The vicissitudes of artistic and environmental research in ethics committees: study of two cases

Abstract

This article describes some of the difficulties when a research project pertaining to knowledge areas with languages and logics that are distant from clinical research is submitted to an ethics committee for its evaluation and approval. Two cases, with different knowledge object epistemologies to the ones usually deliberated in those instances are presented. The first case deals with an art installation that allowed the study of the link of affection between human beings and lab mice. The ethics committee’s punctual requests and the answers given by the artist are analyzed in order to get its approval. The second case describes the introduction of the invasive species plant Tamarix spp in the riparian ecosystem of the United States, becoming the nesting site of an endangered flycatcher bird Empidonax trailii extimus. This phenomenon prompted challenging ethics issues for the ecological restorationists in their search for the meaning of the natural. The authors conclude ethics committees should welcome Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges perspective and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory suggesting that in the pursue of reaching a universality, science has tended to standardize diverse meanings in a reductionist way.

Keywords

• research ethics committees
• situated knowledges
• interdisciplinary
• environmental research
• artistic re-search
• actor-network theory