Abstract:
Law students are increasingly undertaking empirical research, offline and online. They have to consider that their interactions during their fieldwork can, inevitably, provoke harm. Adverse impacts include risk to participants’ social standing, intrusion, distress and inconvenience. To make sure that participants are treated as humanely as possible, students have to comply with the law and ethical requirements existing at home and in the countries where the research is conducted. The distinction between ethical and unethical behaviour is not dichotomous and the complexity of an issue can give rise to multiple questions about proper behaviour. Students have to assess potential courses of action in context, and they have to use their discretion while interpreting ethical guidelines. Increasingly, the preventive measures that students take need to be formalised in applications to their home institution’s ethical review board. Such ethical clearance proceedings can help students in protecting participants from harm. Such proceedings can, however, also create new challenges because they limit the student’s individual agency to make context-specific accommodations. This paper identifies the challenges that I encountered during my field research in South Korea, while I was a PhD student at Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics (UK). It aims to fuel conversations as to how judgments of complex challenges that are simultaneous of a practical, scientific and ethical nature are made by students and to encourage educational institutions to support students in a way that is flexible and sensitive to the various contexts in which research is carried out.
Speaker:
Dr. Aleydis Nissen, Post-doctoral Fellow, Leiden Law School
Originally from Belgium, Aleydis Nissen is now working as a postdoc at Leiden Law School. She researches various ‘Institutions for Conflict Resolution’ and is currently co-organising sessions on ‘Empirical Methods in Legal Research’. After her studies in international and European law at the University of Leuven and the Sorbonne, she has dabbled in marketing management and journalism. She has recently completed the manuscript of her monograph “The EU’s Response to Human Rights Violations by Developing and Emerging Market Corporations”. This book has been sponsored by Cardiff University and the Fund Pascal Decroos. During her case study research, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Nairobi and Seoul National University.
