The what and where of primate field research may be failing primate conservation

With approximately 30% of nonhuman primate species listed as critically endangered, the window of opportunity to conserve primates is closing fast. In this article, we focus on the degree to which publications in field primatology are biased in favor of particular taxa and field sites. We examined more than 29,000 peer‐reviewed articles and identified 876 field visits to 349 field sites. We found a highly clumped distribution by site and species. We also examined publication ethical statements and the extent to which they acknowledged local human communities (<5%). Due to a lack of consistency across publications, we provide recommendations for improving ethical statements and for evaluating research impact. Given the plight of primate biodiversity, these results suggest broader coverage of primate species and geographies, as well as more attention to the local human communities whose support is necessary if the intent is to have primate species in the wild in the 22nd century.     

Reducing the Ecological Impact of Field Research

Researchers and students at biological field stations, especially in remote areas, are subject to leaving “footprints,” as we conduct research, work, and live in sensitive ecosystems. These footprints include travel, personal trash and waste, and field equipment (e.g. flagging, tree markers, plot markers, trail markers, monitoring devices, etc.). In this commentary, we argue that the field of primatology's commitment to minimum impact research should be more explicitly and visibly integrated into our ethical protocols with regard to field research and instruction in sensitive environments. We review current ethical codes and potential solutions to reducing our “researcher footprints” while conducting fieldwork. Using Costa Rica as an example, we address how sustainable fieldwork differs among varying cultural contexts and argue that researchers should be made responsible and accountable for how our presence, research, and teaching might impact the environment. We conclude by recommending a set of guidelines to be added to ethical protocols regarding research design, station policies, and the conduct of research and teaching in the field. Am. J. Primatol. 75:1‐9, 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Harmonic Dissonance: Reflections on Dwelling in the Field

Focusing on the idea of dwelling in the field, this paper explores the moral grammar of living with others in field settings, including the texture of membership in one's own family and host families. Through a comparative analysis of two ethnographic research contexts – one on transnational Christian non-governmental organizations in the US and Zimbabwe in 1996 –97, and the other on orphans and philanthropy in India in 2004–05 – I interrogate what it means to inhabit the field. In the world of multi-sited ethnography all research sites are not created equal; both in terms of the kinds of data one can collect and the types of observations one can make. How ethnographers are situated in a web of affliations affects their experience in the field, what they observe, and their research practice. I propose renewed attention to how anthropologists live in the field, including how relationships are interpreted in the field by ethnographers and their informants.     

The role of trust in global health research collaborations

Collaborations in global health research are on the rise because they enhance productivity, facilitate capacity building, accelerate output and make tackling big, multifactorial research questions possible. In this paper, I examine the concepts of trust and reliance in scientific collaborations in general, but also in the particular context of collaborations in global health research between high‐income countries and low‐and‐middle income countries (LMIC). I propose and defend the argument that given the particular characteristics of collaborations and demands of trust relationships, reliance is a better relational mode for successful collaborations. Although reliance can be difficult to establish in situations where asymmetry of power exists, trust should not be the only relational mode available to LMIC researchers because of the type of vulnerability it introduces to the relationship. I conclude that the promotion of good collaborations requires addressing the power imbalances between partners, and establishing an even playing field in global health research.     

What constitutes fair shared decision-making in global health research collaborations?

Funders (located primarily in high-income countries) and high-income country researchers have historically dominated decision-making within global health research collaborations: from setting agendas and research design to determining how data are collected and analysed and what happens with findings and outputs. The ethical principle of shared decision-making has been proposed as a way to help address these imbalances within collaborations and to reduce semicolonial and exploitative forms of global health research. It is important to be clear about what shared decision-making means in order to ensure that it is not done in a tokenistic, shallow way. Thus far, the principle’s content has not been examined and articulated in detail. This paper aims to start the process of delineating a concept of fair shared decision-making as a minimum standard for global health research. Using two hypothetical case examples, the paper will demonstrate that global health research practice is often inconsistent with ideal shared decision-making. In such instances, it can be difficult to decide whether shared decision-making within collaborations is fair. The paper describes how the two cases do not meet criteria for unfair or non-ideal shared decision-making, despite having potentially morally troubling features. The nuances of these examples of research practice help to generate clearer ideas about how to judge fairness in shared decision-making. The paper concludes by presenting ideas about when soft power can be fairly employed between high-income-country and low- and middle-income-country partners and what fair compromise agreements may look like in shared decision-making.     

Ethics committees in western and central Africa: concrete foundations

The involvement of developing countries in international clinical trials is necessary for the development of appropriate medicines for local populations. However, the absence of appropriate structures for ethical review represents a barrier for certain countries. Currently there is very little information available on existing structures dedicated to ethics in western and central Africa. This article briefly describes historical milestones in the development of networks dedicated to capacity building in ethical review in these regions and outlines the major conclusions of two workshops on this issue, which were held in September and October 2002 in Libreville, Gabon, and Paris, France. The workshops were the culmination of collaboration between the African Malaria Network Trust (AMANET) and the Pan African Bioethics Initiative (PABIN). They produced an update on ethics organizations with regard to mission, function, activities, members, and contact people, in eight countries within the regions discussed. As a result of the commitment of mandated delegates, a further prominent outcome followed these workshops: the creation of national structures, where none existed before, dedicated to the ethical review of clinical trials.     

Politicized and depoliticized ethnicities,power relations and temporality: insights to outsider research from comparative and transnational fieldwork

The insider and outsider positions in migration studies have conventionally been approached in terms of ethnic or national belonging. Recently scholars have problematized the essentialist approaches to these roles by arguing for the inclusion of multiple intersecting social locations that are at play in the constitution of researcher positionality. Less attention has been paid, however, on how different ethnicities are constructed and how they can become politicized and depoliticized at particular moments during the research process. This article discusses the fieldwork experiences of two “apparent outsiders” to the studied diaspora community. Drawing from our experiences in multi-sited and comparative fieldwork on the Kurdish diaspora, we argue that rather than taking insider and outsider positions as a starting-point to understand researcher positionality, scholars need to look at particular moments of insiderness and outsiderness to grasp how the researcher’s assumed ethnicity becomes politicized and depoliticized during ethnographic fieldwork.     

Ethical Review of Research on Human Subjects at Unilever: Reflections on Governance

This article considers the process of ethical review of research on human subjects at a very large multinational consumer products company. The commercial context of this research throws up unique challenges and opportunities that make the ethics of the process of oversight distinct from mainstream medical research. Reflection on the justification of governance processes sheds important, contrasting light on the ethics of governance of other forms and context of research.     

My Father’s Daughter: Becoming a ‘Real’ Anthropologist among the Ubang of Southeast Nigeria

This article explores some of the complexities of fieldwork for ethnographers conducting research in the ethnographic settings of significant ‘others’. The fieldwork in question took place in the rural, geographically isolated community of Ubang, in Obudu, Nigeria, where I was following in the footsteps of my anthropologist father. Drawing on personal experience, I attempt to candidly examine the challenges inevitably faced in this situation, including acceptance by the community as a bona fide researcher, pressure to fulfill the expectations of others familiar with my father’s work, and the struggle to carve out a professional identity distinct from my father’s. An earlier version of this paper, bearing the same title, first appeared in the Anthropology Matters Journal, 2007, vol 9(1). The paper is dedicated to the memory of my father, HRH Eze (Prof.) V.C. Uchendu, whose untimely death occurred after the final editing of the article, on December 7, 2006.     

Demography,education, and research trends in the interdisciplinary field of disease ecology

Micro‐ and macroparasites are a leading cause of mortality for humans, animals, and plants, and there is great need to understand their origins, transmission dynamics, and impacts. Disease ecology formed as an interdisciplinary field in the 1970s to fill this need and has recently rapidly grown in size and influence. Because interdisciplinary fields integrate diverse scientific expertise and training experiences, understanding their composition and research priorities is often difficult. Here, for the first time, we quantify the composition and educational experiences of a subset of disease ecology practitioners and identify topical trends in published research. We combined a large survey of self‐declared disease ecologists with a literature synthesis involving machine‐learning topic detection of over 18,500 disease ecology research articles. The number of graduate degrees earned by disease ecology practitioners has grown dramatically since the early 2000s. Similar to other science fields, we show that practitioners in disease ecology have diversified in the last decade in terms of gender identity and institution, with weaker diversification in race and ethnicity. Topic detection analysis revealed how the frequency of publications on certain topics has declined (e.g., HIV, serology), increased (e.g., the dilution effect, infectious disease in bats), remained relatively common (e.g., malaria ecology, influenza, vaccine research and development), or have consistently remained relatively infrequent (e.g., theoretical models, field experiments). Other topics, such as climate change, superspreading, emerging infectious diseases, and network analyses, have recently come to prominence. This study helps identify the major themes of disease ecology and demonstrates how publication frequency corresponds to emergent health and environmental threats. More broadly, our approach provides a framework to examine the composition and publication trends of other major research fields that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.     

Reflections on research ethics in a public health emergency: Experiences of Brazilian women affected by Zika

In Brazil, the epicenter of the Zika crisis, brown, black, and indigenous poor women living in municipalities with scarce resources were disproportionally affected. The gendered consequences of the epidemic exposed how intersectional lenses are central to understand the impact of public health emergencies in the lives of women and girls. The demand for Zika-affected children and women to be research participants is relevant for an ethical analysis of participant protection procedures during a crisis. We investigated how women experienced research participation by analyzing their narratives. Two-year-long longitudinal qualitative study in Brazilian sites located in the epidemic's epicenter was performed using mixed methods: ethnography with women from two distinct states and individual semi-structured interviews with five women in different Zika-affected states, four of which were community leaders. All women in the study were mothers or grandmothers of Zika-affected children. Thematic analysis was used for data evaluation. Women perceived being pressured to participate in research and a lack of benefit sharing. Structural determinants of gender inequality, such as its effect on power distribution, were found to impact research participant protection. Formal procedures for research protocols approvals were insufficient in protecting participants because these instruments were unable to account for structural aspects. Communitarian mobilization, through WhatsApp groups, was found to be an important mechanism to create conditions to challenge oppressive structures. Strengthening public health, effective community-based participation in research planning and implantation of ethical strategies that promotes gender equality can have transformative effect on unequal power structures and promote participant protection.     

An ethics of anthropology-informed community engagement with COVID-19 clinical trials in Africa

The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the critical role of ethics and community engagement in designing and conducting clinical research during infectious disease outbreaks where no vaccine or treatment already exists. In reviewing current practices across Africa, we distinguish between three distinct roles for community engagement in clinical research that are often conflated: 1) the importance of community engagement for identifying and honouring cultural sensitivities; 2) the importance of recognising the socio-political context in which the research is proposed; and 3) the importance of understanding what is in the interest of communities recruited to research according to their own views and values. By making these distinctions, we show that current practice of clinical research could draw on anthropology in ways which are sometimes unnecessary to solicit local cultural values, overlook the importance of socio-political contexts and wider societal structures within which it works, potentially serving to reinforce unjust political or social regimes, and threaten to cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the research. We argue that more discerning anthropological engagement as well as wider collaboration with other social scientists and those working in the humanities is urgently needed to improve the ethics of current biomedical and pharmaceutical research practice in Africa.     

Collaboration in scientific research: a critical need for freshwater ecology

1. Collaboration means actively working together to achieve things which could not be done alone. This article attempts to provide an overall, unified, guiding framework for collaboration in freshwater ecology by discussing aspects of collaboration at individual and organizational levels, and addressing international linkages.
2. The essential elements of collaboration are communication and trust, and effective project management. Barriers to effective collaboration include competition, organizational cultures and organizational instabilities.
3. The success of collaboration can be measured by tangible benefits such as increased numbers of peer-reviewed publications, the production of working models and a number of intangible benefits.
4. Interactions between individuals lie at the heart of an effective collaboration; organizational arrangements should facilitate this interaction. Some governments are encouraging collaboration to increase cost efficiency and allocate accountability. This trend should continue on an international level.
5. Collaboration is a key to future research in freshwater ecology.     

Neutral theory in community ecology

One of the central goals of community ecology is to understand the forces that maintain species diversity within communities. The traditional niche-assembly theory asserts that species live together in a community only when they differ from one another in resource uses. But this theory has some difficulties in explaining the diversity often observed in specie-rich communities such as tropical forests. As an alternative to the niche theory, Hubbell and other ecologists introduced a neutral model. Hubbell argues that the number of species in a community is controlled by species extinction and immigration or speciation of new species. Assuming that all individuals of all species in a trophically similar com-munity are ecologically equivalent, Hubbell's neutral theory predicts two important statistical distributions. One is the asymptotic log-series distribution for the metacommunities under point mutation speciation, and the other is the zero-sum multinomial distribution for both local communities under dispersal limitation and metacommunities under random fission speciation. Unlike the niche-assembly theory, the neutral theory takes similarity in species and individuals as a starting point for investigating species diversity. Based on the fundamental processes of birth, death, dispersal and spe-ciation, the neutral theory provided the first mechanistic explanation of species abundance distribution commonly observed in natural communities. Since the publication of the neutral theory, there has been much discussion about it, pro and con. In this paper, we summarize recent progress in the assumption, prediction and speciation mode of the neutral theory, including progress in the theory itself, tests about the assumption of the theory, prediction and speciation mode at the metacommunity level. We also suggest that the most important task in the future is to bridge the niche-assembly theory and the neutral theory, and to add species differences to the neutral theory and more stochasticity to the niche theory.     

Spiders, Firesouls, and Little Fingers: Necessary Magic in University–Community Collaboration

On the basis of extensive research on university–community collaborative education projects in southern California and southern Sweden, this article proposes two roles and a research strategy and approach as elements essential to sustained collaboration. Recognition and fulfillment of the roles of "spider" and "firesoul," while "leading with the little finger," contribute to educational anthropology by linking qualitative and ethnographic research with university and community learning, practice, and service in a process of involvement.     

Neutral theory in community ecology

One of the central goals of community ecology is to understand the forces that maintain species diversity within communities. The traditional niche-assembly theory asserts that species live together in a community only when they differ from one another in resource uses. But this theory has some difficulties in explaining the diversity often observed in specie-rich communities such as tropical forests. As an alternative to the niche theory, Hubbell and other ecologists introduced a neutral model. Hubbell argues that the number of species in a community is controlled by species extinction and immigration or speciation of new species. Assuming that all individuals of all species in a trophically similar community are ecologically equivalent, Hubbell’s neutral theory predicts two important statistical distributions. One is the asymptotic log-series distribution for the metacommunities under point mutation speciation, and the other is the zero-sum multinomial distribution for both local communities under dispersal limitation and metacommunities under random fission speciation. Unlike the niche-assembly theory, the neutral theory takes similarity in species and individuals as a starting point for investigating species diversity. Based on the fundamental processes of birth, death, dispersal and speciation, the neutral theory provided the first mechanistic explanation of species abundance distribution commonly observed in natural communities. Since the publication of the neutral theory, there has been much discussion about it, pro and con. In this paper, we summarize recent progress in the assumption, prediction and speciation mode of the neutral theory, including progress in the theory itself, tests about the assumption of the theory, prediction and speciation mode at the metacommunity level. We also suggest that the most important task in the future is to bridge the niche-assembly theory and the neutral theory, and to add species differences to the neutral theory and more stochasticity to the niche theory. __________ Translated from Journal of Plant Ecology, 2006, 30(5): 868–877 [译自:植物生态学报]     

Ethics,ecology and economics

This paper describes the general structure of an environmental philosophy. There can be many such philosophies, and those with their roots in economic theory have been extensively studied recently. Specific examples cited in the paper include the work of David Pearce and Robert Goodin. Economics-based philosophies can founder on the issue of externalities and a misplaced attempt to provide a comprehensive approach to valuing nature as a bundle of goods and services. It is argued that it is dangerously easy to slide from considering nature as a standing reserve of processes and objects that have the potential to satisfy human desires to the idea that it is nothing more than that. In general, the consequentialist basis of economics limits its usefulness in contributing to informed environmental decisions. But there is room for a sensitive use of institutional environmental economics as a partial guide for our reflections and choices. Any such development should take on board the existence of a plurality of perspectives on fundamental issues and the pluralism of values that can be found within moral theory itself.