Suit Challenges UT Mandate Of ‘Culturally Appropriate’ Research

Witnessing the life-and-death cultural roadblocks experienced by Ethiopian women in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) moved Idil Issak to advocate for them. That is why she is seeking a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. But now the school’s “unconstitutional licensing scheme” threatens to prevent her from using her free speech rights to help these women, a lawsuit alleges.

The university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) has put conditions on her proposed dissertation — Unraveling the Complexities of Ethiopian Female Domestic Workers’ Experiences and Their Responses to Exploitation in the UAE — that Issak says violates her constitutional right to free speech and prevents her from completing her work.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a complaint this week in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Tennessee at Knoxville on Issak’s behalf, asking the court to declare the IRB’s actions unconstitutional and allow Issak to begin her dissertation.

Issak has finished the course requirements for her Ph.D. program, and her doctoral committee has approved her dissertation topic. The next step is research: in this case, interviewing women in the UAE.

But the IRB refuses to let Issak start her research without its prior approval to speak with third parties internationally. If she does the work but fails to get IRB approval, Issak may be disciplined by the IRB for misconduct, and her Ph.D. may be jeopardized.

“The only reason she has to get approval is because of what she is going to say,” noted Attorney Margot Cleveland, a senior legal correspondent at The Federalist. “This is the government regulating the speech of these researchers, and all they’re doing is talking. They’re only doing communicative research.”

The IRB does not require historians, journalists, or biographers to obtain prior approval for interviews “if the information being collected focuses directly on the specific individuals about whom the information is collected and not on generalizing the information or findings to other individuals,” according to court papers. If she focused on individuals instead of her plan to generalize the information she gathers, IRB approval would not be required, but that would change her research.

The IRB also mandates that international research be “culturally appropriate” in the country where the research will take place. But it is unlikely her research, aimed at defining cultural problems, would meet that requirement. And the IRB does not have an anthropologist on the board, as far as Cleveland knows, who might see the need for the research.

While working for a media company in the UAE, circa 2013-2015, Issak discovered the room she rented was next to several other rooms housing runaway Ethiopian girls who had fled abusive employers. Each room housed eight or nine girls — around 25 total in the building. A girl, raped by her employer and pregnant, was sick and needed a doctor. At the time, women needed a UAE marriage certificate to receive prenatal care, according to Issak’s written testimony. There were other cultural roadblocks, and ultimately the woman died. Death was not the end of the tragic story. The community raised money to send her body back to Ethiopia, but that country and the UAE “argued over the circumstances of her death,” and her body was not sent home for weeks.  

“I left the UAE shortly after, deeply affected and determined to return one day, not as a journalist, but as a lawyer, to fight for the rights of religious minorities and migrant workers in the Gulf,” Issak wrote. “I knew I needed a deeper understanding of the region’s legal, political, and social dynamics. That’s what led me to anthropology: to study the region’s history, legal structures, and conduct research that could shed light on the systemic issues I had witnessed firsthand. More importantly, I hoped to conduct research that could pave the way for meaningful solutions to these complex issues.”

It is a violation of the First Amendment when a researcher is required to get a letter saying the research is deemed “culturally appropriate,” Cleveland says, because it is like requiring a license to have research conversations.

“If you think about it, what [the IRB] is doing is preventing this very important research from taking place that exposes these types of things,” Cleveland said. 

The University of Tennessee-Knoxville did not respond to a request for comment.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.