This article reports on an empirical study of a literature project at a special residential home for detained youth in Sweden. Informed by critical literacy, the study explored the ways in which versions of empowerment in relation to reading were performed in a 'critical space'. The ethnographic study was analytically inspired by the actor-network theory. Observations and interviews with students and teachers were used to understand the ambiguous and at times contradictory ways that empowerment was enacted; aligning with or refusing to align with dominant literacies or institutionalised expectations of development and improvement. Two different versions of empowerment are explored; these exist in tension with each other and are enacted in the material. The paper concludes with a discussion of the reading project as a critical space, a specific site that offered more critical elements of reading to take part in education.