Creative research methods and ethics

This chapter addresses creativity, research, learning and art rather broadly, to explore how creativity in research comes up against ethical considerations. Methods concern how research is done, while ethics are concerned with consequences and relationships between researchers and the worlds they move within and between. Methods concern the selection and framing of subject matter and participants, conduct of research and treatment of information. Ethics concern how research dwells in a context (`ethos) and the quality of relationships between researchers, subject matter, interlocutors and the world. In this chapter, I lay the ground for thinking about creativity-and-ethics and methods-and-ethics as bundled together, so that researchers might begin to think about conjoint ideas like `ethical creativity or `methics, and begin to consider creativity-methods-ethics in the round (Kara and Khoo 2021; van Brown 2020). Methods and ethics require justification (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006), so it cannot be assumed that creative methods are automatically a good thing for research.