The perils of working at home: IRB "mission creep" as context and content for an ethnography of disciplinary knowledges:
RENA LEDERMAN
Among kinds of fieldwork "at home," ethnographies of higher education inevitably draw on informal gleanings of everyday insider experience. Such informality is implicitly outlawed by federal human-subjects research regulations, which presume a clinical biomedical model that formally demarcates research from other activities. Intricately implicated in these circumstances, this article describes a comparative investigation into the methodologically embedded ethical conventions of anthropology and related disciplines for which institutional review board (IRB) participation itself became inadvertently informative, work that also reveals a conflict between the ethics of human-subjects protections (confidentiality) and of collegial exchange (citation).