Hotspots and Touchstones: From Critical to Ethical Spatial Practice

This essay starts with an event - what I have come to call "an ethical hotspot" - a moment in which my value systems were challenged and I found myself unable to continue to act as before, until I undertook some critical reflection. Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam (2004) describe what they call "ethically important moments,"(1)which for them mark the "ethical dimension" of decision-making around the day to day dilemmas of research practice. For Guillemin and Gillam negotiating these dilemmas and their relation to institutional ethical procedures requires a degree of reflexivity on the part of the researcher. In this essay, I start by describing the ethical hot-spot that occurred in my life and then discuss how, by reflecting on these issues and the practices that I developed out of them, it might be possible to develop modes of ethical practice that I call - following Foucault - basanic.