Research ethics in Greenland

Doing research in Greenland comes with particular responsibilities. There is no ethics review board for social-science research in Greenlandic institutions (see blog post here: Ethics in research and Greenlandic fieldwork, raising to the challenge!), and I have deliberately not treated this as a reason simply to seek ethical approval elsewhere.

Given Greenland’s colonial history, having research on Greenland approved exclusively by an institution outside Greenland would itself raise questions about who has the authority to decide what constitutes ethical research.

The approach adopted in PREFER has therefore been to work with the Circumpolar Inuit Protocols for Equitable and Ethical Engagement developed by the Inuit Circumpolar Council, while also thinking about reciprocity throughout the research process.

In order to move froward with the Greenlandic case studies, we decided that restitution would come before data collection, rather than being something researchers promise once they have obtained their data. This led to cultural workshops in Nuuk and Ittoqqortoormiit, facilitated by Kuluk Helms, and to narrative and cultural work developed through our transdisciplinary approach (film making with the communities).

It initially was tested through the making of the documentary Inuuniddinni Ilaaralaaor / Une part de nous / Part of us, produced jointly in connection with PREFER and the SeMPER-Arctic project. It is important to be precise here: this is not simply a restitution of “PREFER data”. The film emerged from a broader research relationship involving two projects. It nevertheless illustrates the kind of contribution we wanted our presence in Greenland to involve.

Things have changed since then. Kuluk Helms left the project, and some of the original plans consequently had to be reconsidered. The fact that restitution has taken place without being followed by the data collection originally envisaged also makes one aspect of the initial intention particularly clear: a cultural contribution should not be understood as payment for information.

The Greenland work is now being reorganised around two strands.

The first concerns people who experienced the Nugatsiaq tsunami. A documentary telling their story will be presented before a new round of interviews planned for April. The film is therefore an initial restitution, before we ask people to participate in further research. Watching or discussing the film will not imply agreement to be interviewed.

The second strand is different. We are revisiting ethnographic material collected by Jeanne Gherardi during fieldwork conducted while Kuluk was also in Ittoqqortoormiit (Jeanne used to be on of Kuluk’s PhD supervisors, the other being myself).

The material is now being looked at in relation to questions that have subsequently become important to PREFER, notably those surrounding the Jameson Land drilling licences and what they raise about territory, continuity, risk and habitability. When this revisiting will raise (and it post probably will) the need for new conversations with people, these will be treated as new research encounters, rather than assuming that previous participation covers them.

I do not think this provides a simple formula for “ethical research”. It is rather an attempt to remain attentive to the relationships in which research takes place, to what happens to people’s stories once they have been shared with us, and to our own position as researchers coming from outside Greenland.

Since the onset of the project, in the spirit fo transdisciplinary interventions, for PREFER, ethics is therefore not something that happened before the fieldwork. It is part of the fieldwork - and something we are still thinking through.