Senior Honors Tutorial: Literature and the Ethics of Research

Note: This
course is designed for students in Honors program in English and other UHM
departments, but English majors who are not in the Honors program may, with
consent, enroll in the course, which will count as a 400-level Studies course.
All students will need consent to register. If you would like to enroll, email
the instructor at zuern@hawaii.edu

 

Objectives

Every
day we all take advantage of a vast range of products and processes that have
been developed by means of scientific research. We don’t always ask ourselves
how that research has been conducted and how it has affected the people,
animals, and other dimensions of the natural and social worlds that are caught
up in it. Which communities are served, and which ones are disadvantaged and
exploited?

Who
and what gets harmed through research? Who gets rich? How do we weigh the costs
of research, in financial, human, and environmental terms, against its promised
benefits?

 

This
class examines novels, films, and works of non-fiction that raise questions
about what it means to do responsible research in a range of academic fields,
with a particular focus on the biological sciences. The course provides students
with an overview of the historical development of policies on research ethics,
including key cases of misconduct that spurred debate and reform (for example,
the Nazi medical experiments in concentration camps, Stanley Milgram’s
obedience-to-authority experiment, the Tuskegee syphilis study, and the
Willowbrook State School hepatitis study) and the documents in which the
principles of ethical research have been codified (the Nuremberg Code, the
Declaration of Helsinki Accords, the Common Rule, and the Belmont Report).
Students will be also introduced to the philosophical backgrounds for
contemporary standards in research ethics, engaging short excerpts from the
work of
Aristotle,
Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Emmanuel Levinas, John Rawls,
Carol Gilligan, and Steven Pinker, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
The course
will also address ethical issues directly related to literary studies,
including plagiarism, the use of information gathered from living people, and
the question of who has the right to write about whom. 

 

Alongside the novels, films, and non-fiction, the other
readings for this course aim to deepen students’ awareness of the prevailing
(and sometimes competing) frameworks for ethical decision-making that are
brought to bear on questions relating to the conduct of researchers, as well as
to expand the conceptual foundation for analyzing the rhetoric and ethics of
storytelling.

 

Focus
Designations

 

This course has a UHM Contemporary Ethical Issues (E)
Focus designation
. Contemporary
ethical issues are fully integrated into the main course material and will
constitute at least 30% of the course content. At least 8 hours of class time
will be spent discussing ethical issues. By way of the lectures, discussions
and assignments, you will develop basic competency in recognizing and analyzing
ethical issues, deliberating thoughtfully on ethical issues, and making
ethically determined judgments. Many of your writing exercises will ask you
address the ethical implications of human behavior regarding money as they are
reflected in the assigned materials.

 

The course also has the UHM Written
Communication (W) Focus designation
.

The
class uses writing to promote the learning of course materials. You will get
feedback and support from the instructor and your classmates while you do the
assigned writing. Your writing for this class will be substantial—a minimum of
4,000 words, or about 16 pages. Written assignments make up to 60% of your
final course grade. You will turn in drafts of all your major writing
assignments; I will make suggestions for improvement and you will have a chance
to revise before turning in the work for a final grade.

 

Required Primary Texts

 

Novels and Non-Fiction

 

Amis, Martin. Time’s
Arrow.
(1991).

Time’s Arrow
tells the story of a Nazi doctor who performed experiments on prisoners in
Auschwitz, but the events are organized in reverse chronological order,
beginning with the doctor’s death in the United States long after WWII and
moving backward through history.

 

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx
and Crake
. (2003).

This novel explores a
friendship between a writer and a scientist whose experiments with genetically
modified organisms ultimately unleashes an apocalypse that all but wipes out
the human species.

 

Grace, Patricia. Baby
No-Eyes
. (1998).

Grace takes on the issue of
“biocolonialism” in her novel Baby
No-Eyes
, which is haunted by the spirit of a M
āori girl whose eyes have
been harvested for genetic research.

 

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never
Let Me Go.
(2005).

Ishiguro’s novel is set in a
boarding school for children who have been cloned solely to provide organs for
donation.

 

Le Carré, John. The
Constant Gardener.
(2001).

This thriller tells the
story of a man who, while investigating the death of his wife, uncovers a
conspiracy in the pharmaceutical industry.

 

Skloot, Rebecca. The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
(2011).

Skloot’s non-fiction account
chronicles the story of a cell specimen harvested without consent from a tumor
in the body of Henrietta Lacks, a poor African American woman, which has
continued to multiply since Lacks’s death in 1951 and has been marketed for a
wide range of medical research projects.

 

 

Films

 

Ferguson, Charles H. (dir). Inside Job. (2010).

This documentary offers an
explanation of the events leading up to the 2008 financial crisis that focuses
explicitly on their ethical implications, in particular for the academic
discipline of Economics.

 

Sargent, Joseph (dir). Miss Evers’ Boys. (1997).

This feature film dramatizes
the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, conducted from 1932-1972, in which
researchers withheld treatment from African American men infected with syphilis
in order to study the long-term effects of the disease.

 

 

Assignments

Your grade will
be based on your performance in the following assignments. I will provide more
detailed descriptions of these assignments within the first two weeks of the
semester.

 

in-class
roundtable contribution (5 minute provocative statement, followed by a
structured discussion)

 

field notes on
ethical questions (5 pages in the course of the term)

 

abstract for a
term paper (1 page)

 

term paper based
on independent research (20-25 pages)

 

an in-class
midterm examination

 

a take-home
final examination