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111© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
F. Boonzaier, T. van Niekerk (eds.), Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology,
Community Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20001-5_8
“On theWay toCalvary, ILost My Way”:
Navigating Ethical Quagmires
inCommunity Psychology at theMargins
HaileMatutu
Contents
Introduction 111
Positioning Queer Subjects asCommunity 113
Regulatory, Principilist Ethics Vs Dialogical, Value-Based Ethics 115
Navigating Ethical Quagmires 118
Reaching & Engaging NGI MSM: AnEthics ofCare 118
Reconsidering Consent 120
Rapport & Conict ofInterests 121
Imagining Risk andVulnerability 125
Humanising theResearch Encounter: ADecolonial Feminist Approach 126
References 126
Introduction
Community psychological research that seeks to disrupt oppressive systems is
fraught with ethical complexities, more so when it involves investigations con-
cerned with non-normative sexual and gender identities in contexts such as South
Africa. Students who undertake community research inquiries concerned with sexu-
ality as part of their professional training may nd themselves with little guidance
when they are faced with ethical dilemmas in the course of conducting psychologi-
cal research in communities. In this chapter, I present the ethical complexities that
emerged over the course of a study I conducted with non-gay identifying men who
have sex with men (NGI MSM) in Cape Town South Africa. Through this study I
H. Matutu (*)
Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa
e-mail: MTTNKO001@myuct.ac.za
112
came to experience how received knowledge, in the form of ‘standard research eth-
ics practice’, functions as epistemic violence when applied as universals in contexts
other those from which they originate. That is, what emerged in the study illustrated
the limitations of regulatory forms of ethics, given their nite sensitivity to contex-
tual issues. This study on the constructions of gender and sexual identity among
non-gay identifying men who have sex with men used non-probability, purposive
sampling to recruit 10 adult participants. Half of whom were recruited from an
online location based social network application: Grindr, one of the most popular
social networks for gay, bi, trans, and queer people.
While this project started out with a focus on nding a way to do psychological
research in ways that are not oppressive, the way I imagined what oppression might
look like reected my thinking about oppression as something external to myself.
That is, I could not fathom that, I as a queer Black man could be the source of
oppression towards people with dissident sexual practices and/or marginal sexuali-
ties. At the inception of this study, I conceived of oppression as originating from a
place of uncaring forceful usurping of another person’s power. With little reexion,
I took my knowledge of the challenges of being in the world as Black and queer to
be a suitable basis for building a bridge that would connect me and the people who
would take part in this study. However, I was gravely mistaken in assuming that this
‘shared’ experience would be sufcient, so too in my thinking that my methods,
because they were marked with institutional approval, would naturally be void of
oppressive tendencies. What emerged was that my sense of ‘good conduct’ was
experienced by potential participants as an attempt to either convert or force them to
give an account of themselves for being non-normative. The very attempt to
‘research’ NGI MSM was considered by the men as part of an effort to ‘normalise
them’. That is, an attempt to shame them as people “whose sexuality and desire do
not have the conjugal home as their (primary) venue, whose lives are considered
less real or less legitimate” (Butler as cited in Ruti 2017, p.13). Over the course of
the study my application of ethics emerged as discordant with the perspective of a
‘regulatory enterprise’ but was rather intrinsically aligned to reexivity. In the early
parts of the study, some men who refused to participate assumed that I was after
narratives of pain and suffering brought on by their refusal to take on the yoke of
identity. Seen from this vantage point, my intentions were not enough to justify
what seemed to be a colonialization of their knowledge of themselves. My experi-
ence of recruiting men for this study led me to consider that ethical conduct in com-
munity research with marginalized populations can be more useful and afrming
when it is ongoing, critical, and dialogical (Cannella and Manuelito 2008; Figueroa
2014). It further necessitated an approach that would allow for an epistemological
openness and one that fosters relationality and authentic rapport. Through this work
I came to embrace a decolonial feminist research agenda, seeing it as an opportunity
to reconsider the practice of ethics in research and attend to the unjust erasure of
dissidence from community psychological research. From this vantage point, the
study worked against the afnity between research and epistemic violence.1
1 The term MSM is widely used in public health discourse and has been found to be useful in con-
H. Matutu
113
The study I draw from to map out the lessons we can learn for thinking about and
developing a decolonial feminist psychology was not designed to be feminist nor
decolonial, per se. My choice in these approaches emerged as a result of the limita-
tions of mainstream ethical frameworks to engage with the participants in a manner
that I could recognise as ethical and non-oppressive. At rst, I approached this task
only with the guidance of the ethical frameworks that are made available for stu-
dents of psychology in most university settings: research ethics guidelines and the
professional codes of conduct that regulate the discipline. In the sections that fol-
low, I rst discuss and critique how non-gay-identifying subjects, who refuse iden-
tity come to be considered as community; and some of the discordance that may be
associated with this framing. I follow this discussion by highlighting some of the
salient ethical concerns that emerged within in this study. I explore institutionalised
regimes of ethics and the latent power wielded by institutional review boards and
their effect on the conduct of community psychological research. The chapter con-
cludes with a few examples of the ethical quagmires that I encountered in the course
of conducting this research, and points to the utility of feminist decolonial
approaches as means to humanise the research encounter (see Paris and Winn 2014)
both for participants and those who conduct community psychological research.
Positioning Queer Subjects asCommunity
“The ideal of community presumes subjects who are present to themselves and presumes
subjects can understand one another as they understand themselves. It thus denies the dif-
ference between subjects” (Young 2004, p.195).
One of the initial challenges I had in conceptualising this study related to how I
would come to delineate the men who would be participants: could they be consid-
ered a community, given that they mostly eschew any form of identity related to
their relations with men with whom they have sexual relations? Or were they merely
individuals who happened to share an afnity to engage in sexual relations with
other men? While most men in the study spoke of living as loners, where their same
sex desires were concerned, all of them spoke of the efforts they went to in orderto
build or fashion forms of ‘community’. For some these were family members who
were sympathetic to difference, for others this was in the form of friendships with
other non-normative men. The virtual space of social network applications was
another productive source of a sense of community for some of the participants. It
should be noted that this view of these online platforms exists in spite of all com-
munication occurring between two individuals at a time. Mark, for example, spoke
about Grindr as a space of refuge, albeit with increasing heteronormativity:
texts where interventions aimed at sexual minorities may not be permitted if men took up identity
labels such as gay, bisexual etc. The term is also problematic in its apparent reduction of sexuality
to ‘acts’, and no less for its possible denial of sexual-minority groups’ right to name themselves.
“On theWay toCalvary, ILost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires inCommunity…
114
the queer community… at least the way I see it, it’s supposed to be a community that is
accepting, no matter what degree of queer you’ve experienced… you’re meant to know
what it’s like. So, this should be like a safe haven… the queer community, you know… this
is where you go when you know that you’re not straight or identify or when you don’t iden-
tify as straight! Why do you need the same utility? Like… to navigate this space? You
know… because you don’t need to hide from anyone here. But then again, I think it has to
do with the whole thing of like… we’ve also adopted heteronormativity…
In South Africa, the term community is loaded with connotations of deciency
(Carolissen etal. 2010). Furthermore, there seems to be a blind sidedness in formu-
lations of community as a concept. Most salient is the mythologizing of community
which ignores the often inegalitarian and unfair aspects of communities paired with
a limited consideration of the problematic specicities of particular communities in
their socio-historical contexts (Coimbra etal. 2012). It is in the light of this potential
to mythologise community that the need to dene our use of the term in time and
space gathers urgency; more so when our inquiries concern marginalised subgroups
such as people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and inter-
sex (LGBTQI). In spite of many radical theories’ use of the ideal of community as
an alternative to the oppressive and exploitative patriarchal society, the concept of
community is seldom articulated explicitly. Instead, much theorisation around
‘community’ tends to evoke what Young (2004) refers to as ‘effective values’.
Conventional and subcultural denitions of community both carry strong connota-
tions of familiarity and belonging thus giving the sense that to belong to such a
collective one would be in the midst of the familiar, comfortable, and afrming
(Dahl 2010). The warm and fuzzy idea of community has also been contrasted in
dominant discourses with a place that is “marginal, amoral, anomic, foreboding,
forbidding and frightening” (Coimbra etal. 2012, p.135). It is in this terrain of
seemingly oppositional framings of community that researchers invested in emanci-
patory sexuality research are called to traverse. For this reason, I propose that we
delineate the form of community we are invoking when we refer to the ‘LGBTQI
Community’ as such a delineation has implications for our approach to research
ethics.
In order to think through what a practice of ‘doing community psychology dif-
ferently’ might be within this broad community, we need to look at the ways that
community psychology has engaged ‘community’. As an example, we can look at
the emancipatory, liberation-centred, and critical orientation that community psy-
chology has taken in its development in South Africa and consider how it has cre-
ated what approximates a blind spot. Firstly, what is considered community
psychology is largely taken to be work that makes interventions directed at clearly
identiable communities. That is, an orientation towards communities as perma-
nent, corporeal populations with clear boundaries– much of which is geographi-
cal– with clearly delineated gatekeepers (Dahl 2010; Meyrowitz 1997).
Much of these communities that the discipline engages are marginalised, gener-
ally poor, exhibiting some degree of impoverishment, and almost universally Black
(see Swartz etal. 2002). Secondly, other than Participatory Action Research (PAR)
and similar participatory approaches to research, there is generally a dearth of sexu-
H. Matutu
115
ality research that situates itself squarely within community psychology. A cursory
search on major Psychology databases shows very little psychological research that
owns up to being simultaneously concerned with sexual subjectivity and commu-
nity psychology. Exceptions to this being research that addresses the intersections
of sexuality with health-related issues and their impact on community wellbeing
such as HIV research (see for example, D’Augelli 2000). This gives the impression
that community psychologists do not research sexual subjectivities unless they are
“community projects”- conceptualised in the terrestrial perspective outlined above.
There has been little engagement with the discordance between the seemingly con-
icting ontological foundations of both community psychologies and the quintes-
sentially individuating mainstream Psychologies. We can discern from these
tendencies that there is a generalised fear of descending into the murky waters of
individualising experiences that community psychology has worked against since
its emergence. However, our reluctance to engage the personal– even as we embrace
ecological and systematic approaches to psychological inquiry– comes off as dis-
honesty; especially since it renders sexuality as exceptional. When the personal
(here one might read sexuality) is perceived as exceptional, above all other social
activities, it gets imbued with an inherent sense of danger (Webber and Brunger
2018). Again, this has tangible repercussions when we consider our approach to
research ethics when working with people situated/situating themselves at the mar-
gins. Given the problematics presented above, how might researchers minimise the
seemingly inadvertent harms that may be created through the way sexuality research
is framed both in practice as well as in the resulting reporting of the same? The next
section offers some possible approaches. I offer these as possibilities that yield very
different results.
Regulatory, Principilist Ethics Vs Dialogical, Value-Based
Ethics
While ethical frameworks offer criteria against which researchers might consider
what actions are morally justiable in the conduct of research (Wiles 2013); these
frameworks may, at best, be considered idealised ethical guides, and vary according
to a researcher’s professional and disciplinary afliation as well as their politics. de
Laine (2000) offers a useful denition of ethical dilemmas; she holds that they are
problems “for which no course of action exists because there are ‘good’ but contra-
dictory ethical reasons to take conicting and incompatible courses of action” (p.3).
There is little agreement among scholars about the nature of these dilemmas. Wiles
(2013) contends that even though ethical dilemmas may be situational and contex-
tual, the consideration of ethical frameworks does not preclude individual delibera-
tion on the part of researchers. She argues that the dilemmas that emerge in the eld
are essentially moral dilemmas. Other scholars such as Hammersley and Traianou
(2012) have suggested that research ethics should be viewed as a type of
“On theWay toCalvary, ILost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires inCommunity…
116
occupational ethics. They forward an argument for a decentring of politics from the
research process by claiming that while ‘the political’ might be a motive for the
conduct of research, it should not be a substitute for its institutionalised goal. The
perception here is that ‘motives’– as they refer to them, be they social justice, or
empowerment– should never be the goals of research. For them, the centring of
politics as the goal of research is only likely to increase the danger of error in nd-
ings (ibid.). This view is of course discordant with any form of an emancipatory
research undertaking. Contrary to the position taken in professional ethics codes
and guidelines, where ethical dilemmas are viewed through the prism of objectivity
and from an intellectual distance, researchers in community psychological research
experience these dilemmas with an immediacy heightened by personal involvement
drawn from intuition, empathy and feelings (de Laine 2000).
Institutional Research Boards (IRB),2 Research Ethics Committees (REC), and
the professional codes of organisations such as the Health Professions Council of
South Africa (HPCSA), favour a regulatory form of ethics to guide community psy-
chological research (see von Unger 2016). The principlist approach to ethics is the
most widely used approach in the evaluation of applications for ethical clearance by
RECs (Wiles 2013). The regulatory orientation towards research ethics focuses on
the punitive mechanisms written within the various codes or standards should a
researcher fail to meet those standards or common rules. Many of the principles
addressed in professional codes largely relate to concerns about the wellbeing and
rights of research participants. Given that many researchers who conduct research
may not belong to professional organisations, ethics regulatory bodies, in the form
of RECs and IRBs, are often the sole means of ensuring researcher compliance with
some form of ethical framework. While these bodies may have an inuence in deter-
mining how ethical issues will be handled before research projects commence,
researchers generally do not seek the guidance of these structures once they are in
the process of conducting research (Wiles 2013). The codes and standards of RECs’
framing of ethics are largely concerned with three ethical principles, which are
viewed as universal across all cultures: respect for personal autonomy, benecence,
and justice (Mutenherwa and Wassenaar 2014). Where autonomy refers to the
inalienable right to the respect and dignity of research participants; benecence
relates to the ways in which research participants might benet from participating
in research, and the cardinal issue of research: participants being given enough
information to make informed choices about the risk and benets of participation;
and justice being the degree to which participants are treated with fairness and
equity throughout the research process (Munro 2011; van Wijk and Harrison 2013).
The universality of these principles has been questioned (see for example,
Macklin 1999; Redwood and Todres 2006); the argument here being that these prin-
2 Institutional Review Boards (IRB), Ethics Review Boards ERB), Ethics Review Committees
(ERC), and Research Ethics Committees (REC) are all terms that refer to groups of suitably quali-
ed persons who have a mandated institutional or national authority to review and approve research
involving human participants (Kruger and Horn 2014). In this chapter I shall use the REC to refer
to all these groups as that term is the most frequently used in South African institutions.
H. Matutu
117
ciples rely on Western notions of ethics and that ethical issues in Africa may require
dialogical frameworks that are less prescriptive (Mutenherwa and Wassenaar 2014).
Critique against ethics review in community psychology concerns the origins of the
three principles– the Belmont Report– which was written in response to growing
concerns about research misconduct in the medical eld (Wendler 2012). While the
principles that are highlighted in the Belmont Report are important for the protec-
tion that they afford research participants, they are limited in their utility for the
navigation of ethical dilemmas that researchers may be confronted with when con-
ducting community psychology research with marginalised communities in the
Global South.
Regulatory guidelines are often at odds with the character of qualitative research
(Hammersley and Traianou 2012). In part, this is related to the inadequacy of the
‘principlisim’ inherent in regulatory ethics that renders it inept at responding to
context-bound complexities (Onuoha 2007; Wiles 2013); as well as the biomedical
research origins of these ethical codes. What guides ethical research conduct may
not always be a conscious engagement with ethical frameworks. This need not mean
that ethical frameworks have no utility whatsoever. For example, Wiles (2013)
argues that often researchers rely on their own sense of moral judgement. What
remains though, is that researchers are expected to justify the decisions they make.
Wiles (2013) then proposes that ethical decision-making may need to apply levels
of reasoning that draw on the researcher’s moral sense (informed by their values) as
well as the various ethical codes and disciplinary codes at their disposal. Thus, for
Wiles, ultimately ethical dilemmas need to be evaluated in terms of principlist eth-
ics (benecence, non-malecence, honesty, and fairness).
The regulatory approach to ethics is also problematised in Community
Psychology scholarship for its inadequacy to respond to: differential power dynam-
ics; the history of research institutions vis-a-vis the communities we do research
with, often experienced as epistemic violence; and the discordant conceptualisa-
tions of consent, benecence, and harm. The research ethics that guide much of
institutional research endeavours are largely founded on a concept of asymmetry of
power between the researcher and those with whom they do research. However, in
this formulation, there is little acknowledgement of the power wielded by Research
Ethics Committees (RECs), which have tangible effects on the relational interplay
between the researcher and study participants. There is a need to critically engage
the misconception that research participants always enter sexuality studies with lit-
tle or no power. While it is acknowledged that researchers have agenda-setting
power, we should not neglect to consider that research participants often bring their
own agenda into the research relationship and in many instances, they drive these
agendas with as much resolve and determination as researchers drive their own
(Oliffe and Mróz 2005). Scholars such as Juristzen etal. (2011) argue that research
participants could be harmed by some of the protective efforts of ethics monitoring
bodies. As such, following Silva etal. (2011), I contend that it is necessary to con-
sider how these traditional conceptions and procedures of research ethics might be
modied through a decolonial feminist approach to research ethics in community
“On theWay toCalvary, ILost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires inCommunity…
118
psychological research. The following section outline some of the quagmires of
researching at the margins.
Navigating Ethical Quagmires
I am interested in the tensions that result from expanding what is considered ‘doing
community psychologies’ and incorporating the personal while focusing on the
emancipatory potential of non-oppression, or liberation-oriented community psy-
chologies. What might be lost in the effacing of ‘the personal’ in community psy-
chologies that centre non-oppression and liberation ideals in researching
marginalised communities– particularly LGBTQI and other sexual minorities?
Drawing on the study I conducted with NGI MSM, I now turn to exploring how
ethics in the conduct of community psychology research with these forms of com-
munities are affected by the void created by this ontological gap, as well as the regu-
latory approaches to research ethics favoured within the academy.3 To do this, I
frame my discussion around Cannella and Manuelito’s (2008) feminist decolonial
perspective, which understands the research encounter as multivocal, uid and
hybrid. I also heed Cannella and Manuelito’s call for the consideration of the mate-
rial effects of oppression on the marginalised– especially their call for researchers
to attempt facilitating a social justice agenda. Arguing that by combining these anti-
oppression, liberatory approaches, we may bridge the articial divide between what
is considered to relate to community and the personal in community psychology
sexuality enquiries.
Reaching & Engaging NGI MSM: AnEthics ofCare
It is said that the academy uses the pain of our research participants, many who are
impoverished, disenfranchised and exhibiting some form of deciency– for the
personal gain of researchers (Tuck and Yang 2014; Wiles 2013). From this vantage
point, it could be argued that I was involved in this very type of exploitative and
parasitic tendency. The men I spoke to between December 2017 and September
2018, marginalised to differing levels, living in the shadows of their families and
communities, and almost all carrying feelings of wishing to belong could t this
framing of victims of a capitalistic and voyeuristic academy. From a different van-
tage point we could see the men who took part in this study as agentive. They chose
to speak with me, many of them had strong feelings about what they wanted to be
known about them. Ian, in the exchange below, in an interview that was conducted
3 By regulatory I mean an orientation that is concerned with prescribing what one might do in the
context of conducting research, as well as the prohibition of forms of conduct that are deemed to
be unethical.
H. Matutu
119
via text messages, illustrates this capacity to refuse. He had simply ignored my
probing into his avoidance of talking about relationships:
04/18, 20:13– Haile: The last thing I asked you was about how you liked to change
the subject when a question about relationships came up.
Haile: I didn’t want to read into that…
Ian: I do it only because of being used and hurt in the past.
Haile: Okay… I hear you… anything you would like to share about that…
Ian: Not really.
Tuck and Yang (2014) theorise refusals not as “subtractive, [but as] theoretically
generative and expansive” (p.239). They argue that a methodology of refusals
regards limits on knowledge as productive. This form of refusal is an attempt to
place limits on the colonial premise of frontiers where knowledge signies con-
quest. In all their interviews these men never missed an opportunity to tell me off, if
there was anything they were not willing to go into with me. This capacity to refuse
is something I relished whenever it came up in our exchanges, be they the inter-
views that were recorded and formed the corpus of this study or in the multiple
messages we exchanged before they agreed to sit with me for what one man called
“the interview”.
One of the challenges of doing research with marginalised groups, let alone one
that aims at emancipatory and liberatory goals, is not only reaching them but also
engaging them in a process that would lead to them being partners in those enqui-
ries. The men in this study were recruited to share their experiences of talking about
embodying non-normative sexualities; there was no expressed need for them to take
part in a study such as this. This may seem to be at odds with the ideas of doing
community psychology, especially since it is recommended that researchers should
not impose their own ideas of bringing about change in communities but should
rather wait to be approached by communities before intervening (see Tomlinson and
Swartz 2002). The men I spoke with were uniformly interested in talking about their
lives and their sense of ‘being in the world’. There was no a priori need for my
intervention per se. Instead, we were drawn together either by our interest in
embodying these differential selves or by our perceived sense of difference and
resultant fascination with how others who are part of this ‘community’ may be navi-
gating the worlds we nd ourselves in. One participant, Jason, when asked what
would have made the interview better, indicated that he would have found it bene-
cial to be interviewed with other men in similar situations.
Jason: Maybe to sit and hear real stories of other gents told from the heart.
Haile: I see. It is difcult to do that when everyone wants to remain anonymous…
but it’s an idea…
Jason: Ja, hey.
These exchanges were facilitated by an ethics of care. Ethics of care is relational
and does not involve a consideration of general rules but rather a desire to act in a
manner that benets the individual/ group that is the focus of inquiry. Some regard
it as a form of virtue ethics (see Wiles 2013) as it consolidates an ideal of what ethi-
“On theWay toCalvary, ILost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires inCommunity…
120
cal research conduct might look like and relies on notions of an aspirational charac-
ter. The benet of creating this relational environment, where I intentionally
humanise the research encounter by privileging reciprocity over objectivity while
centring their capacity to refuse, is evident in the exchange I had with Ben:
Haile: Yet I sense that it makes you uncomfortable.
Ben: What this?
Haile: Well from the response you’ve just given
Ben: Oh no, the only reason why I’m here, is because you’re accessing the
brain. And a little of my heart through my brain. Not my heart, but
my person. Through asking me pointed questions.
Haile: Okay…
Ben: Actual questions that go into “what did you think about this; how do
you view this; what’s the label of that?” these things my mind can
work with. And occasionally you add this “how does it make you
feel”, which is ne. But if the premise is always the guiding sort of
like structure… it’s always like “how does your mind or your person-
ality guide you through this experience?”, then I’m okay with that.
But you know, that doesn’t always happen in the one on one connec-
tion you have– maybe if I ever have one with Pearl or people on a day
to day at [name of nightclub]. This [clears throat] safe zone, as it
were, normal exchange of mind and thought or whatever does not
exist out there, sunshine. People are there with hunger, they are out
there with intent, they’re out there with needs, desires. You know
these things. Me too, of course! But then it becomes a smorgasbord
of whatever the hell goes on. Before this meeting, you’ve set out
“okay, Ben: You can end at any time, you can walk away at any time,
you can do this, you can… not answer these things” These things are
structures that I feel comfortable with. Because you gave me a struc-
ture to work in, and that you’re gonna work within! And that is awe-
some! [clapping his hands] Now how many times does this
safeguarding happen there? The short answer is no. Not often.
Reconsidering Consent
In studies where participants have completed consent forms via email, it is useful to
revisit the issue of consent at the beginning of the interview. This is important
because the researcher is never present when participants sign online consent forms,
and there is no way of knowing if they understand the conditions under which they
are participating in the studies (Jowett etal. 2011). It is also important to be cogni-
zant of participant fatigue which often manifests itself through body language such
as arms on the fold or explicitly checking the time” (Oliffe and Mróz 2005, p.259).
In online interviews it is not easy to read these cues. Assessing a participant’s capac-
ity to consent in online research is challenging. The researcher contractually bound
H. Matutu
121
by principlist ethical frameworks demanded by ethics committees may risk partici-
pant attrition in the course of enacting this requirement. The process of acquiring
consent online may be seen as cumbersome by participants who may have to dedi-
cate extended interview time validating their capacity to consent to research partici-
pation (Wiles 2013). One of the participants, Marc, who chose to do an instant
messaging interview ratherthan meeting me in person was greatly inconvenienced
by my desire to tick all the boxes of what I initially considered ‘good ethical behav-
iour’. In my notes over the course of this interview I noted that I grew impatient with
Marc:
“Keeps going ofine. I’m getting annoyed. I keep thinking he’s pulling a prank. He claims
to be with his brothers yet insists on doing this now. I’m going along with it. I keep thinking
he might be genuine. He contacted me after all!”
As perplexed as I was about Marc’s apparent slow engagement and the delays in
communication it became apparent to me when I reviewed the transcript that an
hour after we had started the conversation, we had only covered issues of ethics. I
spent much of this time trying to gure out if he was legitimate. I was also con-
cerned that he was too keen to speak without understanding what participation
meant. By adhering to this rigid conceptualisation of ethics, I had brought about an
untenable and unreasonable demand on Marc’s time. What was meant to be an hour
interview turned into a long chat over 15days. Much of thiswas because Marc
could only speak when he was alone, which tended to be in spurts of 15-minute
intervals. He eventually stopped communicating with me after a few days of similar
lines of questioning.
While the encounter with Marc proved that an unreexive adherence to ethical
frameworks may be counterproductive, in other encounters, there was much to gain
in constantly renegotiating consent. In a different interview, I found myself needing
to remind a participant that he was still on the record. A level of refusal may be use-
ful in navigating the issue of consent, where participants may forget that they are
still part of a research project due to the personal nature of the encounter.
Rapport & Conict ofInterests
A psychologist shall refrain from entering into a multiple relationship if such multiple rela-
tionship could reasonably be expected to impair the psychologist’s objectivity, competence
or effectiveness in performing his or her functions as psychologist or otherwise risk exploi-
tation or harm to the person or organisation with whom the professional relationship exists.
(HPCSA 2006, p.6).
While the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) rules of conduct’s
framing of dual relationships is useful for therapeutic contexts. It has very limited
utility for feminist decolonial research, this approach centres relationality, and prob-
lematises the boundaries that are imposed between the researcher and the researched
(Figueroa 2014). The decolonial feminist approach “reveals and actively challenges
“On theWay toCalvary, ILost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires inCommunity…
122
social systems, discourses and institutions that are oppressive and that perpetuate
injustice” (Cannella and Manuelito 2008). That is, feminist decolonial research
explicitly centres the political. In contrast, Hammersley and Traianou (2012) for-
ward an argument for a decentring of politics from the research process by claiming
that the political might be a motive for the conduct of research but that it should not
substitute its institutionalised goal. The perception here is that if these ‘motives’ as
they refer to them, were to be the goals of research, they would likely increase the
danger of error in ndings.
What transpired between me and the men I interviewed was something alto-
gether different from what the literature said an interview could be. How this hap-
pened, I am not entirely sure. I was terried of admitting to this fact, but it is
important for what I propose in terms of reaching and engaging knowledge co-
creators. In the initial stages of this research I lived in fear of my ethics review com-
mittee. No one had ever told me I should be fearful of this institutional committee.
Even my engagement with them at my proposal defence was nothing short of what
could be considered a pleasant engagement with scholars who were well versed in
all the theory, methodology and methods I was proposing to deploy in the imple-
mentation of this study. Yet, in the rst year of this study, there was seldom a moment
when I was not thinking about what this group of very agreeable scholars could do
to inuence my future prospects of doing this form of work were I to make any
blunder or compromise the integrity of the institutionally sanctioned study– which
I always imagined should be above reproach. I lived in constant fear that what came
to me as most natural would lead to me being reported as a person with bad ethics
or rather one who lacked ethics in the conduct of research. In this way, principlist
ethics served to ‘make strange what is most familiar’ to me(see Manganyi 1984);
that is, it alienated me from my very sense of being African.
Much of the interactions with the men who took part in this study were facilitated
by a rapport that took a long time to develop. I was in conversation with some of
these men for about eightmonths before they agreed to take part in this study. In that
time, we spoke at length about many issues related to queer subjectivity, their
thoughts about being men in a society that is at times antagonistic towards differ-
ence. These exchanges created a form of intimacy that may not be recognisable as
‘doing research’ if one were to look at them through the prism of detached positivist
research. While I would not characterise these as friendship, there is something
deeply human in the way they evolved. While the openness with which I approached
the relationship building of these inter-views was rmly rooted in the epistemic
orientation of this study, I was also unsure about what was developing between me
and the research participants. At times I wondered if the familiarity that was emerg-
ing could be seen as ‘faking friendship’ (see Newton 2016).
I was a researcher in an online community known for its ckleness, superciality
and aversion to anything approximating depth. My friends often told me that noth-
ing of substance could come out of Grindr. Yet I persisted with my prole (Fig.1),
even citing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It was by putting ‘substance’ in my prole that
allowed the rich and layered conversations I was to eventually have with some of the
men on this platform. It became important that I inserted myself (my relationship
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status) in the midst of what I was trying to do, (i.e. looking for opportunities to
speak about non-normative subjectivity).
The idea that I shared characteristics with some of them became the reason that
some of men responded to me, and ultimately participated in the study. Of course
“Chat and Networking” are sometimes used by men to denote all manner of
conversations; not all of it is devoid of ‘the sexual’. Similarly, ‘Networking’ can
incorporate a number of possibilities including the pedestrian variety that most
business people and academics engage in at conferences. It was important for me
that I should not pretend to be an aloof researcher because I wanted to have a more
personal engagement with the participants. This humanising orientation was not
coming through in the early stages of the recruitment. The fear of being seen to be
dabling in salacious recruitment practices was ever present.
My initial attempts at recruitment often fell at. I toyed with variations of invita-
tions most of which made mention of the fact that this was a legitimate study. I even
supplied a UCT email address, because I believed that the institutional afliation
would distinguish this invitation from other fantastical invitations that the platform’s
users mayhave been in the habit of receiving. Figure2, Doing Research Right, illus-
trates how many of the unsolicited invitations were perceived. In his study with a
similar population, Walby (2010) chose to not openly address his own sense of sex-
ual identity in terms of a category, such as gay. Instead, he took a vaguer approach to
Fig. 1 Grindr prole created for this study
“On theWay toCalvary, ILost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires inCommunity…
124
answering a question that many queer people ask in these research settings, that is,
‘are you gay?’. He is reluctant to engage what he considers ‘bonding ploys’.
‘Bonding ploys’ that result from participants assuming a shared insider identity
with the researcher are problematised by some scholars (for example, Schwalbe and
Wolkomir 2001), the argument being that in the context of queer research these
ploys may create a sexualised rapport. I am uncertain about the utility of these
measures of control for the manner in which they approximate positivist aspirations
of neutrality and for their attempts at presenting an asexual and somewhat detached
researcher subjectivity. This position should not be taken as advocating for unbri-
dled boundless sexualisation of the research encounter. Rather we should consider
it as an attempt to extend the humanizing orientation of sexuality research and
extend this perspective to include the researcher. However, my concern is not to
indiscriminately centre the sexuality of the researcher, as that would defeat the aims
of research. It is the narratives of the participants that we are most interested in. It is
my contention that we may elicit these without de-humanizing the researcher.
The discourse of the confessional plays out in a didactic manner in interviews
where men interview MSM.The expectation that one ought to confess something
about their sexuality goes both ways and may inuence the direction of rapport
within that encounter (Walby 2010). I too had a story of speaking about my own
queer subjectivity. Many of the participants in this study were privy to this knowl-
edge, even though for the most part my own story became known to them after we
had sat for our ‘on the record’ interviews. What became apparent to me were the
versions of the narrative of my speaking of non-normative subjectivity that different
Fig. 2 Doing research
right “Yes, Please”
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125
participants heard. The way I constructed the story of my ‘being in the world’ was
always different depending on the person with whom I was speaking. The facts of
the narrative never changed, however, the details and how I framed myself within
these was informed by the degree that each man was comfortable with aspects of
their own subjectivity. With Mark I could speak about being a Xhosa man and what
that did to my relationship with my father. This happened in a very natural way, in
our exchanges through nods at “we don’t know how to speak about being queer in
non-oppressive language”, laughing at the homophobia of our mothers’ friends, for
example. Yet with some others, there was an assumed freedom in my version of
queerness, withMike noting that “it’s different for your generation” (Mike was a
few years older than me but is married with two children). Where it was appropriate,
I opened up about my own struggles and achievements. There was however, one
narrative which at the time was not complete– how I spoke to my parents about
embodying my sexual identity.
Imagining Risk andVulnerability
Normative judgments about sexuality frames research participants in sexuality
research as vulnerable (Webber and Brunger 2018). Non-normative participants are
relegated to the subject position of ‘vulnerable’ in a manner that suggests that they
have limited capacity to be autonomous such that their perceived social discrimina-
tion takes a de facto diminished agency (Irvine as cited in Webber and Brunger
2018). However, social researchers agree that what constitutes harm is by no means
straightforward (Hammersley and Traianou 2012).
In a context where sexuality research is scrutinized more than other elds of
research, and as inherently more risky than other forms of research, how might com-
munity psychology act in ways that protect both themselves as well as the commu-
nities they work with? We might start by considering that risk and harm aren’t
always seen as linked by those who engage in research (both participants and
researchers). Determining risk in advance, is “paternalist and a colonial practice
that overrides participants’ self-determination” (Webber and Brunger 2018, para 2).
In fact, a level of risk in the eld might enhance our understanding of social phe-
nomena and enrich the production of knowledge. When we centre the participants
in assessment of risk, we may nd that RECs demands for safeguarding measures
may have unintended repercussions. Let us for example consider what is understood
to be ‘distressful’ in sexuality research: it has been reported that participants in
sexuality studies enjoy talking about their sexuality and sexual practices and that
talk about these issues is perceived by those participants as a positive experience
(Webber and Brunger 2018). Most importantly, participants voice an appreciation of
havingthe occasion to “speak frankly about their perception of sexuality with an
interested and non-judgmental interlocutor” (ibid, para14).
“On theWay toCalvary, ILost My Way”: Navigating Ethical Quagmires inCommunity…
126
Humanising theResearch Encounter: ADecolonial Feminist
Approach
Decolonial feminist approaches to research involve researchers enabling partici-
pants to tell their own stories about their lives; as a result, researchers need to value
and pay close attention to how these stories are constructed both within the research
encounter as well as in the narratives that are written about those research encoun-
ters. This necessitates a keen sense of reexivity (Wiles 2013). In the study I have
drawn from, reexivity took on the position of an ethical framework. This in turn
created the afrming, humanising, participant-centred research encounter privi-
leged in feminist research. Part of this humanising framing pertains to how bene-
cence is imagined in community research. When we as researchers are the primary
benefactors in these research encounters and the participant’s pain becomes an
instrument to further our aspirations, we enter into the exploitative terrain of con-
quest critiqued by decolonial scholars (see for example, Figueroa 2014; Wiles
2013). Narrative approaches present ethical challenges in relation to the manage-
ment of relationships with participants as well as the sensitivity with which stories
are handled. These necessitate that we humanise the research encounter from both
the perspective of the participants as well as the researcher. If we are to take seri-
ously the task of avoiding the coloniality of speaking for the marginal voice, we
ought to decentre the discipline’s propensity to “pose as voice box, ventriloquist,
interpreter of the subaltern voice” (Tuck and Yang 2014, p.225). In contrast to the
more mainstream approaches to psychological research, where the locus of identity
is taken to rest within individuals or their inner workings, community psychology–
in its critical varieties– exposes and contests community injustice and misery
(Coimbra etal. 2012). Decolonial feminist approaches to community psychology
necessitate a reexive ethical engagement; as Seedat and Sufa (2017) remind us,
these approaches work to resist and expose dominant methodological, epistemic,
and intervention traditions. How then should we regard ethical frameworks, within
a decolonial feminist perspective? I am not altogether convinced by the perception
of ethical frameworks as deterministic. However, we know that in practice, they are
not enough to guide us through challenging ethical terrains. Centring reexivity as
an ethical framework anchored on decolonial feminist approaches is a worthwhile
endeavour when we do research at the margins.
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