Research on Latin American social movements has, on the whole, not been transparent in terms of its methods or the craft of gathering or constructing data and then analysing it inductively or deductively. As Benedicte Carlsen and Claire Glenton put it, “Transparency and accountability are key elements in any research report not least in qualitative studies. Thorough reporting of methods allows readers to assess the quality and relevance of research findings”. We cannot simply take on trust the robustness and relevance of the research methods deployed. Whereas in the past – at least in sociology and anthropology – the question of methods, be it participant observation or ethnographic methods, practically dominated, today there is more focus on the politics of epistemology than on the “how I did it” angle. Being methodologically reflexive and self-critical is essential, I would argue, to be a good researcher (and, yes, that does need to be defined, of course). Our starting point is the rather startling discovery, based on a systematic trawl through Latin American social movement studies, that even with a fairly minimal definition of transparency only a miniscule proportion were transparent or structured, or “provided the information that a serious reader would require for even minimal interpretation”.

To address this problem, I have consulted with a number of active researchers on Latin American social movements (see Acknowledgements), who are reflexive in their methodologies and are conscious of the need for transparency whatever the particular method they prefer to deploy, as well as drawing on my own experience as researcher and teacher. This chapter will advance in a few distinct moments, as it were. First, I approach the broad question of knowledge: what is a social fact? Is it given or constructed? What does critical realism tell us about doing research on social movements? What do we mean by “constructivism” and can we think in terms of a “grounded” social theory? How do we avoid the twin pitfalls of empiricism and theoreticism?

We then move on to a more applied domain, as it were, namely the question of engagement.