When Consent Is Not Free: Mediated Consent and Structural Positionality

Abstract

Qualitative fieldwork with vulnerable populations generates a consent problem that institutional ethics frameworks cannot resolve. Structural power asymmetries may constrain a participant's freedom to decline regardless of procedural compliance. Drawing on ethics in practice, relational autonomy, and structural coercion, this article argues that structurally assigned positionality, determined by political and legal hierarchies rather than personal biography, can systematically hollow out the voluntariness of consent. This claim is substantiated through field research with Syrian refugees in Turkey. In response, the article introduces mediated consent: a procedure in which a trusted community peer, holding no authority over potential participants, conveys the consent request in the researcher's absence, making refusal a genuinely viable option. Despite limitations regarding intermediary selection and sampling transparency, the study contributes a reflexively documented, field-tested procedure to an area where diagnosis has long outpaced remedy and argues for a post-research imperative of transparent ethical accountability.