In research partnerships, sharing of expertise among various players – researchers, managers, professionals, members of the public – is likely to assist in emancipating people and communities. Researchers, who are simultaneously agents of change and coproducers of knowledge, are led to use their own expertise. This may pose a challenge, considering the risks of reproducing asymmetrical relationships of power in their research. This article tells the story of a research partnership marked by this tension between expertise and a goal of emancipation. This experience came from a collaborative research project on social housing carried out as part of a doctoral thesis in organizational psychology. It is analyzed from two frames of reference: epistemology and the work of St-Arnaud (2003) on cooperation and self-regulation in a context of professional interaction. The implications of the story presented and the tools used to analyze it are then discussed.