Conference Agenda

This case study explores how design education might offer hopeful, creative and affirmative ethical responses to educational practice in challenging times. Situated at a university of technology in Cape Town, South Africa, the research analyses a pedagogical intervention in which Masters of Design students and lecturers explore collaborative and innovative ways of decolonizing a text entitled "What is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable" (Schultz et a, 2018). The presentation will show how students' multimodal engagements with the text that include that include reading aloud, reflexive freewriting and artmaking troubled dominant western forms of expression that permeate learning and teaching discourse and practice. By resisting the dominant neoliberal higher educational culture that valorises speed and outputs, the collaborative practice of Slow Reading (Bozalek, 2023) provided an opportunity for students to critically engage with nuanced complexities and response-abilities that young designer face in shaping the word. While collaborative reading thickened understanding of issues around decolonizing design, the iterative reenactment of Schults et al.'s "roundtable" also uncovered how this seminal text neglects design practice in Africa. Identifying this gap in the literature reveals how multimodal collaborative engagement with texts can help transgress the Western academic canon which tends to prioritise the individual rather than the collective. Student' sharing of their lived experiences in relation to the text opened up a generative space for pushing thought beyond how the know the world and provided insights in to how education space can be activated differently.

Based on our own experiences as co-creative researchers, we aim to trouble dominant risk-aversive paradigms and crisis-prone imaginaries often put forward in institutional standards of research ethics and conduct. Rather than anticipating or ‘precautioning’ against indeterminate risks of harm and challenges that may occur in the field or later research stages, we argue for an opportunity-based, entangled ethics for co-creative research and related fields. Inspired by the agential realist approach of Karen Barad's feminist new materialism and other critical theories, opportunity-based ethics enables co-creative researchers to navigate and take advantage of the uncertainties that emerge in and through the dynamic (re)enactment of research relationalities for improved ethical and research conduct.

Narrating our own co-creative research experiences through the lens of entangled theories, we question standardized anonymization and privacy measures, enhanced informed consent protocols for ‘vulnerable’ research participants, and the anticipation of potentially ‘harmful’ influences before commencement of the research. In asking whom/what is 'safeguarded' by risk-aversive ethical standards, and for whose/which benefit, we propose three ethical principles: relationality, response-ability, and situatedness. These principles open up alternative ways of relating to the human, non-human, and more-than-human that intrinsically make up co-creative research entanglements, while taking seriously the in-situ collaborations and outcomes that unfold across various places and times. In doing so, we contribute to enhance research quality and data richness, as well as improved participant wellbeing and collaborative research benefits.

The discourse on development has often neglected its intertwined consequence on the environment. Mining activities have led to environmental crises and damaging consequences on livelihood and health of mining-affected populations. Highlighting the experiences of people residing in such a “space”, which is sensitive, inaccessible and inhabitable, the current study focuses on understanding how co-creating spaces of trust required the practice of researcher reflexivity. The field experiences from an ethnographic study on understanding the social determinants of health, of those who reside in close vicinity of mines in the state of Jharkhand, India are discussed. The process of “getting closer to a hard-to-reach community” necessitated practising critical reflexivity to address not only researcher’s vulnerability in navigating the field, but also negotiating the ethical dilemmas. Taking on Pillow’s (2003) framework on “uncomfortable reflexivity”, the messy nature of ethnographic field work is highlighted which can contribute to more ethical and insightful research.

As increasing numbers of veterans return home from deployment, the invisible wounds of war extend beyond the individual, shaping the moral, emotional, and relational lives of those closest to them. While post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among service members has been extensively studied, less is known about the moral and relational consequences experienced by their partners and families. Moral injury (MI), defined as the lasting psychological, social, and spiritual impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or witnessing acts that violate deeply held moral beliefs (Litz et al., 2009), offers a critical lens for understanding these experiences within family systems.

This qualitative study employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to explore how current and former partners of military service members with PTSD experience and interpret moral injury in the context of their intimate and family relationships. Guided by Gadamerian principles of interpretation and meaning-making, twenty participants engaged in in-depth, semi-structured interviews designed to elicit rich accounts of their lived experiences. The study was structured around three research questions: (1) How do partners experience and interpret morally injurious events within their relationships and family lives? (2) How do they make sense of the relational consequences of these experiences within their partnerships? and (3) How do they understand the ways morally injurious experiences shape family dynamics, roles, and identities within the family system?

Preliminary interpretation suggests that partners’ narratives reflect complex intersections of empathy, betrayal, guilt, and loss of moral coherence within intimate and family life. The findings aim to deepen understanding of how moral injury extends beyond the individual veteran to influence the moral fabric of family systems. This work contributes to a growing qualitative discourse that situates moral injury as a relational and contextual phenomenon, highlighting the need for family-centered, morally attuned approaches to support and intervention.

The practice of suicide tourism refers to the traveling of individuals to other countries to seek legally permitted assisted suicide. This study employed a descriptive qualitative research approach exploring how right-to-die organizations perceive suicide tourism and its implications on the right-to-die. The study included in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 activists from right-to-die organizations, as well as thirteen documents written by such organizations or related to the suicide-tourism phenomenon. Five themes emerged following the analysis of 12 in-depth interviews with activists from right-to-die organizations and 13 relevant documents: (1) unequivocal attitudes toward suicide tourism; (2) relationships between the organizations and the media; (3) acting to change the legal status of the right-to-die; (4) the role of the family in interactions between the organization and the person seeking assistance; and (5) reciprocal relations between the organizations and the physicians. The findings reveal ambivalent attitudes within such organizations toward suicide tourism, inherent tension among participating physicians, and complex relationships between assisted suicide, palliative care, and the physicians’ duty to promote individual choice at end-of-life.