Updated: Feb 20th, 2024; Owner/contact: @Olubunmi, Role: Ethics

<aside> <img src="/icons/apple_gray.svg" alt="/icons/apple_gray.svg" width="40px" /> At Sonder we hold ourselves accountable to high moral standards in every area of our work.

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Please see the Pathways Ethics Handbook of General Guidance

As such in our fieldwork we…

• Engage with our participants well aware of the power dynamics at play in the researcher-subject relationship. With this in mind, we aim to establish relations as exchanges in which participants feel empowered to defend their ideas and thoughts, and where we, as investigators, acknowledge the dynamics we create when we enter someone's world in the context of research.

• Are transparent about our motivations for the research, ask before taking photographs or recording audio and ensure that the content collected remains private and unidentifiable.

• Use empathy, self-examination, and a deep sense of curiosity when in the field. This means we attempt, to the best of our ability, to identify with the people we interact with to understand what motivates their emotions, decisions and actions without judgment but rather with open-minded understanding.

• Read a lot so as to identify the larger ideological systems that may animate the different situations we work in. How does knowing about capital, class reproduction, kinship ties, or definitions of dirt play in making us more ethical researchers? Well these topics help us think about underlying forces behind what we observe and as such help us be considerate in our questioning.

• Remind ourselves that when a situation becomes too uncomfortable it is always important to have a backup plan to explain an untimely exit.

More on our ethical position

How to think about photography at Sonder?

Our values

Collecting, storing and managing personal data (GDPR)