By Sheeva Sabati
This article considers the institutionalization of research ethics as a site of “colonial unknowing” in which the racial colonial entanglements of academic research and institutions are obscured. She examines the origin stories situating Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as a response to cases of exceptional violence, most notably the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, within an otherwise neutral history of research. She then considers how the 2018 revisions to the Common Rule extend “colonial unknowing” by decontextualizing the forms of risk involved in social and behavioral research. She situates these complicities as necessary starting points toward anticolonial research ethics of “answerability.”
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Decolonising Global Health Archive 