This book series deals with religion and its interface with the state and society in Southeast Asia. It examines the multidimensional facets of politics, public policies and social change in relation to contemporary forms of religions, religious communities, thinking, praxis and ethos. All articles in this Book Series were a direct result of a policy-relevant research collaboration conducted by investigators from the participating countries from 2013–2016. The issues under examination in this Series include: state management of diversity, multicultural policies, religious (...) social activism and state-society relations. All of the analyses in this Book Series are fixed within the context of a rapidly changing society in Southeast Asia. (shrink)

This study aims to provide an overview of RECs (research ethics committees) in Chinese universities, encompassing both medical and non-medical studies. The primary objective is to identify major challenges faced by RECs in Chinese universities and draw meaningful implications from the findings. The investigation focuses on 42 comprehensive Chinese universities, and the results reveal that while all universities have implemented RECs in various forms, only 28.6% explicitly stipulate ethical review requirements for non-medical disciplines. Furthermore, RECs in Chinese universities encounter various (...) challenges, including insufficient attention to research ethics review, inadequate ethics review systems and regulations, a lack of education and training, and lacking ethics review for non-medical research. This paper proposes recommendations for establishing robust RECs in Chinese universities, seeking to enhance ethical governance in research. By addressing the challenges identified, these recommendations aim to strengthen ethical oversight, foster a culture of responsible research, and uphold the highest ethical standards across diverse academic disciplines. (shrink)

Experience has shown that the application of ethical guidelines developed for research in developed countries to research in developing countries can be, and often is, impractical and raises a number of contentious issues. Various attempts have been made to provide guidelines more appropriate to the developing world context; however, to date these efforts have been dominated by the fields of bioscience, medical research and nutrition. There is very little advice available for those seeking to undertake collaborative social science or natural (...) science research in developing countries and what is there tends to be held within disparate sources. Charting the development of a set of ethics documentation for future use by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme research community, this paper outlines past and present attitudes towards ethics procedures amongst this community and suggests ways in which ethics procedures might be made more relevant and user-friendly to researchers working in this area. (shrink)

This essay explores the claim that bioethics has become a mode of biopolitics. It seeks to illuminate one of the myriad of ways that bioethics joins other institutionalized discursive practices in the task of producing, organizing, and managing the bodies—of policing and controlling populations—in order to empower larger institutional agents. The focus of this analysis is the contemporary practice of transnational biomedical research. The analysis is catalyzed by the enormous transformation in the political economy of transnational research that has occurred (...) over the past three decades and the accompanying increase in the numbers of human bodies now subjected to research. This essay uses the work of Michel Foucault, particularly his notion of docile bodies, to analyze these changes. Two loci from the bioethics literature are explored—one treating research in the United States and one treating research in developing countries. In the latter, we see a novel dynamic of the new biopolitics: the ways in which bioethics helps to create docile political bodies that will police themselves and who will, in turn, facilitate the production of docile human bodies for research. (shrink)