Different Monsters: Traversing the uneasy dialectic between institutional and relational ethics

This paper presents a comic-strip to tell the story of an experience where we, the researchers, struggled to reconcile our institution’s ethical requirements with the need to build respectful and reciprocal relationships with research participants, the essence of ethical practice. The core images of our comic-strip derive from Wallace and Lovell’s monoprint, “Monstrous Breaches” (Lovell & Wallace, in press). We respond to the artists’ invitation to re-work their monoprint in order to better understand the “monsters” or dangers of our research world. We contend that traversing the spaces between institutional and relational ethics is itself a process that is often fraught with ethical dangers, “monsters” that researchers and institutions often overlook at our peril.