Jean-Luc Moriceau. Dealing with “the other matters”. Society and Business Review, 2009, 4 (1), pp.5-7. ⟨10.1108/sbr.2009.29604aaa.001⟩.

The other matters. Encountering, or being confronted to the other, is what research is all about. It is even the taste (and the test) of research. We are striving for something which is other from what we knew. And yet, on the one hand, Denzin and Lincoln (2008, p. 1) depict research as “provid[ing] the foundation for reports about and representations of ‘the other’”. From which they conclude, looking back to their early years, that from their early beginnings, qualitative researches were implicated in a racist project. On the other hand, we have to admit that much of our effort is about encapsulating all the differences into one concept, one theory or one narrative, thus ruling out otherness and singularity. In between these two extremes, research has been haunted, has been renewed by the question of the other: how to voice the other, how to speak for, how to write about him/her? With the inherent limit of Derrida’s (1986) law of the other: the other can approach, as the other, in its phenomenon of being otherness, only by moving away. And the other can appear, in its unlimited otherness, only by approaching …