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The reflective research diary: a tool for more ethical and engaged disaster research

Anuszka Mosurska

Disaster Prevention and Management

ISSN: 0965-3562

Article publication date: 22 November 2021

Issue publication date: 22 April 2022

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to highlight how keeping a reflective research journal can help disaster researchers to work in a more ethical and engaged way.

Design/methodology/approach

The author analyses the reflective research diary to illustrate how keeping it has helped the author, a white, non-Indigenous researcher, navigate British academia whilst trying to plan a collaborative project with Indigenous peoples during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

Findings

The author draws out some of the ways that academic institutions can undermine ethical research practice through opaque structures and by incentivising pressuring early-career researchers (ECRs) to conduct fieldwork in dangerous times. The author demonstrates ways the rpeers and author have tried to push against these structures, noting that this is not always possible and that their efforts are always limited without institutional support or change.

Originality/value

Many ECRs and PhD students have written reflective accounts about the ethical challenges they have faced during fieldwork. In this article, the author adds to this by building on literature in disaster studies and positing how ethical and engaged research can be conducted within British (colonial) institutions.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The author would like to formally thank Prof Lori Peek, Noémie Gonzalez-Bautista and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The author also wants to thank the editors for putting together this special issue and for doing so in a way that encouraged dialogue between contributors. The author does not know how she would have navigated my PhD and the pandemic without support from Dr Susie Sallu, Prof James Ford, Dr Aaron Clark-Ginsberg and Katy Davis. Finally, quyanaqpak to all those in Utqiaġvik who took the author under their wing and taught so much, especially Jonathan Hopson, Mary Virginia Hall, Tristyn and Brendan Hollis, Everett and Amanda Edwardsen, Jacqueline and Charles Edwardsen and Mabel Kaleak.

Funding: This work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership, project number 2113218.

Citation

Mosurska, A. (2022), "The reflective research diary: a tool for more ethical and engaged disaster research", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 31 No. 1, pp. 51-59. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-03-2021-0103

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

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