Untangling ethical issues in participatory research practices with young people in contexts of oppression

Within participatory research practices, adult researchers must be strongly committed to social justice. This means that they must engage with challenging questions about the underlying processes that enable participatory practices, what is valued as knowledge, who has access to and ownership of knowledge production, and who is excluded or silenced from these processes. This is especially true for research with young people in contexts of oppression, who have historically been silenced and exploited by many care, policy, and research practices. In this article, we share our reflections of our own learning experiences with young people in contexts of oppression using participatory research approaches. We attempt to untangle some of the ethical issues we faced by focusing on: 1) navigating rigidity in ‘powerful’ research institutes; 2) the positivistic, biomedical, and eurocentric standards of ethics; 3) adultism at the center of research projects; and 4) challenging adultism in fostering meaningful collaboration.