I will echo the concerns of others here about the impacts of IRBs on social science research, particularly in digital spaces. If their power isn't altered, the current trend to doing research about humans via work that never once talks to humans or engages with them will continue. I see this in the area digital game studies particularly; people using server logs, public forum posts and YouTube videos to understand gameworlds, because these are the only venues that make it okay past IRBs. So I ask you... where are the people in our sociology? I know that for my own MA work around World of Warcraft and neoliberalism, my ethics application was rejected because my ethnography was deemed to be of more than minimal risk to participants. The IRB had a list of 14 issues with my work, of which some were truly startlingly naive. What emerged from that process was my awareness that IRBs buy into the old New Yorker cartoon stereotype<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog>that "online, nobody knows that if you are a dog or a human or a bot" . While my work was not about the supposed risks of gaming in any way, I was told "The is a great deal of respected research on the negative effects of gaming and you do address this is any way in your application" and "Are you aware of the issue of mental health around gaming? This is a serious matter and you do not seem to address this particular point at all in the application." Leaving aside the questionable nature of such an assertion, given the mountain of academic work that shows the reverse and given the fact that I'm a sociologist, not a psychologist....That is like saying to someone studying the impacts of changing business practices on bschool university students that "Undergraduates go through considerable stress while studying, and sometimes fall into excessive drinking and even drug use while at university, so why doesn't the study address that? why don't you address the mental health aspects?" I had to spend four months working with my IRB, along with my advisor and department chair, to convince them that ethnography was an acceptable research practice, that the people I had observed via direct participation in the gameworld were not identifable just by looking at an avatar; that no one was at risk by my work on the links between neoliberal western values and online gaming practices; that I was a serious researcher and didn't wake up one morning saying "hey! I have an 80 in WoW, I'll study that!"; and a whole host of other things. I also had to give them a primer on what ethnography is. The people who sat on the IRB consisted of laywers, biologists and psychologists (maybe to change this, for a start, we could try insisting that each university's IRB has a sociologist or anthropologist on the board?). I published an article about my experience in University Affairs magazine<http://www.universityaffairs.ca/application-denied.aspx>based on a presentation I did at the 2010 Congress for the Humanities annual conference of the Canadian Game Studies Association. As a PhD student, I'll gladly join in on whatever initiatives are in place in this group and the broader ASA context, to alter the IRB landscape and bring the humans back into our sociology. Tamara Peyton (tspeyton@gmail.com) PhD Student - Communications & Culture York University - Toronto, ON CANADA @pstamara