In higher education research pedagogy, ethical considerations are typically taught as procedural compliance milestones i.e., a clearance to be obtained, form completed, a best practice guide for fieldwork, etc. rather than as entangled, embodied dimensions of the research process itself. Such a procedural framing, reinforced by the time-constrained information density of institutional ethics teaching formats, risks reproducing onto-epistemic hierarchies that critical and decolonial scholarship seeks to dismantle. This paper draws on an Ethical Considerations in Research seminar held at the Faculty of Education, Cambridge, to reveal how institutional pedagogical formats adopted for researcher training reiterate normative onto-epistemics which ignore bodily and affective conditioning of students in shaping knowledge. Attending to affective dimensions of the seminar through - sighs, silences, and shifts in bodily orientations of students, makes visible how knowledge is not merely transmitted but is affectively produced impacting how bodies can listen, engage, and know. Building on embodied participant observation with thick descriptions from my role as a teaching assistant, I trace how affective intensities, particularly what Ahmed (2014) refers to as ‘sticky’ affects circulates between bodies, sites, and processes, to shape the design and delivery of the session, and how students engage in the knowledge space. From this analysis, I propose deep listening as a decolonial pedagogical method grounded in affects and sound to disrupt normative knowledge hierarchies embedded in institutional teaching formats. This paper contributes to scholarship on affective and decolonial pedagogies by calling attention to sound and embodiment to reconfigure institutional ethical and epistemic research training.

Authors:
Girinandini Singh, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Girinandini Singh is a final year doctoral student at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/girinandini-singh-6a125546/

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