Up and down and sideways: Collaboration, friction and ethnographic representations of orthodontics for children

Abstract

In this article, I discuss collaboration and my experiences of involving orthodontists when representing orthodontic practice. Drawing on an ethnographic study with children and young people getting fixed appliances, the aim is to understand the politics of the practitioners’ receptions of the research result. First, I explore the power balance involved in researching expertise in general. Studying up and down and sideways in a multidirectional collaboration, I demonstrate that direct focus on the practitioners’ reactions to the ethnographic representations can reveal the political and social processes in institutions that deeply affect the lives of children. Secondly, the ethnographic examples show the specific changing conditions within the field of orthodontics that influenced how my analysis was received by the orthodontists. I argue that the result of collaboration, in the form of both agreement and friction, serves as knowledge about the burning questions of the institutional network under study.