Our Work
Our Vision
We envision a research ecosystem in which diverse ways of knowing are recognized, valued, and supported as legitimate forms of knowledge production across communities, academia, and philanthropy, and research institutions.
Our Shared Values
Curiosity. We approach feminist research ethics with openness, humility, and a commitment to learning. We seek to deepen our collective understanding.
Intersectional Feminisms. We center gendered power analysis, intersectionality, and community agency as essential to ethical research. We recognize that experiences of power, harm, and exclusion are shaped by intersecting identities, histories, and systems.
Epistemic Justice. We challenge colonial, patriarchal, and positivist hierarchies that determine whose knowledge is considered valid, objective, or scientific. We value multiple ways of knowing, particularly knowledge rooted in communities and Global South / Global Majority / Majority World contexts.
Solidarity. We cultivate a supportive community of practice where researchers, community practitioners, ethics review members, activists, students, and funders can openly examine dilemmas, learn from one another, and co-create solutions.
Accountability. We are accountable to the people and communities affected by research, not only to institutions, funders, or review bodies. We examine how power shapes research decisions, remain transparent about our intentions and limitations, and take responsibility for how knowledge is produced, represented, shared, and used. We are committed to translating critical ideas into practical, actionable strategies.
Our Approach
We pursue change across the research ethics ecosystem by working with three groups: feminist researchers, ethics review bodies, and funders. Through strategies tailored to each group, we help people navigate existing systems while building the relationships, practices, and institutional conditions needed to transform them.
Our work takes place both within systems, by supporting reform of ethics review processes, and beyond existing systems, by advancing new models of ethical research grounded in feminist, participatory, and decolonial practice.
Ethics review bodies are a critical site of this work. Conventional review processes are often shaped by Western, positivist assumptions about knowledge, evidence, risk, and objectivity. These assumptions can marginalize or discredit approaches rooted in community knowledge, lived experience, relational accountability, and Global South contexts.
We seek ethics review processes that:
center community knowledge and voice;
recognize the expertise of local researchers;
respect culturally grounded ethical practices;
understand consent and accountability as ongoing relationships, rather than one-time procedural requirements; and
distribute decision-making power more equitably.
Achieving this requires change at multiple levels, including who participates in ethics review, whose knowledge carries authority, how review processes are designed, and when locally led systems should take precedence over externally imposed institutional models.