Brown University, Department of Environmental Studies
Year of Publication
2010
Publication Language
English
Abstract
New ethical research practices with community populations stress partnership and participatory models with community members. Working in partnership and sharing control over the research process can lead to significant new challenges in the scientific practice of community/environmental health interventions and environmental research. This course will explore how bio-medical research protections for individuals can be extended to groups and communities by reviewing case studies in community-based, participatory research and ethical theories of principle ethics, virtue ethics, communitarian, deontology, ethics of care and post-modern ethics. A review of informed consent theory and international case studies on informed consent with communities will provide training to students on how these research ethics challenges are being addressed. Moral complexities such as how do we build community representation for collaboration and partnership and how to adapt and modify research methods to respond to community needs in research will be analyzed. New community research protections are needed to overcome group/collective risks of research. How do community-academic partnerships deal with sharing the process of data collection; the control of data; the interpretation of research findings, the dissemination of results and intellectual property rights? These difficult issues are more complex when dealing with culturally-diverse groups. How can cultural competence theories assist us in conducting community interventions? We will review public health, environmental studies research approaches/designs that can engage culturally-diverse communities with culturally-appropriate methods. The local lifestyle contexts, knowledge values and ecologies of Native Americans, Southeast Asians, African-Americans, and Hispanic populations will be explored in review articles and case studies.Syllabus includes learning goals and a list of topics and readings for each class,
