The politics of ethics in sociolinguistics introduction: (re)imagining ethics in sociolinguistics

In an age of proliferating protocols and public moral anxieties, this Dialogue asks what sociolinguistics becomes when ethics is treated not as protocol but as relational practice. Contributions rework ethical obligation across three strands of thought: an ethics of responsibility after Levinas and Derrida, decolonial and Indigenous relational accountability and anti-universalism, and posthuman/new materialist accounts of ethical entanglement. Across contributions, the human is held open as a wound rather than a settled category. Ethics moves with language: in listening that risks response; in obligations remade through how we come to know and act in relation; and in material entanglements that can be reconfigured but not undone. A final commentary returns to these tensions, asking what it means for sociolinguistics to remain open to transformation without guarantees. The Dialogue thus invites a sociolinguistics that better responds to the Other—working with undecidability, sustaining plurality, and willing to transform and be transformed.