What is it about?
This article presents ethnographic research in Sierra Leone with people with disabilities. I explore ethical challenges faced in research and the importance of engaging in more reciprocal and collaborative communal research using a social model of disability framework to try and access discourses -
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Why is it important?
This article describes how during ethnographic research in Sierra Leone, I was working with people who were used to telling stories of violence about how they got their impairments, which I perceived as ethically problematic and exploitative. I explain how those stories are becoming linked to a post-conflict culture of dependency, patronage and payment. In this context, I explain some of the ethical limitations and struggles I encountered and why, in order to align my research to the community's wants and needs, it was important to engage in more reciprocal and collaborative communal research. I used a social model of disability framework to try and access discourses that the community were using to advocate their issues, and explain some of the limits people encountered by trying to get involved in those discourses.
Perspectives
I faced a lot of ethical dilemmas working as an academic in a post-conflict environment. People had high expectations and set ideas of not only how I should do research but also 'help'. Yet, I found that not many researchers wrote about these experiences and dilemmas from a disability perspective. I think this is definitely the article I should have read as a student before entering the field. So, I was really happy that it has also been featured in Rose Barbour's Introducing Qualitative Research: A Student's Guide. In many ways, this article is sort of the background to what happens later in my research in Sierra Leone and illustrates some of tensions with using a social model in practice.
Dr Maria Berghs
De Montfort University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Paying for stories of impairment – parasitic or ethical? Reflections undertaking anthropological research in post-conflict Sierra Leone, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, November 2011, Stockholm University Press,
DOI: 10.1080/15017419.2010.507370.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Introducing Qualitative Research: A Student's Guide
This is Rose Barbour's Introducing Qualitative Research: A Student's Guide where this case features in terms of ethical dilemmas researchers face in the field.
Telling the story? The Commodification of Impairment and Disability in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone
This is a related post I wrote about the increasing commodification of stories of impairment and disability in post-conflict Sierra Leone.
'“Mi at Don Poil”: A Report on Reparations for Amputee and War-Wounded People in Sierra Leone
This was a report that Edward Conteh and myself were involved in writing together on behalf of the people who called themselves amputee and war-wounded.
Contributors
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