Alignment and Alienation: Emergency Staff and Midwifery Scholars as Co-Researchers.

To unpack healthcare practices, I frequently use video-reflexive ethnography (VRE). This visual methodology asks clinicians to become co-researchers. Studying practices in this way brings interdisciplinary and multi-paradigmatic alliances. This chapter describes situations in which different epistemic cultures meet each other and that may generate risks for researchers’ epistemic credibility, as well as opportunities for on-the-ground problem-solving. The first case study is about an Australian Emergency Department and demonstrates how a solid preparation of research includes potential risks for one’s professional reputation. The second case study draws on a Midwifery Science project in the Netherlands. It describes how real or imagined threats to professional credibility can affect both the experience of interdisciplinary collaboration and the relationship with one’s own academic community. By reflecting on these situations, I aim to explicate the learning potential of such encounters. Such new experiences in doing research in traditions other than one’s own make one humble and can prevent dogmatism.