Studying trial communities: an ethnographic study of a medical field trial site in Western Kenya. (360G-Wellcome-077430_Z_05_A)

Overseas medical research ethics are concerned with the social relations within, for example, clinical trials. The interaction between scientists and study subjects is the scientifically crucial one, but also other relations, such as among scientists or community members, and between these and the public, produce ethical concerns. Together, these interdependent and dynamic relations constitute an unusual form of community - the 'trial community. Ethnography is a way of conducting fieldwork and writing about the social life of communities. Conventionally, these were 'traditional' village-type communities, but increasingly, wider and 'modern' networks and the social practices and processes that constitute and transform them are studied ethnographically. The ethics of social interaction are necessarily central to ethnography. Hence, ethnographic studies of 'trial communities' could elucidate ethical problems from the viewpoint of practice, moving beyond the concerns with formal principles that at present dominate ethics debates. The aim of this project is thus to contribute to sustainable and fair relations in trial communities, and to ongoing ethics debates about these, by ethnographically describing and analysing the ideas and practices of the members of a specific trial community: the KEMRI/CDC AIDS-research programmes in western Kenya.