Ethical review boards: Constitutions, functions, tensions and blind spots

The introduction of ethical review boards in social sciences and humanities research from roughly the 1990s was deemed to be essential to safeguard human rights in research. In education research this was primarily to protect in the rights of children and had become part of the landscape of most, though not all, research systems in Europe by the late 1990s. The introduction of ethical review boards has not been without criticism, however – for instance, as being modelled on utilitarian ethical conventions and as operating from a perspective of national political sovereignty that is potentially marginalising and possibly even harmful towards critical qualitative educational research, particularly ethnography. The present chapter tries to bring a balanced critique of the work of ethical review boards into view that keeps sight of possible values without denying that there are some potentially troubling biases, tensions and omissions.