The Practice of Making Ethics : Methodological Entanglements and Speculative Governance

Ethics in research is often treated as a procedural hurdle; a fixed, front-loaded checkpoint of compliance. I propose an alternative: an ethics that is intra-active, materially situated, and made with the unfolding of the research itself, making ethics . Drawing on feminist new materialist praxis, I explore how ethics emerges within embodied, co-creative, and affective research encounters, particularly in creative, practice-based, and post-qualitative methodologies. I examine not only the methodological implications of this remaking but also the institutional structures that constrain it. I call for iterative materially embedded ethics practices and a remaking of research governance that privileges responsiveness over risk-averse abstraction. With this paper, I offer making ethics , not a retrospective add-on or predictive mechanism but a generative, materially attuned, and institutionally consequential practice, one that demands structural transformation. What might research become if ethics were made with-in its world?