This paper responds to the growing body of literature that calls for more candour in discussing practical, social, and ethical problems that inevitably arise throughout the lifespan of research projects. We begin by describing our use of critical and anarchist pedagogies to inform the design of a recent academic workshop. The workshop emerged iteratively and led to the core activity: our building of a totemic “city of ethical conundrums”. This collaborative artefact allowed us to discuss why and how we negotiate ethical issues in vivo, and how this matches up with the formal institutional ethics process. We uncovered what we called “ethno-empathy”: a concept that helped us understand, and give language to the circumstances, requirements and implications for our mutually shared experience of crafting a metaphorical city of ethical conundrums.