Global Ethnographies of Parliaments, Politicians and People: representation, relationships and ruptures (EoPPP) is a programme of research co-ordinated by SOAS, University of London (2019-2024) with a team in Brazil, Ethiopia and the UK. This document summarises our approach to ethics, key principles and some of the processes we will commit to as a team. We aim to supplement our funder’s (the European Research Council) and universities’ requirements for ethics, which tend to focus on consent and data protection, with other aspects that we are just as concerned about, such as prevention of harm, climate change and intellectual property rights. We propose taking 10 principles seriously as we develop and debate our ethical approach and practices. We see these processes as complex and often contradictory, requiring debate and negotiation. For examples of contradictions, consider these: challenging hate speech may put us in danger; seeking consent might put some informants in a state of worry; one interlocutor’s honesty can be falsehood for another, and so on.
We will regularly review how we are doing against these principles and report to our Ethics Advisor, Dr Gerhard Anders (University of Edinburgh), and in our reports to the European Research Council (ERC), while he reports to the ERC at regular intervals as well. The Principal Investigator, Emma Crewe, will take overall responsibility for the implementation, review and evaluation of ethics while all members of the team have responsibility for aspiring towards these shared principles and processes. We last updated this document in October 2021.