Ethical regulation and visual methods:making visual research impossible or developing good practice

The ethical regulation of social research in the UK has been steadily increasing over the last decade or so. Concerns have been raised by visual social researchers that such ethical scrutiny and regulation will place severe limitations to visual researchers’ practice. This paper draws on a qualitative study with visual researchers in the UK exploring the views, challenges and practices of visual researchers in relation to ethical issues. Interviewees reflected on their experience of the ethical approval process and on the broader issue of ethical governance. The range of formats for ethical review within HEIs gave rise to a variety of strategies for managing the approval process in relation to visual research practice. For some this meant explicitly ‘making the case’ for undertaking visual research while for others it involved normalising visual methods in ways which delimited the possible ethical dilemmas of visual approaches. Researchers only rarely identified significant barriers to conducting visual research from ethical approval committees, though skilful negotiation and actively managing the system was sometimes required.