Ethical budgets in (psycho-)linguistic fieldwork

Abstract As most linguists and social scientists are now aware, cross-cultural field research can be extractive, especially when the target community does not have ready access to and/or understanding of the research products. The notions of collaborative research, with communities rather than on them, and co-design of research with the participant community, are now common currency in funding applications, and indeed, an international code of ethics for cross-cultural research now exists: the TRUST Code. But it is easy to pay lip service to some of the principles of the TRUST Code, such as collaboration, co-design, and respect, without offering hard proof of these, at project design and ethics and funding application stages. I propose a straightforward and easy-to-implement partial solution: fair budgets. I suggest, as a starting point, that: (1) any grant proposal or ethics application must state what proportion of the overall project funds will be distributed among local community members, and (2) the travel costs for outsiders must be less than or equal to funds distributed within the local community. Because it may be impossible to match the costs of international travel through participant payments alone, such quotas will require researchers not only to pay everyone who supports the project in the field fairly (as suggested in the TRUST Code on a smaller scale), but also to envision meaningful, capacity-building ways to involve local people in running the project. Then, once local people are trained, they can design and run their own locally relevant projects. Budget quotas are already used by research funders like the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, which requires that a minimum of 40 % of all grant monies must be spent in-country, but this idea has not yet taken hold widely in social science and humanities research.