Abstract
This article argues that whilst some academic disciplines have been richly innovative in both their approaches to, and work with movements, for the most part social movements are still considered as objects of knowledge for researchers and academics, rather than as knowledge producers in their own right. It considers the ethical and methodological dilemmas that arise from this situation and instead proposes an ethics of engagement with critical subjectivities whose contextual and situated knowledge is both independent of the academy and valuable in its own right.