Have you ever been writing a conference proposal but the call asks for stuff that doesn’t fit your proposal? Here’s one way I try to handle that. I insert a sentence like this before getting to the details.

Below I address A and B aspects of the proposal call. Since C and D aspects do not apply to this submission, I instead address E and F because they [reason]

I directly say what I’m not doing so they don’t have to wonder about it. But instead of just saying what I’m not doing, I let them know what I’m doing instead. I try to think about it like this: what’s the information they might have asked for if they better understood the kind of thing I’m proposing.

So instead of addressing the data sources in a call that assumes everything is “empirical,” I might address the ethical stance of the project instead.