Conference Agenda

Qualitative research in sensitive fields such as bereavement, trauma, and culpability requires more than formal adherence to institutional ethical protocols. While informed consent and confidentiality remain essential, they do not capture the lived, moment-to-moment ethical negotiations that researchers encounter in practice. This has been described as ethics-in-practice — the ongoing, situated process of balancing care, responsibility, and reflexivity in research encounters.

Our Dream Team session takes up this challenge within an ongoing study on the experiences of individuals who have unintentionally caused another person’s death, either a stranger (e.g., through accidental traffic fatalities) or a close relation (e.g., children who died under parental supervision). The project is carried out by senior researchers and several research assistants who conduct in-depth interviews. This team composition sheds light on an underexplored dimension: how diverse researcher subjectivities, across career stages and personal backgrounds, shape not only the emotional experience of fieldwork but also the ethical dynamics within the team. Whereas much of the literature frames research assistants mainly in relation to power hierarchies, here we ask how shared vulnerability, ambivalence, and reflexivity circulate within the team and reconfigure ethical practice.

From the very start of fieldwork, our team encountered ambivalence: moments of deep empathy intertwined with fear, judgment, or withdrawal; the pull of closeness followed by the need for distance; the recognition that working with such material is simultaneously a privilege and a burden. Crucially, these experiences did not remain confined to interviews with participants. They reverberated within the team itself, where assistants and senior researchers grappled together with questions of proximity and distance, of supporting participants while also protecting one another, and of making sense of ethically charged encounters.

The guiding questions of this session are: How do ambivalence and reflexivity emerge in team dynamics in sensitive qualitative research? How can these processes be acknowledged and held, rather than suppressed? And what structures or practices (such as debriefing, supervision, or collaborative reflexivity) can best support researchers at different stages in coping with the emotional and ethical demands of such work?

The Dream Team format offers a unique opportunity to explore these issues collectively. In our session, senior researchers and research assistants will share short reflexive accounts of the challenges they encountered, followed by small-group discussions where participants consider parallel dilemmas from their own projects. Groups will be invited to propose tentative guidelines for fostering ethics-in-practice within research teams. These provisional guidelines will be gathered and synthesized, with the possibility of continuing the dialogue in a writing collective after the congress.

By situating ethics-in-practice not only in the researcher–participant relationship but also in the collaborative life of research teams, this session advances methodological reflection in two ways. First, it underscores that ethical deliberation in sensitive inquiry must include the dynamics among researchers themselves. Second, it highlights ambivalence as an inherent and potentially productive feature of qualitative work, one that can deepen reflexivity and open new ways of thinking about responsibility in research.