Sparks: Indictments against a top extremism researcher and the SPLC force a reckoning on research ethics - an extremism scholar reflects on the field’s challenges
An ethics committee has been convened to determine whether studying dangerous people endangers people, and it expects its findings in fourteen years, by which point the danger will have been thoroughly documented and thoroughly unaddressed.
They propose ethics guidelines for those who document the far right, a reform that disciplines the observer while the observed continue organising untouched, and I ask whether freedom to research exists only for those whose research threatens no one.
That a scholar who records the words of dangerous men should face indictment while the dangerous men themselves remain unindicted is an arrangement no free society can sustain, and every generation must test whether it still holds.
A claim is circulating that proximity to extremists corrupts the researcher; the premises on which it rests are never stated, which suggests that stating them would reduce the confidence considerably.
The prosecution is described as accountability; the structural observation is that power strikes at those who map its movements, and the language of ethics is the decoration that makes the strike presentable.
Researchers face charges, the movements they documented face none, and I confess I do not understand why the pen is tried while the deeds walk free.
Trace the operation step by step: observe, record, publish, and now answer for the recording - a new instruction inserted into the engine of inquiry, and the question is what the whole mechanism will produce once scholars learn to fear their own punch cards.
They indicted the diarist for recording the sickness accurately; the patient walks free, and the room stays sealed.
It is perfectly monstrous that a scholar should be prosecuted for documenting extremism, but then documenting is the only crime the respectable can understand, having never committed the interesting ones.
We are told the researcher's methods were chosen and flawed; but the field accumulated its practices one unremarkable fieldwork decision at a time, and the indictment is simply the selection pressure arriving at last.
Asked to wait for better methods while the movements she documents grow bolder, the scholar should ask who benefits from the waiting, for power has always preferred an unwatched hour.
If studying extremists is dangerous, is it dangerous to the scholar or to the truth, and if we stop the study, who exactly is made safer?
Before we tear down the old fieldwork traditions for their ethical lapses, I should like one reformer to explain why researchers went embedded in the first place - the fence was built because the desk cannot hear the mob.
From outside the locked door, the ethics board reviews my methods; from inside the rally, where the recording is made with the heart hammering, adequacy looks different than it does on the review form.
Professors measure the movement from a distance, and now the indictment measures the professor; nobody has yet measured the fear in the room where the notes were taken, and that measurement is the whole story.
Legal and scholarly questions appear to conflict, but the court asks whether methods broke law while the scholar asks whether truth was served, and the error is believing one jurisdiction can answer the other.
The indictment speaks of 'unethical research practices' - note the grammar, practices without practitioners, methods that misbehaved themselves - and somewhere in that nominalization, the question of who was actually harmed disappears entirely.