Overcoming ‘Minimal Objectivity’ and ‘Inherent Bias’: Ethics and Understandings of Feminist Research in a Health Sciences Faculty in South Africa

One day, three feminist academics from different disciplinary backgrounds met over coffee on a health sciences campus. Keen to work collectively with medical students, they devised a four-week special study module (SSM) called ‘Intersecting Identities’ that combined a variation of Photovoice, a participatory action research method, with seminars on gender, ‘race’, class, sexual orientation, and other identities. The end results would include a photo exhibition open to the university community, and a portfolio of student’s work. Inherent in the SSM were tenets of feminist research and disciplinary curiosity encouraged by the field of medical and health humanities (MHH). In seeking ethics approval for the SSM, the shared challenges linked to feminist research and cross-disciplinary work in MHH was revealed. The ethics committee suggested that the SSM was ‘inherently biased’ and that there was ‘evidence of minimal objectivity, which is not what research demands’. This article contextualises the SSM in relation to the medical curriculum and the nascent field of MHH and then analyses the committee’s objections and the authors’ replies to them. A discourse analysis and examination of this correspondence provides insights into a case study of inherent epistemic disciplinary violence, pedagogical clashes, notions of ‘risk’ in research, and the long road towards epistemic generosity and reciprocity.