CHAPTER 23

Social Science Research Ethics Beyond 2020: Lessons to Learn for Institutions and Funders

Alexa S. Dietrich

We view ethical collaboration as a multifaceted approach to research that adheres to principles such as equitable exchange and coproduction, respect, and equal opportunity, from research design through implementation, analysis, and dissemination. Further elaboration of these principles, and the ways in which they are put into practice in the context of actual research projects, is a principal focus of the Collaboratory.

“FAQ: Transregional Collaborative Research Grants,” Social Science Research Council

What’s COVID Got to Do with It?

Research ethics for social researchers is not a new topic.1 Social media’s enhanced visibility of disasters, however, has recently called greater attention to the ethical issues inherent in researchers working in or with communities under extreme stress—especially because disasters often occur in communities already bearing the burden of cumulative impacts.2 These impacts may be due to legacies of colonialism, enslavement, disenfranchisement, resource extraction, pollution, and a litany of iterations of inequality. The stress may be physical, social, psychological, or combined. While research holds the promise of informing improvements to social and structural determinants of health and well-being, research itself can cause harms, large and small, creating rather than relieving stress.

This chapter takes work on “how to do ethical research in a pandemic” as a jumping-off point to shift the focus from individual researchers or small teams working in disaster contexts (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) to institutional sponsors of research.3 The fundamental approach to research ethics on the part of funding agencies has been insufficient and at times itself a problem. COVID brought concerns held by marginalized, racialized, overburdened, and over-researched yet still underserved communities to the fore. A significant body of research has demonstrated what these communities could have easily predicted: that on a global scale,4 the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing inequalities in livelihoods, nutrition, health access, and more.5 Given the mainstream acceptance of social determinants of health, some advocates have questioned continuing to fund this research without commitments to applying what is learned at the policy level, even as new research also raises doubts that society at large will act to change these dynamics of inequality through the application of individual-level redistributive behaviors.6 In this context, lessons already learned from research on marginalized communities must accelerate a shift to research in partnership with marginalized communities—a move that has been tentatively recognized by funding agencies and researchers alike but is not uniformly implemented and, more importantly, not adequately incentivized.

Not all researchers whose work directly involves human beings have heard this call to action—in some areas research continues to pay insufficient attention to the values of cocreation and the right of refusal.7 But there is cause for cautious optimism,8 especially in looking at the increased willingness and in some cases policy change among some funders to support ethically collaborative research that focuses on the needs and priorities of overburdened, underserved, and marginalized communities. For example, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) was able to develop several programs in the early 2020s that focused this interest among funders: Just Tech, the Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean, and the Arts Research with Communities of Color programs.9

This chapter draws on my experience as a disaster researcher and also as a key player in developing two of these programs, where we worked to create structures designed to push researchers to center equity and ethical practice through the entire course of their research, beyond the basic requirements of their institutional review board (IRB) process. I argue that while research on pressing social issues is still vitally important, funders of social research (and all human subjects research) must listen hard to marginalized communities, sit with discomfort as they hear about the experiences communities are willing to share, and incorporate their criticisms into how we build research infrastructure and funding opportunities. While we had some success in these proof-of-concept programs, institutions that sponsor and conduct research still have a long way to go in institutionalizing these principles and sustaining them over time.

Institutional Approaches to Ethically Collaborative Research: Notes from the Social Science Research Council

The theories and practices of collaborative research that center the priorities of marginalized communities have been gaining attention, emerging from a broad range of community-based political struggles globally. The tools for this research approach have been building since at least the 1940s and gained momentum in the social sciences from the emancipatory work of Paulo Freire and others10 while also responding to communities organizing around health issues such as HIV/AIDS. In this tradition, the events of 2020 marked another turning point in the United States in the demand by communities for social, environmental, and health researchers who study inequality to center the concerns of communities themselves. In light of the aggressive attacks on scientific integrity by the second Trump administration, research funders who wish to advance equity in research will need to take an active part in incentivizing and modeling the ethical practice of collaborative research, the practices for which may create conflicts with their standard operating procedures.11

Given that there are ethical issues in research that “are outside [the] governance mandate of IRBs,”12 it is incumbent upon researchers (and their funders) to debate and thoughtfully consider potential ethical issues within their specific project and work context. In our effort to encourage such debate and consideration in the planning phase of research, we implemented a planning grants phase in one program, supporting teams in the development of their own ethically collaborative process for undertaking their research. We also asked applicant teams to meaningfully “describe how ethics of research collaboration are reflected in your proposed research planning agenda, team organization and activities, and projected strategies for knowledge dissemination.” Some teams responded with only a rote reference to their intent to gain approval for their project from their IRB. Those teams that carefully read the application as well as the “Frequently Asked Questions” provided in the application materials gave more thoughtful and detailed responses. These applicants received higher scores from reviewers, who had been given specific instructions to rate the substance of their responses.

It is important to recognize that while IRBs have an vital role to play in ensuring ethical research practices, they are not sufficient to cover the research process end to end. For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on two specific aspects of IRB insufficiency: (1) they offer only negative reinforcement (i.e., they do not reward ethical competence, and they withhold approval of projects they deem in need of greater ethical structure), and (2) they focus mainly on the project once it is already conceptualized in methodology and data management. I argue that to have a greater impact, structural support of ethical research practice should (1) reward work being done to high ethical and collaborative standards and (2) attend to the creation and execution of research from inception to dissemination of results to caretaking of data.

As news of an increasingly serious-sounding virus that would later be known as COVID-19 filtered into our awareness in late February 2020, the SSRC staff began talking about how we might respond as an institution. Because the SSRC is a long-standing funder of innovative and policy-relevant social science, support for research about the social, political, and economic impacts of the virus was top of mind. However, the SSRC was also in the midst of launching several programs focused on inequality including in the research process itself, so those concerns were merged with our efforts to better understand COVID-19.

Application questions for the SSRC COVID-19 Rapid-Response Grants on the ethics of collaboration now also addressed the ethics of working in a pandemic. These grants emphasized a new and very important ethical consideration: that researchers should prioritize virtual research methods that reduced the possible exposure of their research subjects and any collaborators to the novel coronavirus. This was an important step in expanding the ethical mandate on the part of the SSRC as a research funder, a mandate that we would further elaborate in the creation of a fellowship program that embedded qualitative researchers with community-based organizations (CBOs).

The Arts Research with Communities of Color program,13 established in 2021 through a partnership with the Wallace Foundation, was the SSRC’s most sustained foray into explicitly supporting community-based participatory research (CBPR).14 To ensure that selected fellows understood the intent of the program, in addition to requiring applications stipulating the applicant’s academic credentials, the applications required statements about how the applicant had previously conducted research in partnership with communities and examples of how their research had been disseminated in forms accessible beyond the academic sphere.

Fellows chosen for the program were also required to deliver a collaborative working agreement (CWA), a document cocreated and signed by both the researcher and a representative of the CBO with which they would partner. In addition to agreements about deliverables for the CBO and the community the collaborators represented, the CWA guidelines encouraged the collaborators to articulate how they would work together, including how they would resolve any potential conflicts that might emerge. The SSRC program team did not require a specific format or content for the CWA but did provide guidelines to set the tone for the spirit of the working agreement, a living document that would embody the goals and values that the funded researcher and the CBO would share in the collaborative work.15 Some examples of the type of content to consider in a CWA might include the following:

• • Shared principles (e.g., values or processes) to foreground in the working relationship.
• • A communication plan. Who are the main contacts for all key parties? How should different types of information be communicated and with what frequency?
• • A community schedule with key dates/deadlines/events of importance for the community.
• • Key responsibilities and expectations (of all key collaborators).
• • Suggested actions in the event of conflict.
• • Project scope, including
  • o Goals,
  • o Activities,
  • o Outputs/deliverables (preferably short-term, medium-term, and long-term outputs), and
  • o Timeline, with a list of the agreed-upon deadlines and key project milestones.
• • Other shared points of commitment and agreement as needed (e.g., cost estimates in terms of time or other resources to guide decision-making/accountability).

Each CBO also received separate funding from the Wallace Foundation that supported their operations and institutional development work, creating some financial equity in the relationship between the SSRC fellow and the CBO.

In situations where the researcher would be the primary resource holder, attention in the CWA should be paid to how to utilize those resources equitably. For funders evaluating research proposals with community engagement components, reviewers should be given specific guidance on evaluating what proportion of the budget is allocated to support community partners and those giving time and other resources to the project. If a researcher is serious about equitable collaboration, it will show in the proposed budget. Even better, funders should set standard expectations for appropriate budgetary allocations to collaborators from different sectors (i.e., with different potential to acquire resources). In my experience as both a program leader and a review panel member, without specific standards panel reviewers will each apply their individual standards, which will vary by both discipline and personal experience.

Community-Based Participatory Research: Another Level of Ethical Participation

Programs that support CBPR have grown more popular, but grant makers sometimes hesitate to write program guidance that is too prescriptive. One example of institutionalized success has been the model CBPR program of federal agencies, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) Community-Based Participatory Research Program,16 which required researcher applicants to include specific and detailed community-involvement components to be considered complete. The program launched in 2012 with a planning grant phase, a mechanism that a variety of community-focused programs have used to provide the needed resources to support the person-time required to develop more sustained community collaborations. These grants required the establishment of a “community coalition and Community Advisory Board that includes community members, researchers and other stakeholders with relevant expertise to inform the intervention process,” one method for ensuring sustained consultation and accountability of the researchers to those from whom they gathered data and whom they claimed to be benefiting through their funded research. More recently, in another example, the National Science Foundation issued a “Dear Colleague” letter detailing its programmatic efforts to “Improve the Inclusion of Local and Indigenous Voices in Arctic Research” while also soliciting proposals that aimed to “support fundamental research about what constitutes or promotes responsible and ethical conduct of research.”17

Through 2024 there was a clear trend among funders to increasingly promote equitable partnerships with communities, especially in the form of CBOs, bringing research collaboration with nontraditional research partners into the structure of research funding applications. It is unclear what impact the second Trump administration’s targeting of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies will have on this trend outside the federal sphere. Many aspects of funding program structure can encourage or otherwise influence the degree to which equity is embedded all across the lifespan of a research project.18 Key to supporting this degree of equity from an institutional side is the construction of application materials, as in several examples already mentioned.

For an institution such as the SSRC, which historically has funded individual researchers and small research teams, other structural approaches, such as informational proposal development workshops, planning grants, and support for time-consuming research preparation, can make a difference in the establishment of more robust and equitable partnerships. Being willing to fund these higher-risk/high-reward steps is necessary to authentically require certain modes of engagement with communities as a condition of the program. These are some of the ways institutions that support research can help ensure that their sponsored researchers have the resources to attend to the ethics of collaboration from research inception through dissemination. But what about when these institutions engage more directly with marginalized communities as collaborators (e.g., as grantees or as knowledge-creation partners)? There are lessons to be learned there as well.

Sitting with Discomfort: Research Lessons in COVID Times

Disaster scholars are increasingly recognizing the benefits of working in interdisciplinary teams. However, this process requires not only attention to the complexities of integrating different theories and methodologies among the research team itself but also varying understanding of ethics. This is not to say that we differ on the fundamentals. For example, as I and others have noted,19 listening is a core value for our research. But what we mean by listening and, importantly, how long we are willing or able to dedicate to that portion of the project may vary. Few disciplines and indeed few funders have the patience or see the need for the time an anthropologist would deem necessary to determine “who lives here.”

Ethics means relationships, and while there is no one way to pursue a relationship, research relationships (like all relationships) fundamentally need to focus on the increasingly popular but difficult-to-enact motto “moving at the speed of trust.” The coining of this phrase is frequently attributed to motivational business author Stephen Covey, but it has been adopted into a wider set of spaces. Community activists and organizers deploy the concept in their critiques of industry, government, and philanthropy alike, and savvy organizations repeat it back to them as evidence that they “get it” and want to be good partners and neighbors.

In practice, when institutions adopt this concept it does not always fit comfortably. It is hard to accommodate the usual forms of benchmarking, metrics, reporting, and evaluation while maintaining flexibility and responsiveness to the priorities of marginalized communities. While institutions are tasked with enacting accountability, it often becomes enacting control over their employees and collaborators (especially if those institutions are funding their collaborators). Many foundations and other actors in the field of community-engaged philanthropy have learned to talk the talk or have hired new program officers well versed in the language, including those who come from the ranks of activism. But when the time comes to revise timelines, increase indirect cost lines, or give fewer-strings funding, walking the walk at the speed of trust often looks like those who hold the funds have the deepest trust issues.

Sitting with the discomfort of different perspectives and power differentials is something that individual researchers or research teams may be more familiar with;20 some of the best collaborations need to move through what has been termed “the groan zone” of discordant collaborations.21 In the groan zone, potential collaborators openly share their disagreements or divergent perspectives and do not presume that the end result will completely harmonize these differences. For researchers working with community members who possess not only different viewpoints but also very different life experiences than formally trained researchers, the discomfort is likely to be their own: being confronted with their privilege and being asked to acknowledge histories of trauma or the belief that they may represent an extractive or oppressive system or institution. Researchers committed to this type of work must accept any number of potential “pain points,” assuming that the effort will be worthwhile not only because it is the most ethical way to work but also because in the long run the knowledge produced will be more authentic and likely more actionable in the service of justice (in the case of applied research).

Unfortunately, funding considerations as well as the pressures of productivity increasing exponentially in academic settings can create substantial barriers to the time-intensive practices of ethical collaboration. Even academic and government researchers who begin with the intention of doing the work in the most equitable and collaborative way possible will be tempted to take shortcuts as the need to publish or the need to spend money (an ironic but common problem) begins to weigh on them.

This is one aspect of research sponsorship where increased flexibility and an emphasis on ethical collaboration on the part of a funder can yield great benefit.22 I am not suggesting that researchers and their various collaborators do not need parameters or reporting requirements but rather that these structures should be created with the understanding that this type of research will only move at the aforementioned speed of trust. This is not a catchphrase; it is an assessment of the research environment, where time is often the most valuable resource but also the one that must be spent most lavishly in order to create strong relationships and be responsive to lived realities.

When institutions, especially funding institutions, directly engage with marginalized communities, it is critical to remember that the open sharing of different views or goals is not happening on a level playing field. What is true for the power dynamic between well-funded academic researchers is exponentially magnified for the institutions that fund them or that are themselves working on the ground. This is especially the context where institutions need to learn to sit with the discomfort of listening to their collaborators and recognize that marginalized communities and communities bearing long histories of collective trauma are always already sitting with discomfort. They are not equally obligated to listen to or accept the views of the institution that holds funds, regulates behaviors, or can act with relative impunity. That obligation rests more heavily with institutions.

Becoming Vulnerable, Earning Trust, and Enacting Ethical Research Collaboration

What have I learned about doing this type of work both outside of and within institutions? It is hard. It is not smooth and pretty or does not necessarily always feel good. But it is worth asking ourselves as program creators and directors and as representatives of institutions how we build trust in the service of people, for better, more actionable, and justice-centered research,

As a founding member of the Culture and Disaster Action Network, I have worked with a group of culturally minded disaster researchers to develop tools to help scholars do more culturally relevant, locally grounded research that is more responsive to the lived experience of communities and that aims for equitable participation. Some of the tools we developed include question banks,23 guidance for government agencies, and case studies,24 particularly aimed at government agencies conducting disaster response as well as for funders of research across all sectors. However, building trust with skeptical communities will require more than enshrining a new set of community-oriented checkboxes for research or other funding proposals. If funding institutions want to have meaningful impact and support meaningful engagement on the part of their programs and funding recipients, they need to rethink their own relationships with communities as people. Relationships between people have certain qualities, expectations, and standards. In order to cultivate trust, a person must be transparent, consistent, and vulnerable.

In theory, an institution can be transparent and consistent. Can an institution also be vulnerable? Does that question acknowledge an always existing barrier to relationship building and trust? Is creating a trustworthy brand the best we can hope for? Is that, at least, an honest goal to proclaim?

Some researchers have noted that circumstances such as COVID can invoke a feeling of being “in it together” that creates the potential for mutual understanding and connection while at the same time masking the very real differences in the background of every Zoom call: family, isolation, hunger, exhaustion, fear, and longing.25 This is all the more so for institutions. One concrete area that reflects this inequality is the budgeting of grants. Many philanthropic funders still limit overhead or indirect costs within budget proposals to 10 or 15 percent, when true overhead costs for nonprofit research partners are more likely to be in the range of 25–35 percent. These funders continue to be complicit in the “nonprofit starvation cycle.”26

Government funders also contribute to inequality in the research system, overfunding large university partners through indirect costs that are not passed through to researchers and underfunding organizations and small schools that cannot undertake the rate negotiation process. As noted in a recent article on the subject in Science,27 the ends of the federal indirect costs rate continuum are too extreme and do not reflect an equitable approach to cost burdens.28

Conclusion

As institutions that implement or sponsor research embrace or endorse CBPR, there are important challenges to keep in mind. Many researchers now claim to be not only doing CBPR but also being expert in the approach. However, in my experience they often fall short of the ideal for many understandable reasons. The standards for what is considered equitable community engagement can vary by discipline because, for example, different disciplines value the contributions of nonacademically trained collaborators differently. A research proposal may also emphasize some aspects of equity but not others: for example, including extensive engagement of relevant community members for knowledge coproduction but allocating little of the research budget to account for the time of these participants.

Additionally, as for individual researchers, funders should ask themselves if research is what is needed. Can research better support other community goals? Contrariwise, funders should look for opportunities when research collaboration is needed because an approach has not yet been tested or because the details of a specific location or circumstance are not yet known (e.g., the findings of one study may not be transferable or replicable to another situation).

So, how can funders make collaborative community research more equitable and more systematic? Here are some overall observations of what works:

• • Create time for listening and responding to communities of focus as you build your program. Be prepared to change program directions midstream if warranted.
• • Community priorities need to be centered in research support even when those priorities seem as if they are out of scope of the research program. Communities see their challenges as holistic and interconnected (e.g., ideas about improving green infrastructure are often linked to ideas for job training programs).
• • Technical support is needed for grant writing, grant management, and all types of reporting requirements. Standard practices of granting agencies can themselves create insurmountable burdens for community grantees or collaborating partners. A novel effort under the Biden-Harris administration, the Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers Program,29 was one such attempt at providing this support.
• • Applicants to funding programs for collaborative projects can benefit from planning grant phases to develop and nurture relationships as well as to develop more robust research questions and test methods.
• • Program structures must account for budget, labor, and attribution equity across all participants (not just researchers and not just lead principal investigators from prestigious institutions). Language of application materials must uniformly communicate both requirements and the values addressed by those requirements to avoid performative box checking.
• • Structural supports within the program should encourage accountability to those equity components (e.g., support for real costs of organizational overhead, paying grant or contract funds on an advance basis, and flexible or longer timelines and flexible deliverables/outcomes based on responding to lived/worked conditions of the research).

Some of these principles are being advanced in mainstream philanthropy,30 but for the funding world at large there is a long way to go in their practice and consistent application. This is especially true in the funding of research, which operates in a related yet distinct area of funding from more program-based giving.

Instead of seeking to jump in at the shiny object of today’s emergency or community of interest, funders would be well advised to cast themselves not as leaders but instead as allies to what researcher and community advocate Alana Tornello has termed the “last responders,”31 those community advocates who live and work through long-term recoveries from disasters. Whether based in climate, disease, or structural inequality or all of the above, communities managing ongoing and cumulative impacts need both the direct support and the specialized collaborative knowledge building (research) that funding agencies can and should support—sustainably and equitably.

The ideas expressed in this essay are the author’s personal reflections and are not the views of any of her employers or funders, past or present.

Notes

1. 1.  Many practitioners I’ve spoken with who work with communities in different contexts (including government agencies) express concern with the term “research” as being inherently extractive and prefer different terms (e.g., collaborative knowledge building). For the sake of a common term and narrative flow, I will generally use the term “research” here, with the acknowledgment that in some instances other terms are more appropriate to describe the kinds of work I’m promoting.
2. 2.  Nicolle Tulve et al., “Challenges and Opportunities for Research Supporting Cumulative Impact Assessments at the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development,” The Lancet Regional Health: Americas 30, 100666. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(23)00240-5/fulltext.
3. 3.  Katherine E. Browne and Lori Peek. “Beyond the IRB: An Ethical Toolkit for Long-term Disaster Research,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters 32, no. 1 (2014): 82–120.
4. 4.  António Guterres, “Tackling Inequality: A New Social Contract for a New Era,” United Nations, July 18, 2020, https://www.un.org/en/coronavirus/tackling-inequality-new-social-contract-new-era.
5. 5.  See, e.g., Whitney N. Laster Pirtle and Tashelle Wright, “Structural Gendered Racism Revealed in Pandemic Times: Intersectional Approaches to Understanding Race and Gender Health Inequities in COVID-19,” Gender & Society, 35, no. 2 (2021): 168–79, https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432211001302; and “Inequalities at Work and the Toll of COVID-19,” Health Affairs, June 4, 2021, https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20210428.863621/full/health-affairs-brief-covid19-workplace-wolfe.pdf.
6. 6.  N. Derek Brown, Drew S. Jacoby-Senghor, and Isaac Raymundo, “If You Rise, I Fall: Equality Is Prevented by the Misperception That It Harms Advantaged Groups,” Science Advances 8, eabm2385(2022). https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.abm2385.
7. 7.  See Godefroid Muzalia, “‘Businessisation of Research’ and Dominocentric Logics: Competition for Opportunities in Collaborative Research,” Governance in Conflict Network, June 23, 2020, https://www.gicnetwork.be/businessisation-of-research-and-dominocentric-logics-competition-for-opportunities-in-collaborative-research/; and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-Words: Refusing Research,” in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth And communities, ed. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Sage, 2014).
8. 8.  While decimation of US federal research funding at the start of the second Trump administration does not lend itself to optimism, I would argue that the lessons learned about research collaboration and cocreation need not be lost to other funders or to future administrations.
9. 9.  Just Tech, https://www.ssrc.org/programs/just-tech/; Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean, https://www.ssrc.org/programs/transregional-collaboratory-on-the-indian-ocean/; and Arts Research with Communities of Color, https://www.ssrc.org/programs/arts-research-with-communities-of-color-program-arcc/.
10. 10.  Nina Wallerstein and Bonnie Duran, “The Theoretical, Historical and Practice Roots of CBPR,” in Community-Based Participatory Research for Health: Advancing Social and Health Equity, 3rd ed., ed. Nina Wallerstein, Bonnie Duran, John G. Oetzel, and Meredith Minkler (Jossey Bass, 2018).
11. 11.  One example of this would be if a funder operates on a reimbursement basis such that grantees must spend money and submit receipts for reimbursement. See Darya Minovi, Kristie Ellickson, Jules Barbati-Dajches, and Rachel Cleetus, “Science and Democracy Under Siege: Documenting Six Months of the Trump Administration’s Destructive Actions,” Union of Concerned Scientists, July 21, 2015, https://www.ucs.org/resources/science-and-democracy-under-siege.
12. 12.  Matthew Zook et al., “Ten Simple Rules for Responsible Big Data Research,” PLOS Computational Biology 13, no. 3: e1005399, https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005399.
13. 13.  See “Arts Research Program,” Social Science Research Council, https://www.ssrc.org/programs/arts-research-with-communities-of-color-program-arcc/.
14. 14.  Individual fellows, such as those supported through the International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship, may have utilized the CBPR approach, but the Arts Research with Communities of Color program made the values of the approach an explicit component of the program.
15. 15.  These guidelines drew inspiration from the experiences of the program’s professional staff, the Research Advisory Committee, and my own experience as a board member of a CBO that was often sought out as a collaborative research partner.
16. 16.  “Advancing Health Disparities Interventions Through Community-Based Participatory Research (U01),” National Institutes of Health, https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/rfa-md-15-010.html.
17. 17.  “Dear Colleague Letter: Update on NSF’s Efforts to Improve the Inclusion of Local and Indigenous Voices in Arctic Research,” US National Science Foundation, May 4, 2021, https://www.nsf.gov/funding/information/dcl-update-nsfs-efforts-improve-inclusion-local-indigenous/nsf21-077.
18. 18.  For more about inequality among research collaborators, see Abla M. Sibai, Anthony Rizk, Adam P. Coutts, Ghinwa Monzer, Adel Daoud, Richard Sullivan, Bayard Roberts, Lokman I. Meho, Fouad M. Fouad, and Jocelyn DeJong, “North–South Inequities in Research Collaboration in Humanitarian and Conflict Contexts.” The Lancet 394, no. 10209 (2019): 1597–600; and Michael Parker and Patricia Kingori, “Good and Bad Research Collaborations: Researchers’ Views on Science and Ethics in Global Health Research.” PloS One 11, no. 10 (2016): e0163579.
19. 19.  Stephen Apanga, Gregory Titi Addebah, and Dennis Chirawurah, “Listening to the Voices of the People: Community’s Assessment of Disaster Responder Agency Performance During Disaster Situations in Rural Northern Ghana,” PLoS Currents 9 (2017); and Alexa S. Dietrich, “On Seeing and Listening: How to Better Support Affected Communities Before the Disaster Starts,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters 38, no. 1 (2020): 13–42.
20. 20.  Philomena Harrison, “Sitting with Discomfort: Experiencing the Power of Racism and Working to Imagine Ways Forward?,” Critical and Radical Social Work (2022): 1–14; Hurriyet Babacan, “Role of Discomfort and Disruption in Anti-Racism,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Racisms in the New World Order: Realities of Culture, Colour and Identity, ed. Narayan Gopalkrishnan and Hurriyet Babacan (Cairns Institute, 2013).
21. 21.  Sam Kaner, Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-making (Wiley, 2014).
22. 22.  In one example of a “lesson learned,” the National Science Foundation “accelerated the release of our NNA solicitation this year to provide more time for proposal preparation and thoughtful collaboration with Arctic communities.” “Dear Colleague Letter.”
23. 23.  K. E. Browne, L. Olson, J. Hegland, J. Maldonado, E. Marino, K. Maxwell, E. Stern, and W. Walsh, “Building Cultures of Preparedness: A Report for the Emergency Management Higher Education Community,” U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2019.
24. 24.  Joyce Rivera-González, Jennifer Trivedi, Elizabeth K. Marino, and Alexa Dietrich, “Imagining an Ethnographic Otherwise During a Pandemic,” Human Organization 81, no. 3 (2022): 291–300; and Elizabeth Marino, Joyce Rivera-Gonzalez., Mara Benadusi, Alexa Dietrich, Mo Hamza, Alessandra Jerolleman, and Adam Koons, “COVID-19 and All the Things That Kill Us: Research Ethics in the Time of Pandemic,” Practicing Anthropology 42, no. 4 (2020): 36–40.
25. 25.  Rosi Braidotti, “‘We’ Are in This Together, but We Are Not One and the Same,” Bioethical Inquiry 17 (2020): 465–69, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10017-8.
26. 26.  Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard, “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle,” Stanford Social Innovation Review 7, no. 4 (2009): 49–53, https://doi.org/10.48558/6K3V-0Q70
27. 27.  Jocelyn Kaiser, “NIH Plan to Reduce Overhead Payments Draws Fire,” Science, June 2, 2017, https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-reduce-overhead-payments-draws-fire.
28. 28.  As of this writing, the second Trump administration has moved to reduce indirect costs for research grants in the National Institutes of Health to 15 percent across the board. While this will create greater equality among research institutions, it is not a level that acknowledges the true costs of supporting research.
29. 29.  Ainsley Ogletree and Nicole Pouy, “One Year into the Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers Program: Spotlight on the Mid-Atlantic,” Environmental and Energy Study Institute, January 13, 2025, https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/one-year-into-the-environmental-justice-thriving-communities-technical-assistance-centers-program-spotlight-on-the-mid-atlantic; https://www.ejtctac.org/.
30. 30.  “Core to Trust-Based Philanthropy Is a Concrete Set of Six Grantmaking Practices That, When Practiced Together, Contribute to a More Just and Equitable Nonprofit Sector,” Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/practices.
31. 31.  Alana Tornello, “The Last Responders: Approaching the Disaster After the Disaster Through Community-led Long-term Recovery Coalitions” (PhD diss., Naval Postgraduate School, 2020).