Work in progress: photovoice in research on life after immigration detention

This week's Work in Progress seminar is presented by Dr Sarah Turnbull, Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently completing a study of immigration detention and deportation in the United Kingdom and describes the topic of her talk:

This presentation offers a critical reflection on my failed attempt to incorporate visual methods in follow-up research on immigration detention and deportation in Britain. In particular, it considers the uses and limits of participant-generated visuals, and the specific method of photovoice, which were originally conceived as an additional means to explore themes of home, identity, and belonging in and through practices of detention and release or expulsion. Using the notion of a ‘research failure’ as a jumping off point, this presentation highlights the challenges and limitations of photovoice in follow-up research with individuals who were detained and/or deported, pointing to various methodological, logistical, ethical, and political issues pertaining to the method itself and the use of the visual in criminological research. As researchers are increasingly encouraged by funders and others to be ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’ in their methodologies, there has been a turn to the visual and the power of photographic images within criminological research. This shift towards the examination, as well as integration, of images raises a number of important methodological and ethical questions worthy of consideration, including instances where visual methods like photovoice are unsuccessful in a research project.

The seminar will be at 16.30 on Thursday 14 February, in the Abercrombie Building, Headington Campus, Third Floor, Student Hub, White Space. All welcome. See here for details of all the seminars.

Work in progress seminar: Agamben and architecture

IMPORTANT UPDATE: This event is cancelled because University College London is taking part in the University and College Union strike action on 22 February. Apologies for the late notice.

In this Work in Progress seminar, Camillo Boano, Professor at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London, will present his recent book in conversation with CENDEP’s Cathrine Brun. The book titled The Ethics of Potential Urbanism. Critical encounters between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture is a unique engagement with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben from a position of architecture and urban planning. Professor Boano will present an outline and the main argument of the book. This is followed by a conversation between Boano and Brun about how, by engaging with Agamben, we can promote a radically new architecture. Within Agamben’s philosophy lies a social critique and analysis that enables a potentiality – the ability to act – or not to act, the possibility to resist and a hopeful architecture. Agamben’s exceptionalism is perhaps most known in our field for the contribution to the ways in which we can approach humanitarian action and human rights. While the camp is the most prominent and most discussed spatiality of Agamben’s work, we aim to discuss how that spatiality can be applied in shelter, housing and home. The conversation will consider the meaning of the material and the social in understanding how practice inform theory but also how Agamben’s philosophy can inform practice.

For the whole seminar series programme, check this blog post.

Haiti, Oxfam and Amnesty: time for a rethink

Richard Carver writes:

One of the reasons we teach about human rights at CENDEP is that we think it is important to assert the rights and the agency of those affected by conflict and disasters. The behaviour of some Oxfam personnel in Haiti and Chad underlines, in a particularly distressing manner, why this matters.

Three years ago, Amnesty International, an organization I was honoured to work for in the past, voted to adopt a policy advocating the decriminalization of prostitution. This is an issue about which I know next to nothing but my immediate feeling was that such a policy was unwise, primarily because it seemed to be a question on which reasonable people might disagree, rather than a human rights principle. Some argue for the rights of sex workers; others for the “Nordic solution” of criminalizing use of prostitutes. Empirical studies seemed inconclusive, at least to the casual reader like me.

Now we have the Haiti scandal, in which it has emerged that humanitarian personnel paid women for sex in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. This seems to me to pose a very big problem for the decriminalization camp. Amnesty International is on record as condemning the behaviour of these Oxfam personnel, but why? Surely, Roland van Hauwermeiren and his friends were just injecting hard currency into the local economy. Shouldn't Amnesty’s ire rather be addressed to the Haitian authorities who have criminalized these activities and thereby reduced the livelihood opportunities of the affected population? 

Of course, the reason the Haiti scandal appals us is that it lays bare the power relations that underlie prostitution in all instances. Decriminalization promotes the idea that sex is just an exchangeable commodity like any other. The Oxfam affair tells is that this is false. What Amnesty calls “sex work” is always about gender power and oppression. In Haiti we see an additional layer of racism and neo-colonialism. Our gut response of condemnation is the right one – and Amnesty needs to take a long, hard look at its policy.

Catherine Bennett in the Observer puts it much more eloquently.

The only way is ethics: accountability in human rights investigations

Richard Carver writes:

Last week Cathrine Brun questioned whether the ethical signposts that guide modern humanitarianism are adequate for many of the new challenges faced. This week, I return to the topic of ethics, but at a much more elementary level. For non-practitioners it is probably baffling that human rights work has no agreed ethical code to guide those who are working in the sector. Of course, it could be argued that the whole body of human rights is itself an ethical code, but that argument seems dangerous. The fact that human rights practitioners claim to uphold human rights – they would, wouldn’t they? – does not exempt them from independent ethical scrutiny and accountability.

When I first started working as a human rights researcher in the 1980s, I was surprised that there was apparently no agreed code of conduct for people doing my job. My employer, Amnesty International, had very clear rules on one or two issues, such as confidentiality of information collected in the course of our work, but little beyond that. I had previously worked as a journalist and, as a member of the National Union of Journalists, I had committed to be bound by the union’s code of conduct. As a human rights investigator, I suppose I continued to follow the same precepts but nothing was clearly spelt out.

This large gap was drawn to my attention once again last year, when I conducted a training workshop for national human rights institutions (NHRIs) on how to conduct investigations. Participants asked what ethical standards should guide their work and I had to give the honest answer that there was no single agreed code for human rights investigators (and indeed that most NHRIs had no code of conduct at all). An interesting discussion followed and I concluded that future training sessions needed to consider the main ethical principles guiding human rights research.

A year later I found myself in a yurt, half way up a mountain in Kazakhstan, delivering another training session on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme, to investigators from Central Asian national human rights institutions. This time I was better prepared. In the absence of any coherent template of a code of conduct, I looked at a number of other professions that are guided by codes of conduct and where there might be overlaps with the issues posed in human rights investigations.

The first and obvious port of call was the legal profession. Many NHRI investigators – perhaps a majority – are lawyers. They will be regulated by national accreditation bodies that usually require, among other things:

·       Adherence to the principle of legality and the obligation of lawyers to uphold the rule of law at all times;

·       Protection of the best interests of the client (as far as consistent with the principle of legality);

·       Protection of lawyer-client confidentiality.

Medical practitioners are another group with well-known ethical obligations. Physicians swear the Hippocratic Oath, but this is probably of little relevance, except when the human rights investigator is herself a medical practitioner. However, another principle of medical ethics, “Do No Harm,” may be highly relevant. This is not, as is often supposed, part of the Hippocratic Oath, but is nevertheless a fundamental ethical requirement. Doctors may not embark on reckless treatment that may harm a patient. This is a principle that has been adopted by humanitarian practitioners, since Mary Anderson’s 1999 book of the same name. Perhaps human rights researchers also need to consider its relevance.

Academic researchers have constructed a rather complex edifice of ethical rules. The underlying principles here are autonomy, beneficence, and justice. These refer respectively to voluntary participation in research, the obligation to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits for research participants, and fairness in the selection of participants. Of these, voluntary participation may be of particular relevance for human rights investigators. In academic research this is underpinned by the notion of informed consent – that a research subject voluntarily agrees to take part in research, in full knowledge of what this entails, and with the capacity and competence to make such a judgment.

The next set of ethical codes that I consulted took me back to the beginning of my own career in human rights. Journalism is not usually considered as particularly relevant in this context, but the declaration of principles of the International Federation of Journalists contains several useful pointers:

·       Respect for truth and the right of the public to truth;

·       Only report facts where the origin is known;

·       No suppression of information or falsification;

·       Use fair methods to obtain information;

·       Protect confidential sources.

Finally, another group that is not often considered in relation to human rights investigations: police officers. In fact, the process of accumulating evidence and reconstructing past events can be very similar and statutory human rights bodies may even have some of the same powers as police. As an example, the England and Wales College of Policing has an ethical code that contains a number of relevant provisions for human rights investigators, including, once again, protection of confidential information and non-discrimination and respect for equality.

For the purposes of my training event, I compiled a highly provisional nine-point list of principles that could constitute the basis for a code of conduct for human rights investigators:

      ·       Independence and impartiality;

·       Do no harm;

·       Protect safety and security of those affected by the investigation;

·       Informed consent to participation in the investigation (although this will not apply where an NHRI uses legal powers to compel the production of evidence);

·       Confidentiality;

·       Data protection;

·       Compliance with human rights standards;

·       Reliance on objective and verifiable facts;

·       Refusal to be influenced by threats or inducements.

What do readers think? Feedback would be very welcome, either in the form of a comment on this blog post or a direct communication (rcarver@brookes.ac.uk). I would particularly like to hear from NHRIs anywhere in the world that have experience of addressing these issues.

The case for an ethics of care in humanitarianism’s inbetween spaces

Cathrine Brun writes:

More and more of today’s crises are in non-traditional humanitarian settings where the relations between relief and development are blurred; where current humanitarian principles, guidelines and manuals may not be helpful for the humanitarian workers present on the ground. 

Increasingly, humanitarians engage in situations that are less distinguished by urgency, but where, nevertheless, the humanitarian community plays a crucial role. One clear example is long-term displacement. In 2015, UNHCR identified 26 years as the average duration of the 32 protracted refugee situations in which they worked. In these inbetween spaces where needs are between relief and development, humanitarians continue to operate with a humanitarian logic distinguished by emergency, urgency and out of the ordinary measures that to a large degree concerns saving people’s lives rather than development. The challenges humanitarian workers face, however, are far beyond the humanitarian mandate, its ethical register, principles, laws and guidelines. 

In long term displacement, when needs may be closer to development than to relief, the host state may not approve of a development strategy for refugees. There is often a political interest to focus on return or resettlement. A shift in policy towards local integration and consequently more long term presence of the refugees is not an acceptable strategy at the national political level. In these settings, relief and humanitarian practice is often the only accepted way for the international community to assist. But both refugees and humanitarian workers feel hugely constrained by this situation where they are restricted from developing lives. In their day-to-day practice, humanitarian workers try their best to create a future for people they work with and with whom they and their organisations often establish long-term relationships due to the duration of displacement and of the humanitarian operation.[i]

In my current research, I explore how the current ethical register of humanitarianism can be expanded in ways that allow a more relevant humanitarian practice in long term refugee situations. The most dominant stance in humanitarianism today is a so-called ‘principled approach’ where the humanitarian principles (of which the first four are humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence) are guiding the work and decision-making of an organisation. The principles have become a common vocabulary for people working in the system and are often the main moral compass for humanitarian actors. However, to put it simply, the principles are largely about how to not become part of the local context in which humanitarians work. Detachment becomes a way to stay neutral, impartial and independent. But in long term refugee situations where humanitarians have a long-term presence, this detachment becomes more problematic. Many humanitarian workers that we have interviewed call for more focus on understanding the multiple and complex relations that they are part of when assisting in long term crises. For such contexts, the humanitarian principles are less useful because they place less emphasis on the face-to-face encounters that humanitarian workers are always involved in: the particular day-to-day interactions with refugees and other actors. With the humanitarian inbetween spaces in mind, I would like to suggest that current humanitarian ethics can open up for a more relational approach and an ethics of care could help us here. 

Ethics of care has been largely dismissed or avoided in humanitarianism. In long term displacement, however, an ethics of care helps to capture better than the traditional humanitarian principles what humanitarian workers do in the field. Caring “may be said to include everything we do directly to help others to meet their basic needs, develop or sustain their basic capabilities, and alleviate or avoid pain or suffering, in an attentive, responsive and respectful manner.”[ii] 

Care ethics concerns caring in four phases[iii]: Caring about is the recognition that care is necessary, identifying a need; caring for is to take care of and assumes some responsibility for the need; care-giving is the direct meeting of needs for care; and, care-receiving recognizes that the subject of care will respond to the care she or he receives. 

Based on the reflections above, I would suggest that an ethics of care can help humanitarianism become more relevant because it is practice-based, it is an ethics developed through what humanitarian workers do in their interaction with others. An ethics of care opens up for a more nuanced understanding of the multiple and often complex relations involved in humanitarian practice. With an ethics of care, we bring in contextualisation to enable attentiveness towards localised practices of care. While humanitarianism is oriented towards solving an urgent need in the present, an ethics of care opens up for a more future oriented approach where assistance is always attached to specific individuals, their biographies and the possible development of their future.

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[i] Brun, C. 2016. There is no future in humanitarianism: Emergency, temporality and protracted displacement. History and Anthropology 27(4): 393–410.

[ii] Engster 2015: 55, original emphasis

[iii] Tronto, J. 1993. Moral Boundaries. A political argument for an ethic of care. London: Routledge.

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