Sparking change: Frictions as a key function of ethnography for healthcare improvement

Anthropologists increasingly engage with healthcare systems, using ethnographic research as a critical tool for understanding and improving healthcare practices. The resulting interactions and collaborations between ethnographers, healthcare practitioners, and administrators often give rise to ‘frictions’—moments of tension, frustrations, misalignments, and misunderstandings. In physics, friction is the force that one object’s surface exerts over another’s to slow its motion, push back against its inherent energy and movement, and is a constant at all touchpoints between the objects, from both sides. While friction often evokes negative connotations, in this article, we look beyond frictions as obstacles, and instead explore them as productive forces that can drive transformation in the healthcare improvement field. Drawing both on the authors’ own experiences and on the work of other anthropologists, we reflect on how friction helps shed light on the dynamics of interdisciplinary work and improve collaboration. We unpack how conceptual and ethical frictions in applied ethnographic work reveal deeper structural and relational insights that would otherwise remain obscured. This article contributes to anthropological discussions on interdisciplinary collaboration and applied practice, and it offers concrete strategies for handling different kinds of friction in health-related ethnographic research.