What happens when people not only talk to one another but collaborate closely and form strong relationships in conditions of political heterogeneity? This article analyzes data from ethnographic research in seven states with homebirth midwives who, reflecting the “strange coalition” of feminists and traditionalists that analysts have long described in this community, self-identify with a wide range of partisan political affiliations and with divergent positions on the key issue of professional midwifery licensure. Results show that this community’s use of a shared model of care as a boundary object to facilitate collaboration without consensus relies upon a focus on sameness and a bracketing of the ideological commitments that undergird practitioners’ investment in the model of care. When difference is directly engaged, collaboration across political difference becomes difficult to sustain. I argue that bridging ideological divides using boundary objects is politically costly. Collaborative relationships and coalitions are made precarious and risk depoliticizing shared concerns when they are bound by a weakly structured, network-level object whose use demands the allocation of attention to sameness and the bracketing of difference and political disagreement.
Thick description has long been the standard for both credibility and quality in ethnographic, community action, and participatory observation research across the disciplines, but I argue that researchers have an ethical obligation to consider when to decline to describe thickly. When ethnographers write about actions their informants took that broke, skirted, or challenged laws and rules in service of meeting their own basic needs, anonymization is not enough. We risk drawing the attention of law enforcement or hostile regulators to whole communities employing those practices, rendering their future actions more highly policeable or criminalizable—even if we do not intend to do so, and even if we adequately conceal the identities of the particular individuals described. I suggest five principles for ethical description of criminalized or policeable conduct: justified disclosure, substituting thick description of evidence of a practice for description of the practice itself, balancing thickness with thinness, telling stories when the risks of criminalization are decreasing, and narrating affinities with less-surveilled practices.
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