This article offers an analysis of a continuum along which interactive, participatory and emancipatory inquiries may be placed in critical qualitative research with a social justice focus. It draws on critical distinctions to make the argument that labelling research ‘participatory’ hides both interactive approaches and those that might be seen to be emancipatory in the vein of Paolo Freire and Stanley Biggs. To support the argument for a continuum of engaged research, four recent research studies from South Africa, Cameroon, Nigeria and Sierra Leone that address youth marginality and views on an array of topics are discussed with a view to articulating divergences and convergences in approaches. Included are considerations around adapting research for specific audiences and participants, the location of power, research ethics, as well as the demystification and democratisation of knowledge ownership and generation, and the nature of collaboration. The article offers tentative criteria by which research may be located along the suggested continuum and argues that an emancipatory approach, whilst being key to bringing about change or freedom, is a difficult but not impossible aim to achieve in research.

Social movements often face the danger of becoming the very thing they are fighting against. This tension is evident within the student movement, Rhodes Must Fall, at the University of Cape Town. This dialectic is explored through the notion of 'alienation' as a concept of social philosophy. I argue that while the movement emerges from the experience of alienation, certain behaviours internal to the movement can also proceed to cause alienation. The lesson to be learnt from this contradiction is that we are all simultaneously oppressors and oppressed. From this emerges a positive understanding of alienation, as the experience of alienation is not only a negative one. One such positive lesson in this case is the alteration of our understandings of ourselves and others toward an all-inclusive liberation agenda. Failure to heed this could see the transformation potential of such movements like Rhodes Must Fall hijacked by hypocrisy.

Given the urgency of redressing South Africa’s unjust legacies of the past, we interrogate the nature of support and opposition to restitution in South Africa. Informed by responses to the nationally representative South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS), we contend that South Africa remains deeply polarised when it comes to addressing these unjust legacies, with race being the major fault line. When it comes to restitution, South Africans are worlds apart on three levels. We are worlds apart across racial groups; we are worlds apart within racial groups, and we are worlds apart in the kind of language we wish to use in framing our pursuit of equality. In the final analysis, while South Africans may be unified in the acknowledgement that the inequality gap is too high, and perhaps even unified in a desire for change, there is a fundamental disagreement about the desirable vehicles we hope to employ.

This essay draws on the collective learnings from the research study published as Moral Eyes: Youth and justice in Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and South Africa in order to explore both the principles and possibilities of producing theory from the South by the South. By describing the journey of the study and highlighting its struggles and challenges, as well as innovative steps taken along the way, it offers insights into how existing geopolitical inequalities in knowledge production between the Global North and the Global South may be disrupted. Central to these disruptions include the role of Southern theory, the relationships between researchers, methods of data collection, and the ways in which participants are engaged in the study. The task of producing knowledge from the South by the South entails speaking out and insisting on the space to produce knowledge; speaking back while remaining geographically, ethically, and theoretically grounded; speaking up and rooting research in emancipatory methodologies and ontologies; and never being spoken for especially by only accepting funding that supports principles of justice and emancipation in Southern knowledge production.