Walking through Dangerous Neighbourhoods: Ethics and Qualitative Research in Palermo

“Ethical considerations are clearly important in the practice, subject matter and research priorities of geography. […] Cultivating a dialogue on ethics […] contributes to us becoming more fully conscious human beings” (Routledge, 2010: 399). This presentation implies that ethics must become an important topic to be discussed in geographic qualitative research. The case study is an action-research project, which took place in Palermo focusing on the way different neighbourhoods are nowadays perceived in the city. A particularly significant case presented is the (in)famous ‘ZEN’ neighbourhood: in 2005, some Dutch college students came to Palermo to visit the ZEN neighbourhood, and were accompanied throughout their visit by local middle school students. The relationships between the two groups prompted several questions on ethics and activist consciousness: is there a ‘good’ way to represent dangerous neighbourhoods? A more recent (2012) publication on Palermo and its neighbourhoods includes mental maps and interviews that further investigate the ethical stakes of geographic qualitative research. The case studies thus become a chance for theoretical reflections on the role of qualitative researchers as activists and the importance of reciprocity (Bailey, 2001).