When Research Becomes Harm: Colonial Gaze, Western Bias, and Safeguarding in Non-Profit Fieldwork
Author: Dr. Anna Neya Kazanskaia
Publisher: NEYA Global Publishing
Journal: NEYA Global Journal of Non-Profit Studies
Series: When Research Becomes Harm
Series Code: cgsnf
Materials: 10 journal articles
DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-series
Series Overview
When Research Becomes Harm is a NEYA Global research ethics series examining how research can produce harm when access to vulnerable communities is transformed into extractive, reductive, or disproportionate academic representation. The series focuses on non-profit fieldwork, faith-based and community organisations, developing-country contexts, women’s centres, safeguarding-sensitive environments, and institutional research relationships across countries.
The series treats research access not as an individual academic opportunity, but as a high-trust relationship between universities, local organisations, vulnerable communities, national contexts, and systems of protection. A vulnerable community does not open its doors only to a researcher. It opens its doors to an institution, a discipline, and a promise of protection. When that promise is broken, the harm does not remain inside one article. It travels across institutions, countries, and future research relationships.
Across ten articles, the series examines access ethics, community consent, publication framing, contextual identifiability, colonial gaze, Western academic novelty, terminology, researcher accountability, emergent evidence, and stronger research protocols. It argues that ethical research requires more than consent forms, anonymisation, and formal approval. It requires a safeguarding-based knowledge architecture capable of protecting people, institutions, context, meaning, and future international research trust.
Research Significance
This series addresses a critical gap in research ethics, especially in fieldwork involving vulnerable communities, non-profit organisations, faith-based centres, women’s centres, children, trauma, poverty, migration, social stigma, and developing-country contexts. Formal research ethics often focuses on individual consent, anonymisation, data protection, and institutional approval. These mechanisms are necessary, but they are not sufficient when the public framing of research may expose, distort, stigmatise, or reputationally harm the communities and institutions that made the research possible.
The significance of the series lies in reframing research harm as a problem of ethical architecture. Harm may occur not only through misconduct during fieldwork, but also through the later transformation of access, trust, hospitality, institutional legitimacy, and community vulnerability into academic output. A study may meet procedural ethics requirements while still producing harm through title selection, abstract framing, terminology, contextual identifiability, disproportionate interpretation, or externally imposed meaning.
The series also develops the concept of international research trust. In cross-border fieldwork, access is rarely granted to an isolated individual alone. It is granted through the perceived legitimacy of universities, disciplines, research systems, and international academic promises. When vulnerable communities experience harmful representation, they may not distinguish between one researcher, one institution, one country, or one discipline. The damage may affect future research access and the credibility of international academic engagement itself.
This series contributes to the wider field of research ethics by bringing together concerns that are often treated separately: decolonising research, safeguarding, community consent, institutional accountability, publication ethics, contextual identifiability, qualitative interpretation, and non-profit fieldwork. Its contribution is to organise these concerns into a safeguarding-based framework for responsible knowledge production.
Author Positioning
Dr. Anna Neya Kazanskaia’s work is grounded in non-profit knowledge architecture, charitable centre research, digital education implementation, counselling system development, and field-based engagement with vulnerable community settings. Her academic and practical work has focused on how educational, counselling, and organisational systems can be developed and implemented in low-resource and charitable contexts.
This series is informed by the author’s broader research and systems work on non-profit organisations, vulnerable communities, institutional learning, social impact systems, and ethical knowledge production. It reflects a concern with how research can either support or damage the people, organisations, and trust relationships through which knowledge becomes possible.
The series forms part of the NEYA Global knowledge architecture and contributes to the development of a safeguarding-oriented approach to research ethics, publication ethics, institutional responsibility, and international research trust.
Series Articles
01
When Access Becomes Extraction: Research Ethics in Vulnerable Community Settings
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-01
This article examines how research access in vulnerable community settings can become extractive when trust, care, partnership, or empowerment are later transformed into disproportionate academic output.
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02
A Community May Consent to Being Studied Without Consenting to Being Reframed
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-02
This article develops the concept of reframing harm and argues that communities may consent to research participation without consenting to harmful public reinterpretation.
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03
The Violence of Framing: How Titles and Abstracts Can Harm Vulnerable Communities
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-03
This article examines titles and abstracts as ethical sites that may expose vulnerable communities to reputational, institutional, legal, or safeguarding risk.
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04
Safeguarding Beyond Anonymisation: Contextual Identifiability and Institutional Risk
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-04
This article argues that anonymisation alone is insufficient when communities or institutions remain identifiable through context, geography, structure, or social specificity.
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05
Colonial Gaze and Western Bias in Developing-Country Research
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-05
This article analyses how colonial gaze and Western bias may distort developing-country research through external interpretive authority and meaning extraction.
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06
Western Academic Novelty and the Extraction of Vulnerability
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-06
This article examines how academic incentive systems may reward vulnerability extraction over protective institutional work, community resilience, and ethical usefulness.
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07
From Vulnerability to Marginalisation: The Ethics of Terminology in Non-Profit Research
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-07
This article examines terminology as an ethical instrument that may either protect dignity or intensify stigma in vulnerable community contexts.
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08
The Researcher as Guest: Power, Hospitality, and Accountability in Fieldwork
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-08
This article develops the concept of guest accountability and argues that fieldwork hospitality creates ethical obligations beyond formal consent.
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09
Evidence, Harm, and Responsibility: Why “It Emerged from the Data” Is Not Enough
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-09
This article argues that emergent findings do not remove responsibility for proportionality, safeguarding risk, publication framing, and institutional accountability.
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10
Protecting Future Research Access: Why Vulnerable Communities Need Stronger Research Protocols
Reserved DOI: https://doi.org/10.64357/neya-gjnps-cgsnf-10
This article proposes stronger research protocols to prevent harm, protect institutional trust, and preserve ethical future research access.
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Suggested Citation for the Series
Kazanskaia, A. N. (2026). When Research Becomes Harm: Colonial Gaze, Western Bias, and Safeguarding in Non-Profit Fieldwork. NEYA Global Journal of Non-Profit Studies. NEYA Global Publishing.
Related NEYA Global Knowledge Architecture
This series forms part of the NEYA Global knowledge architecture for non-profit research, safeguarding, institutional ethics, and responsible social impact knowledge production. It connects research ethics with broader questions of non-profit knowledge architecture, institutional accountability, community protection, and ethical access to vulnerable field settings
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