Activist research and city politics: Ethical lessons from youth-based public scholarship

Abstract

This article offers observations from an ongoing action research project involving advocacy for public skateboarding facilities in Seattle, Washington to demonstrate both the need for, and the inherent limits to an ethical framework for action rooted in the Kantian moral imperative of treating all people as ‘ends and not means'. By tracing the ethical dilemmas arising from work seeking to advocate on behalf of young people through conventional urban politics, I argue that a ‘covenantal’ ethic should be extended not only to the action researcher's research community, but also to those with whom we compete in the political arena. In support of this argument, Idescribe both the ethical problems arising from purporting to speak on behalf young people, and the difficulties in ethically seeking policy change through urban politics and planning – particularly given the tendencies for political debate to revolve around essentialized constructions of youth identities, and for urban planning processes to reinforce neighborhood level disparities in power.