The renowned US sociologist Howard S. Becker, writing in 1969, posed the ethical question whose side are we on? In the global context of continued structural inequalities in the distribution of power and wealth and individual and institutional oppression, in terms of class, race, gender, disability and sexual orientation, this question remains as important as ever. Moreover, the current dominant global policy discourse, ‘neatly conceals the responsibility for economic crisis, lays the blame on the victim, and sets the scene for a final de facto deletion of any egalitarian aspiration whatsoever from the neoliberal..project’ (Bright & Smyth, 2016, p.123). Arguably, there has never been a greater academic need for a politics of resistance that dares to advocate for social justice and equity by making a stand against repression and forms of personal, cultural, social and economic violence. In essence, an embodied critical research that can form a responsive mode for societal critique, engagement, praxis and voice. In essence, an appproach which is openly activist, robustly partisan and ethically emancipatory. One which questions the legitimacy of the status quo,challenges the conceptual and theoretical bases of knowledge, transcends dominant ideological assumptions and understandings, and questions the inequatable distribution of power. Fundamentaly, to ask whose interests do we want our research to work in and for? In effect, a critical research paridigm that strives to open up alternative possibilities for what can be and should be, for disadvantaged, disempowered people and their comunities. Such goals are arguably central to all critical scholarship and research interested in relations of power, equity, social justice, and relations ’between people and between people, environments, and non-human objects’ (Fitzpatrick and May 2022: 76). In this regard, as Madison (2005, p.90) observes ’A concentration on ethics is fundamental.....because we are involved in entering into the domains of Others’ In essence, ethics need to be imbued in every aspect of the research process from the identification of the research issue and the setting of the research question(s), to the presentation of the findings and everything which unfolds in between (Fitzpatrick & May,  2022). The overiding question to be asked by those thinking of engaging in any form of critical inquiry, is whether the undertaking is likely to be considered relevant, important and beneficial by research particpants and their communty. The ultimate emancipatory ethical goal one of meaningful and authentic participant empowerment.  It is towards this ultimate goal which the paper conceptually turns in providing a ethical emancipatory framework.

The Emancipatory Ethical Framework, presented in the paper, seeks to address the question of positionality. To do so, itprovides a heuristic ethical framework against and within which critical research may be situated. Drawing on the work of Swartz & Nyamnjoh (2018), the continuum is configured around notions of participant power and research ownership. Conceptually, the power dynamics are constituted by three researcher-participant dispositions, exploited, engaged and emancipated. The central ethical tenet of the model, related to the transition, reallocation and ownership of knowledge and power from researcher to participants. Namely, in exploited research the researcher owns the research, in engaged research it is perceived as co-owned between the researcher and participants, and in emancipated research it belongs to the participants. In this final emancipatory ethical configuration, research is no longer ‘mine’, or even ‘ours’ but ‘theirs’ (Swartz & Nyamnjoh 2018, p.1). Subsequently, as a way of showing, what Guillemin and Gillam (2004) term ‘ethics in practice’, we share and reflect on the research process underscoring a critical arts-based research (Bagley & Castro-Salazar 2012) project, the authors’ undertook, entitled Undocumented Historias in the Desert of Dreams, with undocumented Mexican-Americans

The research adopted Critical Race Theory (CRT) as our theoretical position, as it provided an interpretive theoretical and emancipatory ethical frame in line with our beliefs and thinking that racism is 'normal', not aberrant, in US society (Ladson-Billings, 1998). For us, CRT enabled a critical examination and positioning of the educational experiences and lives of undocumented Mexican-Americans as social constructions of inferior or even criminal 'Other', embedded in the dominant xenophobic culture of US society (Villenas & Deyhle, 1999). In striving to keep within an emancipatory ethical frame, the research, informed by CRT, utilised of storytelling—or 'counter-storytelling' through a (counter) life history interview approach (Nebeker, 1998). In practical terms, the process of identifying undocumented participants to interview, given their status, was a difficult and challenging one, and involved cautiously and sensitively talking with individuals within the local Mexican-American community. Following explicit (re) assurances around confidentiality, six undocumented Mexican-Americans volunteered to participate in the study. Two in-depth life-history interviews each of two hours duration, were conducted with each participant, the interview process involving delicate matters of legality and vulnerability. Through this process the interviewer and participants were able to co-participate in the process of seeking understanding, to co-recover and ‘reveal the meaning of lived experience’ (Yow, 1994, p.25) as an undocumented Mexican-American. From a critical arts-based research perspective the counter life-history interviews were perceived not simply as a means of culturally and politically co-recovering lived experience, but as 'a vehicle for producing performance texts.. .about self and society' (Denzin, 2001, p. 24). These ‘performance texts’ derived from the counter life history interviews, to form the key narratives upon which the subsequent critical arts-based performance / exhibit, collaboratively working with Mexican-American artists was based. Crucially, while the use of the arts in the presentation of research might break from more traditional and standard textual forms of telling, such a departure does not in itself, constitute criticality. As such, critical arts-based research is arts based research with an explicit political purpose. The aim of critical arts-based research is for a methodological alignment with subjugated peoples and voices, to uncover unequal power relations and the disproportionate impact these relations have on certain groups marginalised because of their ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender and class (Bagley & Castro-Salazar, 2012)

The primary aim of the paper was to move towards the development of an emancipatory ethic in critical research. To that end, an Emancipatory Ethical Framework was provided, suggesting the need for researchers to move from a position of power to disempowerment in the research process and relationships with participants, whom should be neither exploited nor engaged but emancipated by their involvement. As way of illuminating these emancipatory ethics in practice (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004), the research process underpinning a critical-arts-based performance and exhibit Undocumented Historias in the Desert of Dreams, was provided as a analytically tentative case example. To conclude, and in so far as approaching research from a neutral stance is philosophically and empirically impossible, so as researcher(s) we need to reflect critically on the choices we make. Such choices are not easy or straightforward in academia, as we are never fully (or even partly) in control of the dominant socio-economic, political and cultural forces determining who supports, finances, reads, judges, publishes or acts on the value of our work. Nonetheless, whatever the dominant structural pressures and constraints, what we do retain control over, is our professional and personal values and the way in which we answer and subsequently respond to the central ethical questions: what sort of difference do we want to make; and in whose best interests do we want our research to work?

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