Protracted Ethics

To respond in and through the worlding of technologies in hands

Abstract

Through a particularly affective and inconvenient event, I explore what research ethics might also entail. The different parts of the event relate in various ways to cyberbullying, and unfolded some years back. This event serves in the text as a touchstone for what research ethics can entail when it is not only concerned with the more acute in situ ethics. The text stretches through the inconvenience of the event, and from the first page will explore not only research ethics, but the time threads that delay the answer. By exploring the event through reading the work of Maria Tumarkin, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Astrid Schrader and Lauren Berlant, it is made possible with years of delay to pinpoint the contribution of this article: that research ethics can be understood as receptivity and hence the responsibility to respond even if it is done belatedly.

Keywords

Research ethics, affect, temporality, event, cyberbullying, ethics of care