Anna Leander (Copenhagen Business School)

“Value Neutral Research: Methodological Challenges of Ethnographic Research in Critical Security Studies”

abstract

This paper grown out of a recurring practical concern for critical approaches to security broadly understood as including the full range of post-linguistic turn approaches to security. Work in these traditions appears to violate one of the most fundamental principles of work in the social sciences, namely the principle that science should be value neutral. This paper turns the tables, arguing that Critical Security Studies (CSS) has a sophisticated approach to value neutrality that challenges the common understandings of value neutrality. It is not CSS that should be on the defensive but those who fail to grasp the value of its take on value neutrality. My argument is that the visible presence of values in CSS expresses awareness that value neutrality is not merely an axiological question but an epistemological one expressed on our “most elementary sociological practices”. CSS in other words cultivates value neutrality in a different, not to say less shallow, manner than most scholars who deal with value neutrality. It therefore challenges common understanding of value neutrality. To develop this argument, the paper starts from the bottom. Instead of building a meta-theoretical argument about value neutrality and using CSS to illustrate its practice, it begins from research practice in CSS and primarily on work situated in an ethnographic tradition. The paper is construed as a reflection on how this work deals with value neutrality in “the most elementary” steps of research practice namely the gathering, analysing and presenting of data.