Collaboration and Crisis: Ethnographic Insights from the Mobilization to Avert an Undercount in the 2020 Census

Background/Purpose: Decennial census counting is a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion with high consequence for social work practice—it can entrench inequity by impacting social policy decisions and distributing voting power and federal resources that are key to service delivery settings. In 2020, the Trump administration’s use of the census to target immigrants produced a counting crisis, prompting concern about a significant undercount due to deepened mistrust. In Chicago where that concern was high, counting brought together service providers, advocacy organizations, community organizations, and policy makers in a collaborative effort to reach the Illinois residents they anticipated counting would miss. This paper asks two questions about collaboration in this mobilization. First, what did the crisis make possible for the coalition and what tensions did it produce? Second, what was the role of a social work researcher in this short-term and fast-moving collaboration?

Methods: This paper draws on a larger ethnographic study centered on the professionals in Chicago—social workers, organizers, advocates, and policy actors—who were not part of the Census Bureau’s formal operation, but who were important census-takers nonetheless. Study methods included participant observation and ethnographic interviews from 12 months of fieldwork in the lead up to and throughout 2020 census counting (January 2020 to December 2020). Participant observation was anchored in the coalition at the center of counting outreach in Illinois: the space where stakeholders came together in an effort to avert an undercount. Common sites for participant-observation included meetings, trainings, webinars, and outreach events. Ethnographic data, including fieldnotes and transcripts of meetings and interviews, were analyzed inductively by the author.

Results: This paper argues that the crisis of counting under the Trump administration united a uniquely broad coalition, garnered significant funding, and activated Chicago’s robust organizational infrastructure. At the center of this coalition’s work was the belief that counting would require community practice knowledge as much as statistical or scientific expertise. The crisis also brought different methodological and epistemological approaches to counting into tension, including by delimiting the role of some forms of community practice labor in producing counts. Additionally, the paper shows that a host of Trump administration census policies specifically targeted implementation as a secondary means to their political goals, including by moving around timelines, complicating and exhausting the coalition’s collaborative work. The temporalities of the coalition’s political work relative to the pace of research and the necessity of virtual research during the early months of the pandemic constrained the researcher’s utility as a collaborator.

Conclusions/Implications: This study contributes to understanding of the challenges and possibilities of multi-professional collaboration to ameliorate a complex social problem with an antagonistic federal state and with temporal and political urgency. It considers the implications of leveraging community practice to produce counts only when public participation was needed and outside of a black-box around data processing. It also contributes to discussion about the possible limits of collaboration in social work research, highlighting moments where the demands of collaborative research were at odds with the timeline and needs of the coalition.