There has been a call for applied linguists to consider situated microethical challenges of research in practice, rather than relying on macroethical principles alone to ensure ethical conduct (Kubanyiova, 2008). In research with immigrants, ethical considerations often involve differences of language, culture, race, and education between participants and researchers. Institutional ethics regimes anticipate such differences from afar, at the level of typification (Bauman, 1993). Yet research in practice may reveal unanticipated dimensions of difference, which we suggest must be met through an ethical construct of responsibility for the Other that seeks neither to erase difference nor compel the Other into a response (Levinas, 1985).
We engage with the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of encountering the Other while negotiating consent with participants in adult basic education for immigrants. The aesthetic dimension should not be understood as artistic or creative, but rather as sensorial and emotional. This understanding opens for exploring lived experience and memory, including trauma (Busch & McNamara, 2020), and how these are evoked by the aesthetic characteristics of research encounters. Thus, our aim is to investigate initial negotiations of consent to participate in research as ethical and aesthetic encounters with difference.
We draw on data from an ethnographic monitoring project (Hornberger & De Korne, 2017) in adult basic education for immigrants in Norway, including fieldnotes and recorded meetings and interviews with teachers and multilingual research assistants. Our analysis focuses on (1) the semiotic value of artifacts and practices involved in initial consent and (2) the forms of relationality involved in negotiating difference. First, we found that translated and even oral project information initially produced great resistance from potential participants. Notably, the optics of written project information in languages such as Arabic and Tigrinya evoked traumatic memories of repressive regimes in students' pasts (see Busch & McNamara, 2020), rather than the regulatory regime this represented to us. Second, we found that trust built through biographical similarity or affinity spaces was necessary for engaging relationally given unanticipated dimensions of difference. Multilingual staff, research assistants, and teachers proved important not only for conveying information, but for interpreting students' responses to the signs we introduced. An ethico-aesthetic lens enables a better understanding of unpredictability and difference in negotiating participation in research, by seeing research ethics routines as aesthetically laden experiences. Attending to an aesthetic dimension therefore contributes to ethics negotiations that may indeed qualify as ethical encounters, not only procedurally but also relationally.
Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Blackwell.
Biesta, G. J. J. (2013). The beautiful risk of education. Paradigm Publishers.
Busch, B., & McNamara, T. (2020). Language and trauma: An introduction. Applied Linguistics, 41(3), 323–333.
De Korne, H., & Hornberger, N. H. (2017). Countering unequal multilingualism through ethnographic monitoring. In M. Martin-Jones & D. Martin (Eds.), Researching multilingualism: Critical and ethnographic perspectives (pp. 247–258). Routledge.
Kubanyiova, M. (2008). Rethinking research ethics in contemporary applied linguistics: The tension between macroethical and microethical perspectives in situated research. Modern Language Journal, 92(4), 503–518.
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity. Duquesne University Press.
