Community based research on issues of social justice, community healing and collective liberation requires engagement with emotionally demanding questions, environments and processes. Research institutions and organisations are increasingly risk averse creating environments where important, yet emotionally demanding modes and frames of inquiry may be sidelined. Bureaucratized research procedures can promote artificial objectivity; the potential impact of emotionally demanding research on researchers is often not captured by institutional ethics processes, and strategies for care are often highly (and problematically) individualised. In contrast, an ethics of care would focus on people as relational and interdependent, morally and epistemologically. An ethics of care would also appreciate emotions and relational capabilities. Given the obvious limits to instiutionalised relationships it is acknowledged that some strategies for building communities of care may need to sit outside these contexts and boundaries.

This roundtable aims to advance the critical conception of individual and collective care that supports emotionally demanding research in a range of contexts. We invite critical dialogue on narratives of care in institutional contexts, and how these intersect with other ethos of care that support emotionally demanding inquiries within, and beyond, institutions.