Surviving Storms // Publications // Ethical Groundwork

Ethical Groundwork

Adom Philogene Heron

// 03.09.2025

This document, written in 2020, lays out some of the ethical considerations of the project. I thinks through the planetary and everyday ethics of disaster research in a project about climate change in the Caribbean led by an institution in a part of London that benefitted deeply from from Caribbean sugar and enslavement in a country that is the 5th largest historical emitter of CO2 worldwide (1750-2021).

This ethical groundwork examines:

• how we think about aid vs repair (given that our project is funded by UK aid money)
• whose knowledge of climate adaptation is given value and how
• how we might avoid reproducing trauma and embody an ethics of care in our everyday research.

This is a working document offered as an alternative to disembedded institutional ethical procedures: with their logics of risk, legalistic conceptions and insurer-oriented valuing for human life/wellbeing, and their prescriptive notions of harm vs good research.

This is a search for a research ethics made to the measure of human beings in a specific place, who are connected to Britain through colonial histories and a neocolonial present that has a direct impact on their present lives.