Toward a non-extractive research ethics for transcultural, translingual research: perspectives from the coloniser and the colonised

ABSTRACT

It is widely acknowledged that research ethics is a controversial notion in cross-linguistic, crosscultural research. We suggest that most ethical issues in research arise from four major issues: (1) ethics is not adequately defined, theoretically or practically; (2) researchers have failed to make a distinction in the types of communities they study; (3) insider research versus outsider research has been insufficiently considered; and (4) consent has been mistaken for consensus. Failure to adequately deal with these issues has rendered research ethics in applied linguistics extractive rather than non-extractive. Therefore, several principles, including the intent and integrity of the researcher, the concept of a social hostage, and the inclusion of non-human knowledges are all discussed as they relate to the development of a non-extractive research ethics in applied linguistics.

KEYWORDS:

• Research ethics
• social hostage
• non-extractive
• transcultural
• translingual

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sandra Kouritzin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1112-8002

Satoru Nakagawa http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7826-4335

Notes

1 The Tri-Council refers to Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

2 We caution that we are here concerned with research by dominant-culture and language researchers who are subject to REB review. When dominant cultures are interrogated by non-dominant cultures, as in research by and for Indigenous peoples, it constitutes speaking truth to power, a different paradigm.

3 Ideological state apparatus: A term developed by the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser to denote institutions such as education, the churches, family, media, trade unions, and law, which were formally outside state control but which served to transmit the values of the state, to interpellate (bring into being) those individuals affected by them, and to maintain order in a society, above all to reproduce capitalist relations of production. In contemporary capitalist societies, education has replaced the Church as the principal ideological state apparatus. Among Marxists, the term is contrasted with the so-called ‘repressive state apparatus’ of the armed forces and police, and is allotted a major role in securing compliance within developed capitalist societies.

4 Plato (The Republic, Book II) had Glaucon argue, in considering whether humans naturally tend toward justice or injustice, that justice is only a social construction:

They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice; – it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. (31)

In this, Plato has positioned the Western man as we frequently see ‘him’ today; the ideal is to do injustice without punishment, to be unaccountable.

5 The social hostage is a research-based concept arrived at in negotiation elders in community on Tokunoshima. Research completed by Nakagawa.