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This article addresses the implications of researcher-student cooperation in the production of empirical material. For the student to replace the experienced researcher and work under the researcher's supervision, we call such work proxy-produced ethnographic work. Although there are clear advantages, the specific relations and positions arising from such a set-up between the teacher/researcher and the proxy ethnographer/student are found to have implications for the ethnographies produced. This article's main focus is to show how these relations and positions have shifted the focus of the ethnographic work and in some way have distorted the ethnographies in certain ways. It is shown how the participating researchers have distinctive, incorporated dispositions with which they pre-consciously participate in an implicit and subtle relation that can make it easy to overlook the distortions during the research process. These ethnographic distortions are generated within a framework drawn primarily on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

"Clinical teachers" in the discipline of nursing in Denmark undergo additional education in addition to their registered nursing education to establish their teaching skill qualifications practicum. This ethnographic study examines some of the pedagogical initiatives clinical teachers are practicing as working professionals attempting to gain a foothold in their own "jurisdiction." This study demonstrates that teaching practices contain implicit norms of what counts as knowledge among clinical teachers. Consequently, the classic knowledge hierarchy is continuously reproduced, and the intrinsic qualities of practice that are characterised as opaque, fluctuating, concrete and highly personal are overlooked and downplayed in the clinical teacher's teaching practices. Instead, bringing abstract, academic knowledge into play seems to be a strong marker that emerges when distinguishing the actual practice of nursing from clinical teaching. "Organisational imperatives" strongly disrupt the pedagogical agenda. When clinical teachers struggle to demarcate jurisdictions, their professional identities are at risk of being blurred and becoming unclear.