This workshop is inspired by the Conferens subtheme: Embracing democracy in social work research and practice. Calls to democracise and decolonise research, enabling key stakeholders from outside academia to co-create research together with academics, are growing. This is leading to increading popularity of various forms of participatory research (PR), which entails people with lived experiences being studied playing a role in designing, doing and disseminating research. This may involve communities of place and identity, people who need and use social services and their carers. 

Participatory research seems lika a good route to promoting a kind of epistemic justice - valuing the knowledgeof people traditionally marginalised and sharing the power to reset research agendas, interpretevidence and influence policy and practice. Yet this is not an easy option: it can turn out to be a form of tokenism, extractivism and recolonisation, and is fraught with ethical and practical challenges along the way. Spendingtime engaging in ethical reflection and cultivating reflexivity as academic and community-based co-researchers can be a valuable exercise to develop ethical sensitivity, competence and collaboration. 

This workshop will offer a short outline of the concept and practice of the 'ethics co-laboratory' as developed in the Ethics Working Group of the International Collaboration for Health Research. This will be followed by an experiential session engagning participants in examining ethics cases from various perspectives. 

The e-co-lab has a particular focus on micro-ethic, understood as compromising people's everyday demenour, attitudes, action, and decisions in relation to matters ofwell-being, rigths and responsaibilites in the practice of PR. This includes where people position themselves in space, how they choose to lay out the room, whose voices they acknowledgeand encourage, and how they respond to dilemmas relating to the distribution of benefits and harms or conflicts of rights and responsabilities. 

We are interested in exploring the 'ethics works' of co-researchers engaging in PR. By 'ethics works' we mean the efforts people put in to seeing ethically salient aspects of situations, developing themselves as good practicioners, working out the right course of action and justifying who they are and what they have done. This work occurs in wider institutional and social/political contexts, hence attention also needs to be directed towards meso- and macro-level ethics (the organisational and social imperatives relating to norms and local, national and global structures of power). 

We will present ethics cases drawn from our own PR practice in Mocambique, Germany nad the UK, inviting participants toexamine them from multiple perspectives, considering the finer details and broader contours of the moral ecology of the cases. This may involve individual reflection, smallgroup work and acting out scenario ('performing ethics') based on a case. The aim of the e-co-lab is to generate deeper and wider understandings of the nature of ethical challenges of PR and develop the ethical sensitivity, competence and wisdom of co-researchers through collaborative analysis and dialogue.