Consent of creators is an important avenue of investigation of the project. Whether a person consents to creating individually or as a group, whether a person consents to the images s/he made be kept, by whom, and how, and whether they may be re-used, reproduced, or shown to others.

It was therefore crucial to seek the consent of workshop participants to join in image–making exercises and seeking permission for these images to be shared via the project’s Online Exhibition. 

The University of Exeter requires that ethics approval be sought and secured prior to engaging in human participation of this kind. According to professional standards of ethics for academic research, human participants must be informed about the activities they will undertake, the context of the research, the name and background of the researchers, before taking part in the research activities.

The same professional standards of this for academic research requires that the participants’ consent be sought before the activities, and in writing. We complied with this process, applied and obtained ethics approval.

We produced an information sheet which we shared with our workshop attendees before the event. The information sheets and other documents are available here. 

We also sought consent before the beginning of the workshop for their participation in image-making and the re-use of the images in the process.

The consent form was a two-page document summarising the permissions the participant gave us in re-using the data (view points and images) we collected during the workshop. The consent form can be consulted here.

All attendees gave consents for their data (view points and images) to be re-used by the researchers as asked on the consent form. One participant initially consented but later withdrew their consent. As a result, images this participant created were neither digitized nor included in the project’s Online Exhibition. Alternative images, such as an artist’s response piece or a ‘fictionalisation’ piece were produced instead. 

As the workshop attendees engaged in group work during which images were made collectively in such a manner that individual contribution were no longer (or not easily) identified or taken apart, we were faced with the following question:

Do we remove all of the images that the non-consenting partner contributed to, or do we only remove the images they produced individually?

We opted for removing all images made individually whilst retaining the images made as a group. The research team felt that the individuality or personal contribution dimension of the non-consenting participant was not identifiable, or not easily so. In our view, the benefit of the others within the group to show their collective work outweighed the non-consenting participant’s interest in not sharing the work, so that it complied with the ethical safeguards and standards required by the University. However, this assessment likely contradicts principles of joint-authorship and ownership under UK copyright law. Whilst we feel we have discharged and paid due attention to our ethical obligations towards the participants in the workshop, we may have breached our legal obligations towards the non-consenting participants’ copyright. 

The Online Exhibition reflects the creators’ consent regarding the use of their images and the credits they wanted to see appear on the website.