Ethics, Advocacy, and Empowerment: Issues of Method in Researching Language.

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventional move. Yet any social researcher who has undertaken fieldwork must at some level be aware that power relations exist in this context as in others; and those power relations are strongly affected by the methods we are constrained to adopt in ‘doing research’. That is, they are not entirely determined by pre-existing differences of status imported from other contexts. Something happens within the process of research itself.