Re-engaging ethics: Ethical concerns in engaged scholarship

Our overarching goal is to support patients, community members, investigators and REC members in negotiating this new landscape of engaged research. We expect, by bringing together academic and community investigators who have collaborated on research and members of RECs with international organizations that fund or support research across international settings, we will begin a cross national dialogue on the unique ethical considerations in engaged approaches to research.  Our hope is to engage with, go beyond and complement a principle-based approach to these ethical concerns and thus deploy the full range of analytic tools. In the format of a workshop, our discussions will be grounded in case studies of engaged research provided by attendees and structured around the following themes: 1) how does the current and historical social, economic and political contexts exacerbate or mitigate these dilemmas; 2) what are the relationships of and between community, participant, academic and RECs that should be considered; 3) what are the common thread and lessons learned and what policies or recommendations can be made for review of engaged research.  We also expect to investigate and evaluate future directions for ethics review of engaged research in this field and opportunities for empirical research to address these questions.