Putting ethics at the centre: A research journey at the cross-roads of gender, religion and ethics
In this interview, Dr Zara Martin, a trained anthropologist and senior lecturer in International Relations, reflects on how the importance of ethics in her research on gender and religion in South Asia has informed her role as vice-chair of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee.
For people who don't know your work, how do you describe what you do?
My disciplinary background is in Social Anthropology, and I’ve always worked with people living in very vulnerable contexts. Women and girls tend to be at the heart of these contexts, as the people who endure the most pervasive forms of abuse. I have a regional specialism in South Asia, and I’ve been fortunate to work with lots of different people there, from Tibetan refugees dealing with physical and psychological trauma to Dalit communities facing caste-based abuse and extreme poverty. I’ve also worked with people dealing with the aftermath of major natural disasters. Many women depend on religion as a source of comfort and hope. It offers strength and solidarity as a way through emotional and physical suffering, and yet religious ideas and institutions are also used as weapons to keep women ‘in their place’. Everywhere that I’ve worked, religion has leapt out as a constant thread: as something that shapes both harm and resilience. And for me, ethics has never been separate from that. There’s a fundamental question about how research can be done in ways that prioritise people’s dignity and wellbeing, while at the same time taking the power of faith seriously – in both its positive and negative forms – as a shaper of women’s lives.
What first drew you into those kinds of questions about ethics? Was there a moment when it stopped feeling theoretical and became real?
I landed in the deep end quite early on. During my PhD fieldwork, I worked with Tibetan refugees, exploring the ways that religious beliefs influenced their political activism. I spent a lot of time in close conversations with people, and they shared stories with me about the terrible personal traumas and losses they had faced. The majority of the people who shared these stories were women. Not long after that, I spent time working with communities who had traditionally been labelled ‘untouchable’ in central and southern India. I learned how their religious beliefs and institutions interacted with their socio-economic activism, and again I could see how women carried the heaviest burdens there. Being invited into these people’s spaces – eating with them in their homes and accompanying them in their day-to-day tasks – made it impossible to treat research as purely intellectual. It brought up important questions for me about care, boundaries and what it means to draw on people’s experiences in our academic practice and policy work.
How did those early experiences shape the way you think about religion and ethics more broadly in your research?
I’ve always been drawn to extended fieldwork, and so I’ve spent long periods of time living with different religious communities. What these immersive stays have taught me is that religion is many-sided, especially for women and girls. It has immensely positive aspects, in offering togetherness and protection, as well as hope and strength under difficult conditions. I’ve seen this again and again in women’s organising, in their caregiving roles, and in their everyday religious practices. But I’ve also seen how religion can operate as exclusionary and controlling. It can create risks for people, especially minorities, and gender-specific forms of violence and oppression are often underpinned by religious justifications. Holding these realities in my mind together has really shaped my conviction that ethical research has to begin from a place of genuine respect and engagement, taking religion seriously as something that contributes to people’s lived experiences. It is so important to avoid romanticising religion, and yet neither should we be treating it as an irritation or a problem that gets in the way of ‘progress’ for women.
In recent years you've focused a lot on gender-based violence in South Asia. How has that work developed your ethical perspective?
In recent years I’ve worked on several projects funded by competitive external grants focused on violence against women and girls (VAWG), moving my focus from India to include Nepal and Myanmar as well. Gender isn’t just another variable in understanding interpersonal violence there, or anywhere else. It’s very often the key basis on which violence is normalised, justified and expressed, often with religious language or authority woven in. In contexts where discrimination is endemic, and where conflict and disasters prevent genuine stability, we have to reflect carefully on whose perspectives are sought, who might be at risk from participation, and how research findings might be used or misused. Seeing how religious belonging can be a source of sanctuary for women, while also keeping them in abusive situations, has reinforced my commitment to putting ethics at the centre of what we do. Commitment to research approaches that centralise the safety and dignity of participants while being honest about the ambiguities that structure human feelings and behaviours – I think that sums it up.
You've also spent time working in natural disaster and crisis settings. On the ground, what kinds of ethical dilemmas tend to come up there?
In communities affected by disasters, the ethical stakes are high. Issues include consent, risks of retraumatisation, and the need to safeguard the emotional and physical wellbeing of participants and researchers. These are immediate concerns, not hypothetical issues. Again, women and girls tend to be disproportionately affected during disasters by displacement, and by the loss of livelihoods and social structures. For projects in disaster-affected communities, I’ve designed ethics and safeguarding protocols, supported local research teams, and adapted funder and institutional guidelines to ensure that they fit with local cultural and logistical contexts. Doing this has really underlined for me that ethics frameworks aren’t just forms to complete at the planning stage. They need to be living documents that respond to the challenges that fast-changing conditions bring with them. This is especially the case for the vulnerabilities faced by women and girls.
Alongside your academic fieldwork, you've also been involved with large, multi-country, government-funded programmes on violence against women and girls. From an evaluation perspective, how do those big collaborations change the ethics conversation?
Seeing large programmes from an evaluation perspective has been very revealing. I’ve worked as part of several evaluation teams on UK government-funded projects on preventing VAWG. The focus of that work is evaluation and learning, while the programmes themselves focus on the ground-level projects or interventions. From that vantage point it becomes even more obvious that projects evolve, contexts shift and new risks present themselves. And when you consider that the findings of these programmes are channelled directly into their funders’ policy decisions, you realise that we need ways of revisiting ethical questions across the life of a project. We need to be able to build monitoring and learning processes that help teams to notice when their original ideas or assumptions no longer hold.
Bringing this back to your role here, what do these experiences offer you as Vice-Chair of the Faculty Ethics Committee?
I think of the Ethics Committee as a space where we can bring these complexities together in a constructive way. In the humanities and social sciences, we work closely with colleagues and students whose projects deal with sensitive topics and vulnerable populations in different parts of the globe, and there can sometimes be a tension between the desire to get the work done efficiently (for the good of participants, and for eventual impact), and the need to properly care for participants and the researchers themselves. My goal here is to be able to support rigorous reviews whilst keeping sight of the fact that every application form has a detailed human story, or set of stories, behind it.
If you had to sum up your view of what good ethics in research looks like, how would you put it?
I would say that ethical research is best realised when the principles are woven throughout the life of a project. We need ethical principles at the start of a project to help us plan and strategise in terms of the methods we choose the questions we design and so on. But we also need these principles for the constantly evolving relationships we build, and the ways we shape and share our findings. When it is done well, ethics shouldn’t constrain a researcher’s curiosity. An ethical approach deepens our questions and helps us to ensure that our research remains accountable to the individuals and communities that share their stories with us.