Dr. Christine Eriksen

Have you ever wondered how the ethics, impacts, and outcomes of research might impact researchers? This is a topic close to my heart given my personal experiences as a disaster researcher, and the impact years of analysing and listening to emotionally and politically charged narratives by disaster survivors, emergency managers, and residents fearful of the threat of hazards had on my health.

A recently published book explores this topic in greater detail. Edited by Sebastian Henn, Judith Miggelbrink, and Kathrin Hörschelmann, Research Ethics in Human Geography considers diverse case studies, ranging from a focus on children, refugees and asylum seekers, the inequalities of knowledge production, and illegal ethnographies, to friendships in volunteer-practitioner research.

Two chapters, in particular, draw on my writing to provide insightful considerations. In Chapter 2, Iain Hay and Mark Israel “take a moment to imagine a world of human geographic inquiry in which researchers care little for ethics and integrity in their work”. And, in Chapter 10, Danielle Drozdzewski and Dale Dominey-Howes discuss how the research ethics processes, and the academy more generally, could better account for researcher trauma.

You can read about my experiences, and how I championed a human research ethics process more attuned to the well-being of researchers (as well as research participants) in these two articles:

1. Research Ethics, Trauma and Self-care: Reflections on Disaster Geographies, published in the journal Australian Geographer in 2017.
2. The Relevance of Mindfulness Practice for Trauma-Exposed Disaster Researchers, published in the journal Emotion Space and Society in 2015.

If you have trouble accessing these publications due to pay-walls, please e-mail me and I will happily share PDF copies.