Integrating Ethics with Symbolic Interactionism: The Case of Oncology

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Abstract
Social scientists often relegate ethics to ex post facto considerations and dissociate theory from experientially moral phenomena because it lacks the requisite epistemological tools for an ethic-centered discourse. Research linking individual attributes and access to privilege perpetuates the politics of status-contingent voice and perspective. Therefore, our work has inherently [un]ethical dimensions—more powerful because they remain unarticulated. Drawing from feminist scholarship highlighting the unavoidability of "standpoint" and "perspective" in research, and from data from a 39-month ethnography of ovarian cancer patients, I reveal ethical principles embedded within the Chicago school of symbolic interactionism. This articulation of embodied ethics creates a context wherein ethnographic data reveal themselves as sociopolitical. The vulnerability of respondents emerges; however, they use research participation to identify the multiple layers of their [dis]empowerment. Integrating an ethical mandate within theory and methodology provides an effective analytic tool, and the means to assert a theoretic preference acknowledging respondent entitlement!

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