Abstract
The unspoken
The “unspoken” refers to silences, omissions, and evasions produced by the research relationship, by expectations regarding the reporting of findings, or simply by data collection devices themselves. Writing always entails a process of transformation. Interactions, experiences, quantitative data, hesitations, and uncertainties must be converted into text that is scientifically readable and acceptable. This operation requires selection, hierarchization, and formatting, which implies that all research necessarily contains things left unsaid. No article, chapter, or report can fully restitute the totality of the data collected or the circumstances under which they were produced. Constraints of space and time, editorial formats, academic conventions, and the very need to produce an intelligible argument all require that only part of what has been heard, seen, or experienced be mentioned. The methodological issue is therefore not so much the existence of omissions as the nature of what remains silent within the inquiry. Several regimes of silence may thus be distinguished. Some stem from an economy of writing (not everything “deserves” to be reported); others arise from a set of ethical requirements (protecting anonymity, avoid harming participants, respecting confidences, etc.) (Béliard and Eideliman, 2008); still others correspond more closely to the ordinary modesty of the researcher (fear of exposing one’s affects, anxieties, attractions, and so forth).
This special issue of the Bulletin of Sociological Methodology focuses on these discreet zones of research: the unspoken, which we propose to define as the product of forms of censorship linked either to context (biographical, academic, organizational, etc.) or to interactions within the inquiry itself (euphemisms, refusals, silences, and so forth). In this sense, the “unspoken” has more to do with avoidance than omission. The term does not refer solely to explicit prohibitions. More often, it designates a diffuse unease rather than a formal ban: the discomfort associated with transgressing professional, academic, or moral expectations and norms. As Daniel Bizeul writes: “Clearly, researchers refrain from most forms of conduct that would seriously endanger their lives, lead them to prison, or turn them into pariahs in their professional milieu; where applicable, they remain silent about what might bring them before the courts or provoke the disapproval of their colleagues” (Bizeul, 2007: 79). Throughout the articles gathered in this issue, the unspoken appears less as an anomaly than as an ordinary product of scientific work. The fear of exposing participants, embarrassment regarding one’s own emotions, anxiety about appearing insufficiently rigorous, or the difficulty of acknowledging excessive involvement all emerge as decisive elements in the conduct of research.
The social sciences have long emphasized the gap between the “prescribed” method and the method actually practiced. Research often relies on “a succession of improvisations and adjustments” (Demazière, 2008: 31), and on the reasoned “art of bricolage” described by Bourdieu et al. (1968). Fieldwork resists protocols, displaces initial questions, and imposes temporal, relational, and emotional arrangements that may be considerable. Not all social science training programs teach these realities, and scientific writing tends to smooth over such rough edges, giving the inquiry the appearance of a coherent and linear process. Moreover, constraints of editorial brevity encourage strategies that economise on argumentation, even though the social sciences are disciplines in which contextualization, methodological reflection, and the restitution of empirical materials occupy a central place (Li et al., 2023). These issues are by no means limited to “qualitative” approaches. While ethnographic reflexivity has greatly helped make them visible (Powdermaker, 1967; Wax, 1971; Fine, 1993), quantitative research also has its own unspoken dimensions (Peneff, 1988; Caveng and Darbus, 2015). The unspoken accompanies all forms of data production in which power relations and choices – and even renunciations resulting from them – are present.
A central interest of this special issue of the BMS is the point at which these unspoken dimensions become methodologically problematic such as: when they concern the research relationship, access to the field, or undermining the quality of the material produced and its analysis. The contributions gathered here show that the unspoken does not merely consist of absences of information, but may also constitute valuable indicators of the concrete conditions under which knowledge is produced. Breaking certain silences allows for a more precise discussion of the limits, trade-offs, and biases of an inquiry, while offering readers a more realistic grasp of the research profession. Moreover – and perhaps above all – some of these “disclosures” invite us to reread an inquiry differently, both in terms of the production of data and their interpretation.
This special issue invites neither total disclosure nor the substitution of intimacy for analysis. Rather, it asks us to take seriously a simple question: what is gained by making explicit what constitutes the research process? The unspoken is not the shameful underside of method; it constitutes an instructive and decisive dimension that this issue seeks to explore.
Presentation of this issue
This issue of the BMS opens with Daniel Bizeul’s article What fieldwork accounts cannot reveal: A personal history of practicing sociology, which offers an uncompromising and in-depth reflection on unspoken dimensions that can be constitutive of fieldwork accounts, which he conceptualizes as productions that are at once moral, strategic, and scientific. Through a critical return to his various inquiries and to a history of strong involvement (nomadic populations, Front National activists, and a deeply personal archival investigation), the author shows that accounts of inquiry rest upon an unstable balance between two demands that may appear antinomic: on one hand, the need to preserve an image of mastery and irreproachability within a highly competitive academic world; on the other, the transparency expected in the name of scientific rigor. The article thus brings to light the multiple forms of euphemization, narrative reconstruction, and concealment to which researchers resort (often only partly consciously) in order to make their work acceptable. Daniel Bizeul pays particular attention to silences surrounding dimensions deemed discrediting, such as fear, anger, seduction, and desire, as well as the place of homosexuality in contexts marked by violence and homophobia. The article is not intended as a “naive” plea for total transparency, but rather shows that the degree of disclosure depends on the state of the academic world, the risks incurred by the researcher, and their position within it.
For his part, Clément Reversé offers in his article “Hating one's background and returning to investigate it. When the sociologist's past sheds light on the world of young people struggling to survive” (Avoir haï son milieu et revenir l’enquêter. Quand le passé du sociologue éclaire le monde de jeunes en survie) a reflexive account of the unspoken dimensions that may run through research conducted under conditions of biographical proximity to one’s research participants. Revisiting his doctoral work with young people “just surviving” and stigmatized as “social cases,” the author examines what returning to a social world he had himself sought to flee – and long hated – produced in turn upon the research relationship and the work of writing about it. The article shows how hatred, shame, and disgust internalized toward one’s own milieu of origin constitute affects that are rarely made explicit, even though they deeply structure the regard directed toward participants and the writing itself. By retracing a family trajectory marked by poverty, narratives of violence, and stigmatization, Clément Reversé highlights the methodological effects that this proximity had upon him. The article argues that these unspoken dimensions stem neither from forgetfulness nor from a lack of rigor, but rather from efforts of self-protection, the protection of relatives, and the anticipation of judgment from the academic world. These affects are thus treated as analytical material. Hatred becomes an indicator of internalized symbolic violence as well as an entry point for understanding the moral, symbolic, and relational hierarchies that divide the working classes.
“The researcher's emotions: the unspoken words of the field journal. Looking back on a qualitative research experience in marginalised areas“ (Les émotions de la chercheure ; un non-dit du journal de terrain) is Alexandra Vié’s contribution, which analyzes the silences surrounding emotions in ethnographic research conducted in marginal settings (border populations, gold miners, precarious youth, and others). Drawing on fieldwork carried out in an Amazonian border territory among young people linked to illegal gold mining, Alexandra Vié shows how sadness, anger, and feelings of powerlessness permeate the research experience without always finding explicit expression in academic accounts. Initially, these emotions appeared to the author as incompatible with the demand for scientific objectivity, even though they constitute a methodological and ethical dimension of fieldwork and analysis alike. The article reexamines the negotiations that punctuate the inquiry, particularly concerning access to the field, the researcher’s status (researcher, teacher, friend, etc.), and the issue of proximity and distance vis-à-vis the fieldsite. Returning to the “foundational” scenes of her inquiry, the researcher demonstrates how these unspoken dimensions shaped the choice of object, the construction of the investigation, and the interpretation of observations and interviews.
In their article Scraping the taboo: An impeded empirical inquiry into sexcamming using web data collection, Clément Bert-Erboul, Jean Finez, Jean-Marc Francony, and Jingyue Xing-Bongioanni offer a collective reflection on the methodological, institutional, and emotional silences that can surround the use of digital methods in the social sciences. Based on a long-term inquiry devoted to adult live-streaming platforms, the authors examine what they call a “relative failure”: the enduring impossibility of publishing findings produced through a funded, technically equipped, and data-generating research project. The article highlights two intertwined forms of the unspoken. The first concerns the infrastructural politics of data – that is, the frictions arising between empirical bricolage, the introduction of new methods, the bureaucratization of research, and above all the legal requirements associated with the GDPR (general data protection regulation). These constraints weigh upon researchers’ autonomy and transform administrative obstacles into genuine selection operators. The second form concerns a more embodied experience of inquiry: the emotional, professional, and moral costs of researching pornography and scams. This topic produces differentiated effects among researchers (modesty, embarrassment, stigma, reappropriation, and so forth), notably depending on trajectories and careers within a heterogeneous team divided by status positions, disciplinary backgrounds, and institutional locations. By analyzing how these silences evolve in relation to erotic habitus, strategies of distancing oneself from a “hot object,” and tensions surrounding commitment within the team, the article shows that these unspoken dimensions fully participate in the production of knowledge.
Mégane Erbani’s article “From lies by omission to immersive investigation. A study within a paramilitary camp” (Du mensonge par omission à l’enquête par immersion. Une étude au sein d’un camp paramilitaire) offers an analysis of the methodological, emotional, and moral unspoken dimensions that traverse research conducted by immersion in a paramilitary camp intended for youth from working-class neighborhoods. The starting point of the article is an unplanned situation in which the researcher gradually came to be perceived as a full participant in the supervisory dispositif, following a series of misunderstandings, maintained silences, and tacit arrangements concerning her scientific aims and personal opinions. From this experience, the author shows how “lying by omission” was less a deliberate strategy than a progressive adjustment to the constraints of the field, such as local networks of acquaintance, power relations, and participant expectations. Immersion thus had ambivalent effects. On one hand, it generated moral and emotional costs linked to concealment (discomfort in the face of disciplinary practices, sexist or homophobic situations, psychic fatigue, etc.). On the other hand, it produced heuristic gains made possible by the reduction of social distance, access to less controlled interactions, and the opportunity to experience directly the logics at work within the dispositif under study. The author defends immersion-based inquiry as an “in-between” space composed of unstable compromises between scientificity and ethics. Ambiguity and omission are not flaws of ethnographic work, but structural dimensions of certain research configurations.
Finally, Somayeh Rostampour’s article, entitled The Unspoken and Motivated Omission as Data: Methodological and Ethical Challenges in the Ethnography of Kurdish Women Combatants, examines the analytical status and ethical dimensions of silences in ethnographic research conducted in a context of war and clandestinity. Based on a long-term inquiry among women combatants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), both in the field and within the diaspora (particularly in France), the article questions how certain silences constitute data structuring the understanding of militant subjectivities and gender relations. The author distinguishes between two regimes of silence emerging from the field. First, there are unspoken elements generated by respondents themselves through fear, discipline, taboo, or militant loyalty. Second, there are “motivated omissions” also generated by the researcher as relational and ethical choices intended to protect participants. Somayeh Rostampour proposes the notion of motivated omission as a tool for assuming and rendering intelligible silences or transformations within ethnographic writing. Through an approach attentive to gender and to the embodied experience of the researcher, the article shows how certain silences reveal internal tensions within the PKK, but also how data produced outside formal interviews occupy a central place in sensitive field sites, particularly through silences and the unspoken itself. In short, in a war context, what is deliberately left unsaid may become a condition of the sociological intelligibility of the field.
What not saying means
The articles brought together in this special issue invite us to attend to what remains unsaid in an inquiry. In everyday language, the unspoken tends to evoke taboo, secrecy, or deliberate concealment. Yet the contributions assembled here reveal a far more mundane reality. The silences of research stem, more often than not, less from explicit prohibitions than from practical trade-offs, ethical precautions, professional discomforts, and biographical costs. In this sense, the unspoken is not an “exception” to scientific practice. The methodological question it raises is how to identify what is left unsaid, in what way, and what such silence does to research findings.
This special issue converges around a central tension. Daniel Bizeul powerfully shows how moral and scientific expectations may generate accounts that are partially misleading. Not because they openly lie, but because they erase affects, fears, desires, arrangements, and trial-and-error processes without which many inquiries could never have been successfully conducted. This tension extends the longstanding issue of rendering the conditions of inquiry explicit so that readers may interpret findings with fuller knowledge of their production (Bizeul, 2007).
The six contributions give substance to this proposition, each in its own way. Clément Reversé shows how proximity to precarious young people reactivates older affects (hatred, shame, guilt) that had structured his own trajectory. Alexandra Vié examines the emotions she did not wish to record in her field diary, yet which nonetheless shaped her inquiry. Feelings experienced in situations of discomfort, anger, fear, or attachment are often minimized in scholarly writing (Kulick and Wilson, 1995; Rodgers, 2007), even though they shed light on the social relations under study. From this perspective, emotions are not merely disturbances but may, on the contrary, become analytical indicators, provided they are objectified (Rosaldo, 1989; Krieger, 1985). Some unspoken dimensions also concern research dispositifs and the organizations that make them possible – or impossible. The article by Clément Bert-Erboul, Jean Finez, Jean-Marc Francony, and Jingyue Xing-Bongioanni demonstrates this through a collective inquiry into sexcamming. Silence is no longer individual here, but produced by legal frameworks, technical infrastructures, the taboo nature of the research object, and tensions surrounding competing forms of academic legitimacy. Others concern explicit risks or threats. Mégane Erbani recounts a situation in which what is at stake is no longer embarrassment or diffuse caution, but a genuine power relation. Likewise, Somayeh Rostampour proposes to conceptualize this phenomenon in terms of “motivated omission,” in contexts of war where silence may serve to protect, to prevent danger, or to maintain loyalty. Silence thus becomes a socially situated, and even ethical, act.
This special issue is therefore not an invitation to “say everything,” which would be both illusory and undesirable. Every inquiry contains shadow zones that must be protected, some insignificant, and others difficult to objectify honestly. The challenge lies elsewhere: in making such omissions discussable. In other words, it means understanding why certain things remain unsaid, what these silences reveal, and how they affect the analysis. One may then replace the ideal of transparency with the more useful requirement of “reasoned traceability.”
What, then, changes when some of these silences are lifted? Such disclosure does not always substantially alter findings. But it improves our understanding of the conditions under which knowledge is produced, offers a less “enchanted” view of the profession, allows biases to be discussed more openly, and provides younger and future scholars with resources for thinking through their own ethical and methodological dilemmas. The articles in this issue remind us that scientificity does not rest on erasing the backstage of inquiry, but on critically shaping it. The point is neither to conceal everything nor to reveal everything, but to make room for the silences that matter. For what weakens knowledge is not the existence of the unspoken, but the fact that its effects remain unspoken as well.