This article outlines how the author's conceptual understanding of a labour market programme in Australia called Landcare Environmental Action Plan (LEAP), and the author's place within it, changed as he engaged in a socially critical action research project. As a methodology, action research provided him with a deeper insight into how LEAP experiences were structured ideologically and materially within asymmetrical relations of power and privilege. Indeed, while the programme was supposedly designed to benefit unemployed youth, the reality was that the participants were often frustrated and angry which manifested in acts of passive and active resistance. As the author engaged the young people in seeking out an alternative structuring of space within the confines of the LEAP, he found that his own liberal beliefs in social mobility and equality tended to reinscribe the circle of oppression and despair he sought to eradicate. In this article the author argues that action research may become yet another normalizing and oppressive practice in itself, if educators refuse to move beyond the need for civility and professionalism