The politics of ethics in rural social research: A cautionary tale

An ethical approach to rural research is one that recognises the effects of geography and location on the design, funding, implementation, and reporting of research. Human research that claims to address rural issues must be alert to the problems that generalised ethical frameworks produce for ethical practice in rural areas. As researchers, we cannot silence complexity or flatten out differences between places and the people who live in them; therefore, we must seek to acknowledge the qualitatively different social spaces that are broadly classified as ‘rural’. Drawing on examples from two large-scale educational research studies, this chapter highlights the range of ethical considerations that impact on the design and implementation of research in sites that are marginalised from metro-normative assumptions about research practice. In this way, it argues that institutional frameworks are currently ill-equipped to deal with the specificities of place and space.