The ethics of researching unethical images: A story of trying to do good research without doing bad things

In this article, I tell the story of my research on the topic of “strangershots,’ which are photographs of strangers taken, shared, and mocked online without their subjects’ knowledge or consent. I interweave a narrative of how I conducted my strangershots research with the argument that researchers must develop situationally and ethically responsive methods for working with user-generated digital images. This argument focuses on two of the many ethical quandaries that haunt our efforts to research and write about unethical digital images: looking and sharing. I begin by describing these specific ethical quandaries and providing concrete examples of them from my own research experiences. I then offer actionable strategies for addressing these quandaries. To address ethical problems of looking, I offer the process-oriented methodological strategy of one-and-done data collection. To address ethical problems of sharing, I offer the dual circulation-oriented strategies of asking image subjects for consent and of deploying “ethical ekphrasis,” or intentional description, in place of image reproduction.