Anticipated Risks to Participants

Applications for ethics approval and research permits typically include a section requiring the applicant to anticipate harm to the people they intend to speak with. This poem takes that section as its subject. Following an applicant through the completion of a single form, it sets the standard vocabulary of research governance, phrases such as minimal risk, voluntary participation, pseudonymisation and the right to withdraw at any stage, beside the conditions under which those assurances are received in a small community where it is known who spoke to whom. The form provides a field for risks to the researcher, filled in with roads and weather, and no field for the period after the researcher has left, when a report exists and its author does not. The poem does not treat the applicant as careless: the answers given are accurate and the approval is deserved. Its interest lies in the architecture of the form, in which harms are foreseeable at the point of application, which arrive later, and why an instrument built to protect participants can register only what is already imaginable. The poem reflects on the ordinary paperwork of applied research and on the distance between approval and responsibility.