Our analysis in this paper unfolds on two levels: a critique of the ‘realities’ of graduate nursing education and an argument to sustain its ‘ideals’. We open for discussion an aspect of graduate nursing education dominated by instrumental reason, namely the research industry, using an internal critique approach developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno of the Early Frankfurt School. As we explain, internal critique arises out of, and relies on, the mismatch between goals, or ‘ideals’, and existing realities. Thinking (...) about ‘ideals’ of the academy, we draw on Hans-Georg Gadamer's view of the university as a place to think freely, creatively, and critically. The contemporary realities of the university, on the other hand, that emphasize the market values of the research industry forcefully shape nursing academic scholarship in a particular direction. In our attempt to recognize and disrupt the forces of the research industry with its instrumental reason, we consider Judith Butler's writings on how norms operate in society. We show that our growing involvement in the research industry makes it very difficult to disentangle ourselves from that situation. The values of the research industry actually suppress the very ideals of education and scholarship that we would like to uphold. As a contra-force, the internal critique of the ‘existing realities’ in the graduate nursing education unmasks the tyranny of the research industry and makes visible the importance of sustaining the higher goals and ideals in nursing scholarship. (shrink)

This paper discusses the contribution that the work of Sally Gadow makes to understandings of interpretive inquiry and it's potential to inform and influence nursing practice, research, and education. The discussion draws on several of Gadow's published works that make explicit her understandings of what it means to be interpretive, to be open to multiple truths, to hear multiple voices, to have a history, to be experienced, and to recognize agency in language. Situating this discussion of Gadow's contribution in opposition (...) to a metaphysics of genius is intended to move our understanding of particular work past the subjectivity that produced it, past the subjectivized responses to the work, past the reporting on myself – my thoughts, my perspectives, my experiences – to explore, to see the worthwhileness or even the possibilities of exploring the work itself and the worlds it evokes. This paper is a deliberate attempt to disrupt the call to the author to save us from the task of interpreting the questions that the work itself places us under. Gadow's work itself points us away from a valorization of the voice of the author of the work, a single voice, and towards a cultivation of a worldly repose where each interpretive account points us to some longstanding whole to which the work belongs and from which it gains its sense and significance. (shrink)

Increasingly, research in women's health and healthcare foregrounds women's experience. Despite the contribution that explorations of women's ‘lived life’ makes to our understandings, the concern of these feminist authors is the absence of in‐depth analysis of the complexity of experience and the contexts in which women's experiences of health are constituted. In this paper, authors extend current understandings of the lived life by complicating notions of knowledge, experience, language and ideologies. These ideas challenge taken‐for‐granted assumptions that underlie current women's healthcare (...) practices, disrupting the reinscription of patriarchal ideologies and generating new possibilities for nursing practice. (shrink)