At a time when youth are increasingly negotiating new media literacy practices across multiple contexts, literacy researchers are compelled to take notice and reconsider methodologies that centre the researcher, to purposefully engage youth's knowledge, identities and new media literacies as research methodologies. To that end, the authors constructed and enacted a Social-Participatory Youth Co-Researcher methodology across two in-depth interpretive qualitative research studies. Specifically, the authors describe and analyse how such a methodology enacts purposeful researcher roles for youth that forefront their emerging literacies and complicate static notions of teacher, research(er), standardised curriculum and teacher evaluation whilst youth grapple with issues of educational equity.