Seminar objectives

1. To explore the complexity around ethics in different areas of applied linguistics and to raise the importance of developing ethical literacy/awareness  

2. To create a platform for researchers at different career stages from diverse contexts to network and share their perspectives on ethical challenges  

3. To generate insights pertaining to ethics that can potentially feed into the process for updating the BAAL “Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics” 

Background 

Ethics underpins all Applied Linguistics research. In the current governance structure, research undertaken in any reputable institution cannot proceed without the formal approval of the research ethics committee (REC)/Institutional Review Board (IRB). The importance of ethics in our field of Applied Linguistics is signalled by the continued stream of scholarship on the topic, including positioning pieces in key outlets (e.g. Kubanyiova, 2008; Sterling and Gass, 2017; DeCosta et al., 2021; Yaw et al., 2023) and recent dedicated edited volumes (DeCosta, 2016; DeCosta et al., 2024). The nuances of the concept are partially captured by the distinction between procedural/macro ethics and micro ethics. While the former concerns the formal ethical approval application and its associated procedures, the latter pertains to operating in ethical ways in all stages of research.  

Important as procedural ethics may be vis-à-vis governance and compliance, ethics does not end with attaining a formal ethical approval from the REC/IRB. In fact, having an official document which grants the research the “go-head” does not always prepare researchers for the ethical challenges and dilemmas that can emerge as the research progresses and evolves. These micro ethical challenges often do not lend themselves to black-and-white answers. For instance, how do researchers reconcile the conflict between an ethics governance structure that is written, Western-centric, and derived from bio-medical research with a structure common in Global South contexts where verbal traditions, personal relationship and rapport are valued over written “contractual agreement”? How do researchers deal with the complexity around “freely available” online data, knowing that contributors might not have read or understood the “terms and conditions” about the possible use of their data? How do researchers manage the power imbalance between themselves and participants and how do researchers ensure that they are not extractionist? Or more fundamentally, how do we ensure our practices at all stages are ethical? These are but some of the questions to which there are no easy answers. A compliance approach to ethics ill-equips researchers to deal with these dilemmas.  

Researchers may encounter situations that require ethical decision making at any given stage. From the conceptualisation of the research to data collection through to post-research/ dissemination, each stage potentially presents different challenges. It is our belief that one way forward in better preparing researchers is to encourage the development of ethical literacy/ awareness through iterative reflections and ongoing engagement with peers. It is against this background that we propose this seminar/workshop which brings together researchers at different career stages, from different contexts, who work on diverse areas in Applied Linguistics to help stimulate discussions and reflections. The proposed workshop contains a combination of plenaries by invited speakers (see speakers section for details), a poster session, and small group discussions among participants so as to allow the achievement of the first two objectives listed above. The network developed through the seminar will enable continued discussions, which will allow us to develop materials which can potentially be fed into the updates of the BAAL Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics.