In June 2025, Dr Wendy Asquith and Dr Claire Pierson, Department of Politics, and Prof. Helen Stalford, School of Law and Social Justice, led an interactive one-day workshop on ethics for social justice research.
The event was organised with the support of an interdisciplinary PGR team, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Enhancing Research Culture Fund and in collaboration with the AHRC-funded Centre for People’s Justice and Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre.
This one-day workshop opened up a space for attendees to think collectively about what it means to conduct research ethically with affected communities.
Through expert talks and panel discussions, participant dialogue and creative activities we explored shared ethical principles across disciplines and sectors when it comes to research and practice with social justice aims. We interrogated existing frameworks to support ethical research within our institutions and considered how these need to be adapted to create the conditions in which ethical research can really happen.
Attendees at the Ethics for Social Justice Research workshop in June 2025.
The workshop was hosted at the University of Liverpool and was attended by over 50 researchers of all career stages, practitioners and community-based partners from across the country who are invested in co-produced, socially just research. Across the day colleagues from More than Minutes worked to capture within visual notes some of the key topics of debate, themes of discussion and creative practices used to challenge and rethink current approaches to research ethics.
Visual notes produced at the Ethics for Social Justice workshop by More than Minutes.
The event drew learning from the practices of community-based and cultural partners as well as lived experience experts through a series of short provocations and presentations that critically engaged with current ethics frameworks. Insights on how to devise creative tools to support research teams in planning and delivering ethical research projects were also shared from a recent project on Ethics in modern slavery research commissioned by the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre.
As part of the day’s activities, we held an arts-based workshop that asked participants to express what they would like to see in an ethics framework for socially-engaged and co-productive research via the medium of collage. Participants were asked to respond to prompts including: What principles should drive co-productive research? Do you have a question or provocation that could prompt an improved research ethics? How can we fulfil the ambition to engage with communities well in research for social justice? We were inspired by the energy with which participants engaged in this activity, offering thoughtful and constructive challenge through the beautiful collages created on the day.
Since the workshop our PGR team – comprising Shaëny Cassim-Itibar, Emily Kearon-Warrilow, Adam Burns and Anca Carter-Timofte – reflected from their own disciplinary and methodological perspectives on insights they took away from this event. Each of these has been captured in a blogpost that will be published as a series here on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research and Impact blog over the coming semester. Within each you will see examples of some of the striking collages produced by a range of attendees on the day and reproduced here with their permission.
*Image credits: With thanks to Freddy Sperring whose collage features found materials including fragments of work published in Resurgence and Ecologist. Relevant fragments have been reproduced here with kind permission of Stephanie Lee (makeandtell.com). We have endeavoured to identify any large portions of works reproduced here and seek permissions to use these. If you believe an element of your work has been reproduced here without permission and you would like to raise this, please get in touch by emailing: w.asquith@liverpool.ac.uk