Minority mother tongue instruction is a part of the Finnish school system (see Tainio & Kallioniemi 2019) yet there is relatively little participatory research on the subject. When it comes to subjects such as Arabic, traditional disciplinary foci and researchers’ linguistic repertoires partly explain the situation. However, also the ethical frameworks that regulate classroom research play a role: especially for studies that are interested in interactional data, obtaining necessary research permits is cumbersome and embarking on a research project requires considerable resources both time- and funding-wise. In this presentation, we reflect on our experiences from MIGDIA project, a five-year ethnographic research project with a focus on minority mother tongue instruction in Arabic. We discuss research ethics both in the data collection phase and in connection with publishing research results in terms of everyday ethics and formalised research ethics (cf. Smette 2019). We open up linguistic and cultural challenges of data collection by asking what kind of research projects the current ethical guidelines have been created for and what kind of participant they assume (see Everri et al. 2020). We also ask whether the current regulations and research ethical practices actually contribute to the ethical implementation of research in multilingual and multicultural contexts. The ethical considerations of the research are not limited only to the data collection, but also to the publication of the research results. By this we do not mean just ethical treatment of research participants, but the increasingly politicized environment where educational research on Arabic mother tongue instruction operates for instance in Finland. The increased political influence of far-right parties has brought services provided for linguistic and cultural minorities under scrutiny and criticism (for background, see Petterson 2020). Against this background, we reflect on our research findings. Although optional mother tongue instruction is a part of the mainstream education, in many ways it operates in the fringes of Finnish educational system (see Ylijokipii et al. 2022). With our ethnographic lens, we are in a position of seeing also the linguistically and culturally specific details more clearly. We discuss researcher’s ethical role in knowledge production and identify ethically sustainable practices for research in increasingly polarized societies.

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