Ethics in research practice: young people, pictures, and archives

Abstract

This article takes a reflective approach to an overlooked area of ethical discussion in archival and cultural heritage studies: the ethical practice of how to relate to children’s and young people’s own donations of archival material when used in research. This is an ethics that must often balance between a children’s rights rhetoric and formal research ethics. The empirical material consists of one drawing donated to the Swedish Archive of Children’s Art and two photographs donated to a museum collection in the aftermath of the 2017 terrorist attack in Stockholm. These pictures have all, in one way or another, required ethical pauses and halts for the authors due to doubts, dilemmas, and emotional turmoil. Methodologically, the idea is to hold space for the ethical dilemmas that arise, in order to analyze how ethics is enacted in practice. Aspects such as access, copyright, anonymization, naming, and the relationship between archival metadata and research data are analyzed from and with a youth perspective. The analyzes show the intricate interplay of different norms, values, and ethics that are enacted when pictures are donated by young people to heritage institutions and then used in research.

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