Learning from the messiness of research

This chapter deals with reflexivity in an ongoing research project about the lives and experiences of Filipina and Indonesian domestic migrant workers (DMWs) in Hong Kong. It uses examples from sharing sessions with DMWs to show that the researcher is a co-constructor of the women’s narratives. The discourse excerpts, which are from the initial stages of the data collection, demonstrate the researcher’s ignorance about the participants’ lives, the focus on his own social justice agenda at the expense of the women’s personal agenda, and the naivety behind some of the questions he asked. The chapter questions the feasibility of the positivist empirical agenda in applied linguistics research and argues instead for an empowering research agenda, which acknowledges participants as co-constructors of knowledge and insists that research for and with disenfranchised groups needs to be shared beyond the community of scholars: with the people who help develop the knowledge and with other potential beneficiaries outside academia.