Political scientists recently have taken great strides in addressing sexual harassment and assault in the discipline. Little has been said, however, about sexual violence that political scientists may confront during field research. Field research involves any data-collection activity that occurs away from a researcher’s home institution, including visiting a prominent archive, interviewing political elites, and conducting direct observation of political phenomenon, and fieldwork is widely considered essential to data collection and career development across political science subfields. Field researchers may experience numerous power disparities that put them at acute risk for sexual or gender-based violence in the field, and evidence suggests that such experiences are pervasive and professionally devastating. In an effort to reduce gender-based violence and discrimination across academic worksites, several disciplines and institutions have developed specific guidelines and protocols to prevent and address sexual harassment and assault during fieldwork (Berkeley PATH to Care Center 2020; University of California, Riverside 2018; University of Toronto, Department of Anthropology 2019; Woodgate et al. 2018). Political scientists, however, have largely failed to conceptualize field placements as work settings or to address gender-based violence during fieldwork in our curriculum, training, and policies. Instead, they rely on deeply held methodological fallacies that insist on a field researcher’s absolute privilege, trivialize experiences of sexual violence, and weaponize rape myths to portray survivors as professionally incompetent (Hunt 2022).

What are the ethical responsibilities that social science researchers have, not only to the people we study but also to ourselves as scholars and other scholars? This article argues that as political and social scientists, we need to expand our notion of research ethics, to adopt a notion that embraces treatment of our subject–participants and ourselves as researchers. This study is anchored in the still-growing literature on research ethics in fieldwork and draws on political science work on the ethical implications of the risks and realities of sexual violence for scholars who conduct fieldwork. The article looks beyond political science to feminist-informed research in the social sciences as it develops the argument about the ethical responsibilities of social scientists. In investigating the overarching question, the article addresses resources for survivors of sexual harassment and assault during field research.

Field research, defined as “leaving one’s home institution in order to acquire data, information, or insights that significantly inform one’s research” (Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015, 1), is a beneficial research practice. It also is a practice with significant safety risks, including sexual harassment, that can undermine the research process and harm researchers. Thus, combatting sexual harassment in the field is fundamental to maintaining the integrity of the research enterprise.

Fieldwork is fraught with methodological and ethical concerns, particularly for those junior scholars seeking to establish themselves. There is a pressure to conduct research that pushes the boundaries of emerging techniques and brings our theories to bear on case studies that are underrepresented in the literature. Although this pressure is felt by nearly everyone, the barriers to accessing fieldwork and the premium of privilege lead to significant inequalities (Fujii 2016), which are becoming increasingly apparent as the academy diversifies. Being a white cis-male, I have benefited from overarching systems of privilege across my education, my career, and my international fieldwork. Yet as a gay man, international fieldwork poses potential challenges, illuminating additional realities with which researchers must contend.1

Feminist standpoint theorists highlight how relations of power and inequality impact our knowledge of the social world (Smith 1974). The hierarchical positioning of different social groups creates a world in which the experiences and perspectives of certain people are acknowledged while others are silenced (Hartsock 1998; Hekman 1997). Moreover, a researcher’s personal background—her race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other factors—condition what she is able to learn and how (Collins 2000). Together, this literature underscores how the social world—and who we are within it—shapes knowledge production.

The articles in this symposium underscore at least three common points about understanding and combatting sexual harassment in the context of social science fieldwork:

Civic education is essential to the health of any democracy. When COVID-19 emerged in the spring of 2020, almost all civic education efforts went online. This increased interest in the effectiveness of online civic education. Does it lead to similar outcomes as in-person education? I used student evaluations from a youth civic engagement conference co-run by Latinx and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) non-profit organizations to compare learning outcomes on multiple dimensions of civic education, from an in-person conference in 2019 and an online conference in 2020. I find that although students improved over the course of both conferences, the 2019 in-person conference yielded slightly greater improvement in civic knowledge confidence than the online conference. Other dimensions—verifiable knowledge, self-efficacy, and community consciousness—increased after participation in the conference in both years; however, the increases were similar between the online and in-person formats.