Mutual, Reflexive and Dialectical: On the Constitutive Role of the Research Assistant in Ethical Knowledge Production

To study a globalized world, researchers often relocate to unfamiliar contexts, whereby research assistants can be crucial in navigating language barriers, providing local knowledge and facilitating connections. Increasingly acknowledged as central to knowledge production, scholars have yet to explore research assistants’ role in ethical knowledge production. Within institutions, ethics board approval has increasingly become a bureaucratic checkbox while, in practice, it is rather an ongoing collaborative exercise actively involving researchers, participants and research assistants. As of today, ethics review boards minimally discuss the ethical implications of hiring a research assistant; only considering their role in relation to data protection, translation or risk assessments. Drawing from our own experiences as researcher and research assistant co-conducting qualitative interviews with immigration detention support actors in Italy, this paper reflects on how the researcher-assistant relationship can inform not only the research process, but also knowledge production within the ethical field. Deepening the debate on the role of the research assistant in knowledge production and considering the latter as a dialectical process, we point to the generative nature of this relationship for ethical learning in knowledge production by means of negotiating ethical principles, developing ethics skills and training, and engaging in mutual dialogue to overcome ethical challenges.