The past decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in the number and scope of university ‘research ethics committees’(RECs), as they are called in the UK, New Zealand and Australia, or ‘institutional review boards’(IRBs), as they are called in North America. The aim of these bodies is to promote rigorous independent review processes and ensure the highest ethical standards, particularly for research involving human participants or personal data. They also aim to provide assurance that researchers treat participants with respect and dignity, protect privacy and safety, and safeguard personal and cultural sensitivities. Yet, despite these laudable intentions, there is a growing chorus of complaint within universities about these ethics committees and their proliferating regulatory regimes. Social scientists, particularly those who do ethnographic fieldwork, find themselves increasingly at odds with the assumptions that underpin these committees’ judgements about what constitutes research ethics (Wynn 2011) or indeed what constitutes viable ‘research’. Indeed, some argue that the current model is so fundamentally misconceived (and its implementation so often misguided) that efforts to foster ethical research conduct are actually undermined (Schneider 2015). If so, then why is this the case? Critics frequently highlight institutional bias towards the hard sciences and biomedical models of research, arguing that the individuals who staff these boards often fail to understand qualitative approaches or the participatory methods that ethnographers commonly use. But often such committees are staffed by a predominance of social sciences and humanities scholars who certainly do appreciate