The perils of working at home: IRB "mission creep" as context and content for an ethnography of disciplinary knowledges

Among kinds of fieldwork "at home," ethnographies of higher education inevitably draw on informal gleanings of everyday insider experience. Such informality is implicitly outlawed by federal human-subjects research regulations, which presume a clinical biomedical model that formally demarcates research from other activities. Intricately implicated in these circumstances, this article describes a comparative investigation into the methodologically embedded ethical conventions of anthropology and related disciplines for which institutional review board (IRB) participation itself became inadvertently informative, work that also reveals a conflict between the ethics of human-subjects protections (confidentiality) and of collegial exchange (citation).