This project works directly with households navigating precarity that official systems fail to recognize, and with the institutional actors who operate those systems. That closeness carries specific ethical commitments — and a specific position for the researcher leading it.
Informed Consent
Recruitment for the fieldwork deliberately avoids the language of poverty or vulnerability — participants are invited on the basis of shared experience of their neighbourhood and everyday life, not as a “vulnerable population” to be studied. Full informed consent is established at the first interview, before any disposable camera, urban walk, or mapping activity begins, and participation remains voluntary at every stage: participants can decline any activity, stop an interview, or withdraw entirely without needing to give a reason.
Anonymity & Data Protection
Faces and other identifying details are protected in any material shared publicly, including on this site. Interview recordings, photographs, and mapping outputs are stored securely and are only ever presented in academic and policy outputs in de-identified or aggregated form.
Returning to Communities
This research treats participants as contributors, not just data sources. The narrative maps produced during fieldwork are returned to the communities that helped build them as a tangible product of the process, and a community return workshop is planned once the qualitative fieldwork concludes, so findings reach the people who shaped them before — or alongside — any academic publication.
Ethical Review
Ethical clearance for the qualitative fieldwork is secured ahead of implementation, alongside the design of consent procedures and interview protocols, following the requirements of Maastricht University and the project’s Colombian host institution, the Centro de Estudios Manuel Ramírez (CEMR).
Positionality
Draft — to be reviewed and written in your own voice. As a Colombian researcher studying hidden poverty in Bogotá, I bring both proximity and distance to this work: proximity to the city, the language, and the social codes that make invisibility possible in the first place, and distance through years of academic training abroad. That position shapes the research — it is part of why the project can read the silences and performances households use to protect their dignity, rather than only their answers to direct questions. It also demands care: an awareness of where my own assumptions about class, status, and what counts as “managing well” might filter what I see.
Questions about the project’s ethical protocols or data handling can be directed through the Contact page.
