Making ethics: praxis of care, refusal, and becoming

• Published in: Subjectivity Vol. 32; no. 2; pp. 102 - 119
• Main Author: Page, Tara
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Palgrave Macmillan UK 01.06.2025
• Subjects: Original Article; Social Sciences; Research ethics; Intra-action; conceptual praxis; Governance; Care; Subjectivity
• ISSN: 1755-6341; 1755-635X
• DOI: 10.1057/s41286-025-00215-3

Institutional research ethics remains tethered to proceduralism-reducing ethics to a compliance task that disciplines researchers into risk-averse, self-monitoring subjects. Under the guise of care, governance mechanisms flatten the relational, embodied, and situating complexities of research into administrative predictability. I intervene in that logic by proposing making ethics a praxis-grounded in care, refusal, and relational becoming. Drawing on new and neomaterialist thought, feminist ethics, and abolitionist praxis, I argue that ethics governance is not merely regulatory but a powerful site of subject formation shaped by neoliberal, colonial, and metric-driven logics. Instead of seeking reform, I remake ethics-as-policing to ethics-as-praxis. The paper unfolds in three movements: a critique of proceduralism, a theorisation of relational becoming, and provocations for remaking governance as care-based infrastructure. Making ethics is introduced as a conceptual intervention that positions ethics as a lived, co-produced, materially situated praxis-attuned to the entangled realities of research relations.