Ethical responsibilities to particular actors (ideas, organizations, phenomena?)

We are thinking about our ethical responsibilities to people related in different ways to the project.... Some feel very clear to us, others are less clear. What do you think?

(Each category opens a new page.)

1) Responsibilities to Interview Narrators

2) Responsibilities to Persons in the Story but Not Narrating

3) Responsibilities to Members of the Texas After Violence Project team

4) Responsibilities to Users and Potential Users

5) Responsibilities to Other Persons? Current? Future?

6) Do we have responsibilities to "the work" itself, or to a particular vision?

7) Do we have responsibilities to the organization itself?

8) Responsibilities to our funders

Is it possible to make clear, well-defined, black and white rules that always work? Or are these ethical questions that we will continue to struggle with over time, balancing important values that are sometimes in tension or outright conflict? Think hard about how you might answer these questions if you were positioned differently: a narrator rather than an interviewer, older or younger than you actually are, more or less financially privileged, of a different "race" or ethnicity, able-bodied or disabled in different ways, a person of higher or lower or a different kind of social status, religious or not religious in particular ways, a U.S. citizen or not, a native English speaker or not, physically small or large, with access to personal and private space or not? How do all these -- and other -- factors affect what you value, and how you would resolve particular ethical tensions?