Abstract
This text reviews a recently published book Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods. Studying Language Issues that Matter written by Canadian, Finnish and Catalan authors (Monica Heller, Sari Pietikäinen and Joan Pujolar).
From a disciplinary point of view all authors are sociolinguists in the broadest sense of the word, but when it comes to their approach to the relationship between language and society, we can also detect in their work features of linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis. In this review, I focus especially on the theoretical and methodological framework of critical sociolinguistics presented in the book.
I appreciate the authors' thorough approach in applying this framework even to their own work, in other words, their orientation to the principle of reflexivity. Further, I appreciate the authors' exceptional sensitivity towards the linguistic, cultural, social and political diversity of the current world.
I welcome the authors' focus on ethnography and value their conceptualization of the research process as a five-phase process, the individual phases of which are related through the principle of recursivity and rhizome.