ABSTRACT
This chapter delves into the experiences of the author with a participatory action research (PAR) project with homeless young people in Ottawa, Canada. The research was designed to better understand homeless youths’ engagement with civic and democratic processes, and culminated in an ‘action phase’ meant to address the issues they raised. This ‘action phase’ ultimately became three short films documenting youths’ experiences with police, the need to decriminalize marijuana, and the supports youth need to transition out of homelessness. The chapter examines the research process that culminated in making the films, interrogating avowed institutional commitments to community engagement, the embeddedness of historical cultural categories such as the ‘good youth citizen’ under neoliberalism, and the limits of ‘action’ undertaken through PAR projects such as this one. The chapter invites the reader to sit with the discomforts and contradictions of research intended to generate social change, and to thus ‘trouble PAR’ through thoughtful reflections on how researchers are also implicated in and constrained by wider histories and contexts that shape what we do and how we do it.
