In this paper, we examine the proposition of 'projectless' research as an approach to co-producing knowledge with communities, escaping the governmentality of the project as a framework for making knowledge, and responding to insistent calls to work with communities to discover research and develop research interests and deliver social impact. We use examples derived from research initiatives in the New Zealand context to outline an agenda for emergent, performative, and enactive research practices that centre on following the researcher through a series of encounters. We make a case for the generative potential of these practices and explore the epistemological, ethical, political dilemmas that they raise. We ask whether there is a place for this wild research in the neoliberal university.

Drawing on a recent qualitative research project undertaken in 2016 on Uber driving in Melbourne, Australia, this presentation presents a number of ethical challenges during the development and execution of the project. The study involved in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Uber drivers recruited through snowball sampling. This presentation will detail the attempts made by researchers to ensure prompt approval by the University's Human Ethics Committee by putting in place restrictions on the recruitment method, the attempts by the Human Ethics Committee to make substantial changes to the research, and the impacts of restrictions subsequently placed by the Committee on the research outcomes of the study. In particular focus is on the concerns around conducting research with a population engaging in illegal activity. The presentation will explore these issues in the context of the study being conducted as a student research project. It will evaluate the responses required by the University to successfully complete research on illegal activities while minimising harm and risk to participants and researchers.

Investigations involving human participants always raise questions regarding ethical practice in research. These issues are heightened where significant risks to the both the participants and the researcher is identified. This paper is based upon a broader research project which aimed to understand now stakeholders conceptualised ‘justice’ within a contentious planning decision. Because of the legal nature of the case study, which was then undergoing official investigation by the South Australian Ombudsman, participants were not to be identified by name and professional details. However, this posed significant problems for data analysis and presentation, when these factors became pivotal in understanding how participants defined their experiences with and understandings of justice and planning practice more broadly. Subsequently, this paper will delve into the significant and often personal ethical and moral challenges of undertaking a just research process while investigating just research practice. This includes the implications this research process has for conducting sensitive and confidential investigations in geography and the neoliberal university.

Given the long destructive history of Indigenous-researcher relations, it is widely accepted that processes which ensure minimal guidelines are met for ethical conduct in human research are a positive step toward redefining these research engagements. Different research disciplines (and within them, individual researchers) are seeking research engagement with Indigenous people across a diverse spectrum of participation and engagement. For universities and research entities tasked with managing their own ethics processes, diversity in research approaches creates complexity for their ethics committees. The author draws on research experiences to question how institutional human ethics processes might be limiting Indigenous geographies, by struggling to retro-fit research that seeks to engage with Indigenous people as more than vulnerable, at-risk entities. To what degree is this a result of tension that arises where there are dual goals of managing institutional risk, and managing risk to the researched individuals?