Ethics of care and participatory research relationships in a linguistic ethnographic study of wartime experience

Abstract This paper centres on the dilemmas of situated ethics in the context of participatory ethnography, while making a case for an ethics of care in applied linguistic research in situations of conflict. We discuss encounters in which the requirements of ethics approval challenged ethical subjectivity and the participatory process. While exploring Ukrainian students’ homemaking on the internationalised campus against the background of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the authors placed themselves alongside the student co-researchers as subjects of the same process of knowledge production and ethical care. Relinquishing academic researchers’ control resulted in a tension between two aspects of ethical research. The personal ethical imperative to treat the non-academic researchers’ experience responsibly was at odds with the universal commitment to minimising the risk for all participants. Instead of managing risks through forms of institutional governance, project participants co-created a space for the affective agency concerning their wartime experience, finding ways to narrate how they lived through fear, loss, and grief. This contributed to integrating their experience in newly negotiated life-trajectories. Our analysis centres on the ways in which ethical dilemmas were negotiated in all participants’ intersubjectivities through the participatory process, reflexivity, and a situated care ethics.