More than paperwork: Towards a relational, reflexive, and decolonial ethics in research with black women in South Africa

This paper proposes a decolonial feminist framework for ethical praxis in qualitative research with Black women in South Africa. Drawing on two doctoral studies, one exploring Black women’s breast cancer experiences in Kimberley, and the other examining naked body protests as embodied political praxis, we interrogate the gap between procedural ethics and the lived ethical realities of fieldwork. We show how dominant institutional ethics protocols often fail to account for relationality, affect, embodiment, and power in postcolonial contexts. Grounded in Black feminist thought, decolonial critique, African relational ethics, and feminist ethics of care, the paper advances an understanding of ethics as ongoing, situated, and relational rather than a one-time bureaucratic requirement. We argue that ethical research practice must move beyond compliance toward accountability, care, and epistemic justice, particularly in research with historically marginalised communities in the Global South.