Data, integrity & fieldwork: Navigating ethical debates and processes in interpretive research

The International Institute of Social Studies and Erasmus University Rotterdam, as with many other universities in the Netherlands and globally, have endorsed 'open science' principles and related efforts that encourage (or sometimes require) researchers to make their data 'Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable'. 

This raises sensitivities related to privacy, trust and epistemology - especially for socially-engaged ethnographic and interpretive researchers.

The speakers will share their experiences navigating and advising on data management for ethnographic and fieldwork-based interpretive research projects.

Following these presentations the seminar will then offer space to examine how researchers, data managers and REC reviewers can best chart these debates and expectations so as to productively support socially-engaged and ethical ethnographic and interpretive research. 

Speakers

Professor Peter Pels has been Professor in the Anthropology of Africa at the University of Leiden since 2003. He graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1993 on a study of interactions between missionaries and Africans in late colonial Tanganyika, and has since continued to work on the construction of differences of culture and power in human relationships. Peter coordinates research into modern conceptions of the future, museums, and heritage. He is also the co-author of several articles on data management protocol and ethnography.

Dr Andrew S. Hoffman, PhD holds the title Service Scientist - Research Data Management in the Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences (FSW) at Leiden University. In this hybrid role, he conducts research in the domains of research data management and open science while also providing hands-on support in these areas to researchers in the Institute of Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology (CADS) and the Centre for Science & Technology Studies (CWTS) at FSW. Andrew completed his doctoral studies as an affiliate of the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University in Montréal and prior to joining Leiden he conducted extensive ethnographic research alongside large-scale data infrastructure projects in the biosciences across two subsequent postdoctoral fellowships.