“Mimicked Winks”: Criminalized Conduct and the Ethics of Thick Description

Abstract

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.