ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches out the trajectory of observed events becoming published texts. Examples from a doctoral thesis and subsequent publication serve to highlight a number of methodological considerations about the notions of writing as representation. Through recontextualising concepts from Actor-Network-Theory, translation, hinterland, and scale, ethnographic writing can be understood as a practice in which the world becomes constituted in very specific ways. Technologies of recording as well as assumptions about the world direct the way this world can be made accessible and written about in the first place. Emphasising and deemphasising empirical, autobiographical, and theoretical content produces texts that not only look different but allow for different judgements to be made, not only about the interrogated social field but also about ethnography itself. This is specifically important in publications that have to produce an “evidence-base” for healthcare. Such texts may have to be written as both positivist and relational in order to permit ethnography to perform specific functions associated with ethnography in healthcare, such as the demarginalization and empowerment of service users.
