As part of the task to facilitate the adoption of good ethical practices within the project, Anna Chahine from ICEBERG Work Package 4 hosted a book club on research ethics. In addition to helping researchers reflect on research integrity, the club served as a space that fostered trust and strengthened relationships among participating ICEBERG members. In this text, Anne and Christine Liang share their experiences from the book club.
In ICEBERG, Work Package 4, led by Women of the Arctic, focuses on encouraging ethical, gender-sensitive, equitable, and co-creative research in the project.
Throughout the run time of the ICEBERG project, Anne S. Chahine (East German-German, she/her)* from WP4 aims to create meeting spaces for other ICEBERG people to reflect on ethics and research integrity in their work together. She works as a researcher at The Research Institute for Sustainability in Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS), which is a part of ICEBERG’s partner organization, the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences.
Christine Yiqing Liang (diaspora settler of colour, she/her), a researcher working on Citizen Science framework and Community-Based Environmental Monitoring (CBEM) from the ICEBERG’s partner organization Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), participated in one of these meeting spaces: a book club.
“In my research and ICEBERG, I'm basically focusing on the way we do research. Ethics as a way of being in the world, such as Max Liboiron puts it, is a nice way of thinking about that.” –Anne S. Chahine
Hard-copy of the book Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboiron (2021).
To make reflection on ethics a continuous process throughout the project, Anne has been hosting a book club, where researchers from the ICEBERG consortium were invited to read ‘Pollution Is Colonialism’ by Max Liboiron (Michif-settler, they/them).
Liboiron is Professor in Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland and director of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR). Liboiron is known for their work within the realm of feminist science studies, Indigenous science and technology studies, and justice-oriented science methods.
Pollution is Colonialism (Liboiron 2021) examines how environmental science, especially research on pollution, can uphold colonial structures even when it intends to be progressive. In the book, Liboiron lays out how scientific knowledge can continue to support engagement, a topic of interest frequently requested by ICEBERG project extractive and hierarchical relationships with the environment and people.
This work is relevant to the ICEBERG project as it focuses on participant science and pollution science, provides an Indigenous perspective on dominant approaches to scientific practices, and integrates ethics and methods to reflect on research practices. It also addresses ethical considerations in situations where there is no direct fieldwork or human subject partners.
The book club ran from May-July 2024 in the form of six separate 1,5h meetings that each gave room to discuss one of the chapters in the book. Participants were encouraged to read the respective chapter beforehand and choose one section they find especially interesting in relation to their work.
When initiating the book club, a total of 17 ICEBERG members from 14 different institutions and varying disciplines signed up for the reading group. An average of eight people participated in the online meetings.
During each meeting, each chapter was then being discussed with the group. An online-collaboration platform was used to collect participants’ reflections and thoughts on each chapter, document the group’s process over time, and allow people who couldn’t attend in person to contribute in parallel to the meetings.
The combination of a moderated verbal discussion and the online platform for taking notes also made it possible for different ways of expressing to exist side by side. People who didn’t feel comfortable voicing their perspective, could simply leave a sticky note online.
Miro Board Book Club Spring 2024.
The practice of reading together over time functioned as a tool to share experiences and find a common language about ethical aspects of research across varying interests, disciplines, and backgrounds. This supported the creation of a sense of social community. (Christiansen and Dalsgård, 2021.)
In addition, reading itself functioned as an ethnographic method for Anne’s work in the ICEBERG project. It generated further insights into individual perspectives and experiences when it comes to theorizing but also applying ethics to researcher’s practices.
For Christine, the sections of the book on “Community Peer Review” (with a footnote citation to a step-by-step protocol summary by Liboiron, Zahara, and Schoot [2018]) was particularly interesting and relevant to her work in the ICEBERG project on citizen science frameworks and best practice.
During the joint reading, the book served as a mediator and gateway for participants to reflect on research integrity and possible ethical dilemmas in their work.
“Liboiron’s book allowed me to continuously reflect on my role as a researcher in Indigenous settings, and to try not to fall into indoctrinated thinking and practices from conventional Western science that is “colonizing”.” –Christine Yiqing Liang
The book club became a space for collaborative learning, fostering trust, and building relationships. It provided participants with the opportunity to regularly share and discuss questions around ethics, potentially allowing them to refine and enhance their research design and methodologies over time.
Beyond the book club, at a conference session on hydrology and water resources management no less, Christine found herself unexpectedly connecting with a presenter who had also read the book and cited it as a key inspiration for applying community co-creation to this highly physical sciences-focused field.
Liboiron’s book clearly resonates with researchers and students in all fields and inspires the importance of innovative community-based approaches to environmental issues.
All that aside, it’s simply a compelling read, filled with mind-blowing facts and entertaining footnotes that keep the reader engaged from start to finish.
Authors: Anne S. Chahine and Christine Yiqing Liang.
* The authors here incorporate and test out Liboiron’s idea of ‘marking’ the people writing this text, but also anyone referenced throughout. This aims at clearly positioning the person who speaks, and allows the reader to establish a relation with that person, based on their own positioning. Furthermore, when all people are ‘marked’, it re-centres the playing field and challenges the idea that, for some/many researchers, settlers and whiteness are an unconsciously adopted norm, while Indigenous peoples are deviations from that norm.
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SubscribeProf. Thora Herrmann
University of Oulu
thora.herrmann@oulu.fi
Dr Élise Lépy
University of Oulu
elise.lepy@oulu.fi
Marika Ahonen
Kaskas
marika.ahonen@kaskas.fi
Innovative Community Engagement for Building Effective Resilience and Arctic Ocean Pollution-control Governance in the Context of Climate Change
ICEBERG has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and innovation funding programme under grant agreement No 101135130
