It´s not messy but it´s not clean either

Abstract

Reading with relief One cold winter afternoon, we, three Finland-based researchers in Applied Language Studies, decided to share a reading experience. What started out as a book review exercise turned into a reading circle that critically explored ideas at the intersection of ethics, methodologies, and researcher identities in our field. In the introductory chapter to their edited volume, Heath Rose and Jim McKinley (2017) define the pedagogical and academic space in which they situate their book. Doing Research in Applied Linguistics: Realities, dilemmas and solutions promises the reader guidance and insights into how to deal with challenges arising in research conducted with, by and on "real people in real settings"; in other words, the authors present advice and reassurance for situations where things don't go as planned in research. Setting their work apart from existing textbooks in Applied Linguistics (e.g., Dörnyei, 2007; Mackey & Gass, 2005), Rose and McKinley promise to offer not merely "preventative" but also "curative advice" on issues that "arise and must be dealt with during the research process" (2017, p. 4). As researchers at different stages of our careers (doctoral, postdoctoral, and senior), we were intrigued by this book because it dealt with questions we all were familiar with. We were excited to see a publication that discussed research so authentically and did not try to depict the process as (having to be) clean, smooth and polished. For instance, all of us, particularly in the early years of our academic trajectories, had felt pressure to create something completely new or discover uncharted theoretical territories and ended up getting caught in "academic crossfire" (Rose, 2017, p. 27) between conflicting theories or paradigms. This volume provides relief and support for all researchers, especially those who feel such or similar pressures, by uncovering the kind of tacit academic knowledge that is not always openly available but that we all need in order to cope with unexpected theoretical, methodological or processual shifts and challenges. Through conversations around such knowledge of coping, which had previously rarely been made explicit to us, we kept coming back to the authors' notion of "cure". Its implication that something in a research process