AoIR Risky Research Guide

[[AoIR Risky Research Guide.pdf]]

🧭 Summary

This guide, created by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), offers strategies for protecting scholars conducting risky research—defined as work that could expose researchers to harm from external actors. These harms include harassment, doxxing, mental health impacts, legal challenges, and institutional abandonment. The document provides practical frameworks for risk assessment, mitigation, cybersecurity, mental health, and institutional accountability.

💡 Key Themes

Research involving controversial, politicized, or marginalized topics is inherently risky.
Risks are not equally distributed—identity, visibility, and positionality matter.
Institutions should move from individual to collective responsibility.
Scholars must proactively plan for digital security, fieldwork risk, and legal protection.
Importance of peer support networks and trauma-informed care.

🔎 Notable Insights

Individual risk mitigation (e.g., VPNs, pseudonyms) is not sufficient—collective care and institutional policy must evolve.
The guide introduces questions researchers can use to assess if their work is risky.
Tactics like embargoes, pseudonyms, and encrypted communications are recommended.
There is a need to prepare students and junior scholars for the risks of participating in such work.

🧠 Personal Reflection

This guide is essential for understanding the landscape of digital scholarship and safety.
Especially relevant if working on disinformation, hate speech, or marginalized identities online.
Offers clear actions to take at each stage: planning, conducting, publishing, and reacting.

📚 Further Reading

Data & Society's 2016 Guide on Risky Research
AoIR Ethics Guidelines → https://aoir.org/ethics/
Equality Labs’ Anti-Doxing Guide → https://www.equalitylabs.org/

🧷 Citation

AoIR Risky Research Working Group (2022). Risky Research: An AoIR Guide to Researcher Protection and Safety. Association of Internet Researchers.