The Reach of Ethics: Politics, Bioethics & the Regulation of Social Inquiry

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is a resubmitted proposal, revised in response to reviewer comments, to write a book on history and politics of efforts to extend the scope of ethical oversight of research. In the decades after World War II, bioethics emerged in response to research abuses and became a force-both intellectual and institutional-in defining the boundaries of what activities required oversight. The 1990s witnessed an effort to extend the reach of bioethics, understood as both a system of moral reasoning and a means for regulating research. This expansion has been defined by the attempt to determine whether or not different forms of social inquiry constitute research and, hence, ought to be subject to bioethical oversight. But this seemingly narrow definitional question in fact signals a struggle over whether different modes of inquiry should be subjected to oversight and creates the context for a clash of different disciplinary and institutional priorities, missions, and paradigms of accountability. How extensive should the public governance of social inquiry be? How should the balance between free inquiry, social responsibility, and public accountability be struck? What norms should inform efforts in different domains? Do different forms of social inquiry call for different systems of accountability? The challenge is to understand debates regarding oversight as encounters between different players, institutions, and interests. What is needed at this juncture is a mapping of the political topography of the politics of oversight that accounts for the ideological, institutional, and professional forces that have been marshaled behind competing conceptions of social responsibility and its corollary, accountability, in the search for knowledge. The Reach of Ethics, then, will focus on the battles over epidemiology, public health surveillance, quality improvement, and ethnography in the 1990s, placing them against the broader historical backdrop of how research and oversight was framed some two decades earlier. But, focused though they are on particular controversies, the chapters describing specific clashes over regulation should not be thought of as case studies-that is, as a mere collection of examples. Rather, they seek collectively to lay bare critical dimensions of the contested terrain that defines the politics of the ethics of regulation. The project relies both on archival research and key informant interviews.