Sociologically unspeakable? The ethics of ethnography and live methods

Live Methods argued that there is an ethical imperative for sociologists to really listen to what precariously positioned people say. Research methods can be exploitative in how they render people’s presence. This paper discusses how I practised Live Methods in one ethnography conducted with young migrants in London over 15 years. This research was meant to last two years, but continued on the basis of an emerging ethical covenant with participants – that both researchers and people taking part believed that these individual stories said something about individual lives, but also about others’ experiences of precarity. A tension emerged between keeping this covenant and sociological strictures that forbade making general claims from qualitative ‘samples’. In this article, I work productively through this tension in close engagement with ethnographic encounters with one participant, Mardoche. I argue that conducting research across time and the in-depth quality of the interviews opened up the possibility of making more general claims from individuals’ stories. I conclude that while my ethnographic iteration is in keeping with Live Methods ’ ethical imperative, whether it is ‘speakable’ within the discipline of sociology is questionable.