On what ethical research design looks like when the methodology is participatory, the population is precarious, and the camera is in the participant’s hands.

Research ethics is often treated as a compliance exercise. You submit your protocol to the Research Ethics Board. You receive your approval letter. You file the letter and proceed. Ethics, in this model, is a gate you pass through rather than a practice you sustain.

I designed the ethics of this study differently. The ethical commitments that shape blended witnessing are not procedures I followed before the research began. They are principles that shaped every decision, from the design of the photography prompts to the structure of the debrief session to the decision to build this website as a knowledge return before the academic publications. This page explains those commitments and the scholarship that grounds them.

Dual Ethics Approval

This study received ethics approval from two Research Ethics Boards simultaneously: the Thompson Rivers University Research Ethics Board (File H25-04204, Board of Primary Record) and the Royal Roads University Research Ethics Board (File H25-00572). Dual approval was required because the researcher is affiliated with Royal Roads University while the study was conducted at Thompson Rivers University. The TRU REB was designated the Board of Primary Record, meaning TRU’s ethical standards governed in any area of conflict or ambiguity.

Both boards reviewed the study design, consent processes, recruitment materials, photography prompts, debrief protocol, data management plan, and knowledge mobilisation plan before any participant was recruited. This review process strengthened the ethical design in ways I had not anticipated, and I am grateful for the questions both boards asked.

Consent as Ongoing Relationship

The most fundamental ethical commitment in this study is the treatment of consent not as a one-time signature but as an evolving relationship. This principle draws on feminist and Indigenous research ethics that have long critiqued the legal-contractual model of informed consent as inadequate for participatory research involving vulnerable populations (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999/2021; Wilson, 2008).

In the legal-contractual model, consent is given once at the beginning of the study. The participant signs a form confirming they understand the study and agree to participate. The researcher retains a signed copy. The ethical obligation is met.

The problem with this model for participatory visual research is that participants cannot fully anticipate what the experience of participating will involve at the moment of initial consent. They do not yet know what they will choose to photograph. They do not yet know what emotions the act of documentation will surface. They do not yet know what the group debrief session will feel like. A one-time signature at the beginning of the process cannot capture consent to all of these as-yet-unimagined moments.

In this study, consent was renegotiated at four distinct stages:

  1. Initial recruitment: Informed consent form reviewed and signed; study purpose, risks, and participant rights explained in detail; questions answered.
  2. Photography phase: Before receiving cameras, participants were reminded of their right to photograph only what they chose, to delete images before sharing, and to withdraw at any time without consequence.
  3. Debrief session: Before beginning group discussion, participants were reminded of their right to withhold any photograph from the discussion and of the confidentiality commitments governing the session.
  4. Member checking: Participants reviewed my interpretations of their photographs and had the opportunity to correct, contest, or withdraw any interpretation they disagreed with.

Visual Sovereignty

Visual sovereignty is the principle that participants retain ownership and control of their own images. This principle is especially important in Photovoice research, where participants are asked to document their lives in ways that may involve photographing spaces, situations, or experiences they would not ordinarily share.

In this study, visual sovereignty means:

  • Participants retain ownership of all original images. The images belong to the participants, not to the researcher or the institution.
  • Images are reproduced in the dissertation and on this website only with explicit written permission for each image.
  • Participants may withdraw any image at any time, including after the dissertation has been submitted, and that withdrawal will be honoured in any subsequent publication.
  • Faces of third parties who did not consent to participation are obscured in any reproduced image.
  • Images are not used for any purpose other than those to which participants consented.

Trauma-Informed Protocols

The study was designed with awareness that precarity produces vulnerability, and that asking people to photograph and discuss conditions of precarity may surface difficult emotions and memories. Shawn Ginwright’s (2018) distinction between trauma-informed care and healing-centred engagement shapes this design: the goal is not to avoid difficult material, but to approach it with the structural supports that make genuine engagement safe.

Trauma-informed protocols in this study include:

  • Support resources at every contact point. The Here2Talk service (a national mental health support service for post-secondary students) and the Interior Crisis Line were provided in written form at recruitment, in the photography instructions, and at the beginning and end of the debrief session.
  • Emotional check-in before analytical discussion. Each debrief session began not with the photographs but with a brief check-in: How are you arriving today? What are you carrying in with you? Analysis of photographs did not begin until everyone in the room had had the opportunity to be received as a full person rather than as a data source.
  • Right to pause or stop. Participants were explicitly reminded at the beginning of the debrief session that they had the right to pause the discussion, leave the room, or stop the session at any point, and that their continued participation was entirely voluntary.
  • Debriefing after the debrief. After each session, I remained available for informal conversation. I also sent a follow-up email within 24 hours checking in on how participants were feeling and reiterating the support resources.

Relational Accountability

Shawn Wilson’s (2008) concept of relational accountability grounds the deepest ethical commitment in this study: the recognition that research creates relationships, and that those relationships carry obligations beyond publication.

The institutional model of research — in which the researcher gains credentials, publications, and career advancement from work conducted with a community that receives nothing in return except the distant possibility that a policy brief will one day cite the findings — is itself a form of extraction. It replicates, in the research process, the same asymmetry the research may be critiquing.

Relational accountability in this study means:

  • Findings are returned to participant communities before they are presented at academic conferences or published in academic journals. This website is part of that return.
  • Participants reviewed my interpretations of their work before those interpretations became part of the dissertation.
  • The knowledge generated through this research belongs to the community that generated it. My role is to amplify and contextualise, not to own.

A Note on Ghost Data and Ethical Withdrawal

The unconditional right to withdraw is an ethical principle that becomes analytically significant in a study of precarity. The participant who withdrew before taking a single photograph exercised that right. Her withdrawal was honoured immediately, without question, and without any attempt to retain her participation. No data from her involvement in the recruitment and consent process was used in the analysis.

The concept of ghost data does not treat her withdrawal as data in the sense of personal information about her. It treats the fact of her withdrawal — and the structural conditions that produced it — as evidence about the system. Her identity remains protected. Her story remains hers.

References

Ginwright, S. (2018). The future of healing: Shifting from trauma-informed care to healing-centered engagement (Occasional Paper No. 25).

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (3rd ed.). Zed Books. (Original work published 1999)

Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.