Turning things upside down?

An ethics of activism in youth co-research

Abstract

This article discusses how researchers and young people can co-create democratic spaces of inquiry in which research becomes relevant to young people’s development on their own terms and how researchers can position themselves ethically within such processes. We argue that ethical dilemmas are intensified when young people participate as co-researchers, as youth – as a developmental period – is tied to a broader societal task of “being young and doing youth”. Drawing on a practice research tradition and empirical examples, we unfold how researchers can become co-researchers in young people’s lives in partnerships, thereby reshaping researcher-researched dynamics and challenging conventional notions of researcher authority. We further explore how research can support young people’s critical engagement with their everyday life conditions and foster collective agency through their shared participation – while resisting the imposition of predefined directions of change. We conceptualize these dynamics as an ethics of activism, understood as a commitment to moving beyond constrained positions and pursuing social justice through the development of collective transformative agency.