First posted in 2017, during my PhD research at UC Irvine on heavily researched populations. Lightly revised in June 2026 for reposting.

Willoughby-Herard (2015) writes about why she decided not to write about and research black South African women, despite attempts by South African archivists to redirect her toward them. She states:

“We do not get to claim space in each other’s histories simply because we want to or because we have been in political solidarity” (xvii).

Given that black South African women intellectuals had already made decisive and lasting scholarly interventions in critical theory and history at incredible personal cost, and knowing that as an “American” her findings were likely to be regarded as more insightful and powerful than those of women from black South Africa, she opted not to be seen as the leading flag bearer on the topic and chose a different research object: poor whites in South Africa.

What strikes me about Willoughby-Herard’s decision, in relation to my project on heavily researched populations, is how closely it maps onto the growing feminist literature theorizing research participants’ refusal (McGranahan 2016; Simpson 2007; Ortner 1995), but from the standpoint of the researcher rather than the research subject.

What are the implications or effects of refusing to study something, especially when other scholars identify it as the obvious or natural object that “needs” to be studied?

I am drawn to this question because of my interest in the narratives researchers use to explain how they landed on their particular projects. Most decisions about research objects seem to come from a combination of pragmatic (ease of access, language, contacts), academic (field of study, disciplinary affiliations), historical (existing literature and research infrastructure), and serendipitous reasons. That last category, the “it just happened” explanation, is one I think needs further unpacking. But Willoughby-Herard’s rationale opens a different angle I had not read or heard articulated: the researcher’s deliberate decision not to study something as an intentional, ethical move.

Willoughby-Herard acknowledges that in spite of any sense of political solidarity, her “Americanness” meant her work would travel differently from that of Black South African scholars. To avoid overshadowing or diminishing their existing scholarship, she opted to venture elsewhere during the period she was working (the 1990s). She reflects that today, twenty years after apartheid, she feels more comfortable doing original research on Black South African women because their scholarship has since proliferated and there are now many highly theoretical texts authored by Black South African women themselves. What these further details reveal is not incidental: they make visible the contextualized, temporal nature of research ethics. What did not sit ethically well for Willoughby-Herard at one moment became something she could approach differently at another.

That contextual understanding stands in stark contrast to what is conventionally meant by “research ethics”: universal standards designed to apply regardless of where or with whom research is conducted. Institutional practices such as the institutional review board (IRB) have been designed to delineate exactly those kinds of clear boundaries. But work by medical anthropologists across Africa has revealed the difficulty of putting such processes into practice when working with context-specific vulnerable populations (Abadie 2010; Geissler 2011; Brada 2016). Decisions about when, where, and why to do research, and with what community, push against project-based ethical parameters in ways those frameworks were not designed to handle.

How can the implementation and enforcement of research ethics move beyond project-based parameters to take into consideration the local histories and political economies within which projects and their ethics are actually situated (Biruk 2017)?

 

Works Cited

Abadie, Roberto. 2010. The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press.

Biruk, Crystal. 2017. “Ethical Gifts?: An Analysis of Soap-for-Data Transactions in Malawian Survey Research Worlds: Ethical Gifts?” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31 (3):365–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12374.

Brada, Betsey Behr. 2016. “The Contingency of Humanitarianism: Moral Authority in an African HIV Clinic.” American Anthropologist, 1–17.

Geissler, P. W. 2011. “Studying Trial Communities: Anthropological and Historical Inquiries into Ethos, Politics and Economy of Medical Research in Africa.” In Evidence,Ethos and Experiment The Anthropology and History of Medical Research in Africa, edited by P. W. Geissler and C. Molyneux, 1–28. Oxford: Berghahn. http://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/20889/.

McGranahan, Carole. 2016. “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (3):319–25. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.01.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1):173–93.

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 0 (9). http://junctures.org/index.php/junctures/article/view/66.

Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany. 2015. Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability. Oakland, California: University of California Press.