Interactive Ethics: developing understanding of the social relations of research

Increasingly, geographers are considering the fundamentally relational nature of ethics. This consideration is involving a developing concern with process (e.g. the social relations of research projects) as well as procedures (e.g. administrative guidelines). In this paper, a development in the teaching of ethics is reported from a third-year undergraduate research design and methods course which develops the view that research involves a complex web of relationships. Ethically vexing anecdotes were elicited from practising geographers and a computer-based tutorial package designed that involves students interacting with this material. However, advocacy of this online approach to teaching is not without ambivalence. It is cautioned that being interactive with computers, in the absence of other teaching formats, might curtail students' interaction with each other in their development of moral imaginations.