4.2 Knowledges and Traditions
Jemma Llewellyn; Erin Kelly; Sara Humphreys; Tina Bebbington; Nancy Ami; and Natalie Boldt
When you think of the word “research,” what kind of images come to mind? Rows and rows of books? A person, perhaps a student, wearing glasses, sitting at a mahogany table, piled with books and notebooks, pen in hand, ready to take notes? There is some truth to these stereotypical images, but the origin of much of the research you use in your assignments often involves real human subjects participating in complex studies. Other types of research involve observing phenomena or tracking outcomes. Yet other forms of research test facts for accuracy or fill a social or cultural need.
Our point here is that research involves gathering data, which often requires researchers to interact with human subjects. If they are doing this type of research, then researchers have to apply for permission to study human subjects through what is often called an Ethics Office, which every university in Canada has and which operates under the strict direction of the federal government. If a researcher or research team violates codes of research ethics, they can lose their funding or worse. You may have already received official looking letters asking you to fill out a survey or participate in interviews or some other method of data collection! These letters often contain a statement that the study has been given approval by the Ethics Office. This means the study follows strict protocols (explained more fully below). Once the data has been gathered, then researchers write up what they found and publish it after rigorous review processes. These publications are the articles and books that you look up in library databases and catalogues. So far so good, this all seems pretty benign.
The truth is that research has the potential to be highly invasive, unethical, and occasionally criminal. Prior to intervention, protest, and resistance predominantly by unrepresented academic communities (such as, Black-Canadian, South Asian, or Indigenous scholars whose communities often suffered from unethical research practices), academic research did not undergo the type of rigorous scrutiny and review that it does now. This lack of intensive oversight meant that certain research projects caused serious, long-lasting damage. One horrific example of such crimes were the nutrition experiments performed in Residential Schools between 1948 and 1952.
Please note that this story contains details that may be upsetting. These experiments used Indigenous children as subjects to study the effects of malnutrition. Residential School survivor Russel Moses described his experience as being in constant hunger to the point where children hunted for food in pig swill.[1] The Truth and Reconciliation Commission discovered that the Federal Government endorsed this research, and the consequences for Indigenous health have been far-reaching and inter-generational:
The full cost of that dec