Across educational research, participatory, co-designed and youth-led methodological approaches have gained increasing prominence, with growing efforts to engage young people as collaborators in research that directly impacts their lives (Habib et al., 2024; Cuevas-Parra, 2020). Within these approaches, compensating young people for the time they give to research activities is recognised as ethically necessary (Afkinich et al., 2020), most often through vouchers or symbolic payments. While these practices move away from extractive research models, they also raise less frequently examined questions about how labour, value and benefits are configured within the research process - questions that intersect with wider European debates regarding youth labour, where access to paid work remains uneven and tied to socio-economic disadvantage (ILO, 2024).

This paper addresses two related research questions: What happens when young people’s participation in education research is organised through paid employment? And how do wages enter into knowledge production by reconfiguring research relations? Conceptually, our analysis draws on Gillen’s (2019) Power in the Room to explore how paid work structures educational activities and outcomes. Through his analysis of the Baltimore Algebra Project, a youth-run cooperative in which mathematical learning is organised through paid work, Gillen treats wages as a structuring condition under racialised capitalism that reorganises educational work and gives material weight to young people’s intellectual labour, particularly for those positioned precariously within racial capitalism (Robinson, 2019). In the context of education research, where funds are fiercely surveilled by university systems and structures, paying young people through waged labour raises questions about the nature of work, value and just rewards. Certainly, the payment of wages can be seen as ethically suspect because productive labour under racial capitalism is organised through the exploitation of the worker as they produce commodities that hold surplus value for those in power (the white capitalist). Yet this labour may also operate as a form of collective inquiry that has use-value for young people and their communities (Williams, 2011). Thus, we offer an analysis of paid participation as a condition that intervenes in unequal conditions of participation and recognition, while bringing into view different logics of value within educational research.

The paper draws on the Very Local Maths project (https://verylocalmaths.org.uk/), conducted in collaboration with a community centre in Manchester. Inspired by the Funds of Knowledge approach (Moll et al.,1992), which foregrounds the cultural resources of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the project explored ‘community mathematics’, understood as mathematics emerging beyond formal schooling and connected to young people’s lives and experiences. Seven young people (13-16) took part in the project, most of whom identified as Black, neurodivergent and struggling with their participation in formal schooling. Over six monthly workshops, they were employed as co-researchers and paid an hourly wage to participate in the research. 

The analysis draws on video recordings and written artefacts produced during the workshops, focusing on two episodes from our fourth workshop, where payment shifted from a background condition to an explicit object of negotiation. In the first episode, co-researchers explored how their labour might be valued if the project ran next year, considering factors such as travel costs, changes in minimum wage, or the university’s financial capacities. The second episode centres on a collective discussion about how young people were using their wages, drawing attention to how payment circulated within the group and shaped possibilities and relations within and around the project.

The paper contributes a situated reflection on wages as a research device and their effects within educational research, highlighting payment as more than a practical or ethical arrangement supporting participation. This reflection makes visible how economic arrangements enter into research practices, supporting a more reflexive engagement with the conditions of educational knowledge production.

The reflections presented in this paper emerge from a broader research project conducted over the 2024-2025 academic year in a community centre in Manchester. The project was developed in response to well-documented cultures of exclusion in school mathematics, where exam-driven curricula continue to offer narrow and disconnected experiences of the subject, particularly for young people from structurally marginalised communities (Ladson-Billings, 1997; Observatory for Mathematics Education, 2025). While school mathematics has been widely examined as a key site where inequalities are (re)produced, this project took a different vantage point by directing attention towards how young people encounter and participate in mathematics beyond formal education. The project was organised as a community-based inquiry conducted over seven months. We recruited seven young people aged 13-16 on a voluntary basis through the community centre, with the intention of working together over time rather than through one-off workshops. Most had identified SEND and disrupted educational trajectories including long periods of non-attendance. Workshops were designed as interdisciplinary spaces for exploring and inventing mathematics beyond curricular formats. Sessions combined mathematical exploration with practices drawn from music, photography and poetry, and involved invited artists and university mathematics students. This design intended to open multiple entry points into mathematics and support collaborative and exploratory forms of participation. Participants were engaged as co-researchers and paid an hourly wage of £20/hour for each of the six 2h workshops. This reflected a methodological commitment to recognising participation as work and to treating young people’s time and intellectual contributions as materially significant within the research process. Fieldwork generated a range of materials, including video and audio recordings of workshops and group discussions, as well as written and material artefacts such as notes, sketches, worksheets, and calculation traces. These materials were produced through processes of co-documentation, with young people taking an active role in filming, recording and selecting what counted as relevant traces of the inquiry. In relation to the analyses developed in this paper, our methodological stance aligns with post-qualitative approaches (MacLure, 2013) and directs attention to how specific methodological arrangements take effect within concrete research situations. From this perspective, these arrangements are understood not as neutral tools but as part of the research apparatus, shaping the conditions of knowledge production. This stance supports our reflexive analysis of how payment entered the research, reshaping relations, expectations and forms of participation through which educational knowledge is produced.

The paper offers a situated reflection on what becomes visible when young people’s involvement in education research is organised through paid work. Drawing on concrete episodes from a community-based mathematics project, it attends to wages as more than a practical or ethical arrangement supporting participation. Wages are approached as a tool for inquiry within the research itself, shaping how inquiry is organised and what forms of educational knowledge can be generated. Conceptually, the paper contributes to debates on participation, labour and value. It demonstrates how wages can simultaneously engender young people’s intellectual labour, function as a way of intervening in unequal conditions of participation, whilst also raising concerns about young people’s exploitation, exchange value, and benefit. The paper offers a framework with examples to think about these tensions, without resolving them or assuming participatory arrangements to be equitable. Methodologically, the paper invites a more reflexive engagement with wages as part of the research apparatus, rather than as a background or technical decision. This has direct implications for those working with participatory, co-designed methodologies, particularly those working with young people in contexts of socio-economic precarity. More broadly, situating the analysis within wider European concerns about youth labour and uneven access to paid work, the paper highlights how research practices intersect with broader conditions of economic insecurities. In this context, paying young people might matter not only as a research decision, but as an intervention within existing inequalities, inviting reflection on how compensation and labour are organised in educational research.

Afkinich, J. L., & Blachman-Demner, D. R. (2020). Providing incentives to youth participants in research: A literature review. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 15(3), 202-215. Cuevas-Parra, P. (2020). Co-researching with children in the time of COVID-19: Shifting the narrative on methodologies to generate knowledge. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 19, 1609406920982135. Gillen, J. (2019). The power in the room: Radical education through youth organizing and employment. Beacon press. Habib, S., Alam, H., Chowdhury, M., Hasan, R., & Mudabbir, S. (2024). ‘Being part of a space made up of people of colour, led by people of colour’: Young people navigating institutional whiteness in the cultural sector. Children & Society, 38(3), 945-961. International Labor Organization (ILO). (2024). Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024: Europe and Central Asia. Geneva: ILO. Ladson-Billings, G. (1997). It Doesn’t Add up: African American Students’ Mathematics Achievement. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 28(6), 697. https://doi.org/10.2307/749638 MacLure, M. (2013). Classification or wonder? Coding as an analytic practice in qualitative research. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 164–182). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748644124 Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. Observatory for Mathematical Education (2025). Review of Mathematical Education 2025. University of Nottingham. Robinson, C. J. (2019). Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (H. L. T. Quan, Ed.; 1st ed.). Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvr0qs8p Williams, J. (2011). Toward a political economic theory of education: Use and exchange values of enhanced labor power. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 18(3), 276-292.