Participatory research can be seen as providing affordances for "listening" to student voices. This study contributes to the debate around its affordances in ameliorating democratic processes in schools. Students in a northern city secondary school in England used multimodal methods to research questions based on "where do students feel good about themselves as learners?" The participatory framework was stymied by the privileging of written text and the Discourse of Initiation/Response/Evaluation embedded in our local relations of power, and in my body, and it also provided affordances for autonomy and meaning making. Students took on identities as experts, exploring varied ideas, resisting the stillness and non-socialness of written text-based activities, and choosing multimodal ways to self-author their findings, to communicate "differently" and effectively to chosen audiences. Meanings were made from layers of data, some of it sensory and embodied, but the processes of meaning making distorted and left behind much that was also meaningful in the tumult of researching, denying a more open-ended conclusion. The research explores whether including the tumult, communicating it in a variety of modes including the written, remains truer to the multivoiced, fragmentary, fluid nature of the research process.