Reflections on unanticipated ethical issues during intergenerational trauma transmission research in the former Soviet Union

I began my PhD in 2015, graduating in 2019. In addition to the obvious and expected learning and research opportunities and curves of my candidature, unexpected ethical issues and unexpected outcomes too came with the PhD journey. Hindsight is 20/20, and I now know that as researchers we should leave the door open to expectations of the appearance of those now predictably unexpected or unforeseeable ethical issues and outcomes. Here, I focus on those unexpected visitors, providing an autoethnographic refection on the unanticipated ethical issues I encountered. I discuss two factors that emerged during my research: one that led to my interrogating and questioning the persistence (and what I argue to be unfounded dominance) of Western-based ethics, even when conducting research with cultures and backgrounds outside of the West; and another, the use of my personal life story as a small albeit pronounced part of my research, which led to my decision to abstain from interrogating my self and my life for the foreseeable future. Though these two factors seem distinct from one another and at first may not look connected, they, in fact, are both rooted in ethics: ethical considerations for participants and ethical considerations for the researcher.