Spatial thought is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance in nursing. Building on a long disciplinary tradition of conceptualizing and studying ‘nursing environment’, the past twenty years has witnessing the establishment and refinement of explicitly geographical nursing research. This article – part one in a series of two – reviews the perspectives taken to date, ranging from historical precedent in classical nursing theory through to positivistic spatial science, political economy, and social constructivism in contemporary inquiry. This discussion sets up part two, (...) which considers the potential of non‐representational theory for framing future studies. (shrink)

The concept of ‘place’, and general references to ‘geographies of …’ are making gradual incursions into nursing literature. Although the idea of place in nursing is not new, this recent spatial turn seems to be influenced by the increasing profile of the discipline of health geography, and the broadening of its scope to incorporate smaller and more intimate spatial scales. A wider emphasis within the social sciences on place from a social and cultural perspective, and a wider turn to ‘place’ (...) across disciplines are probably equally important factors. This trend is raising some interesting questions for nurses, but at the same time contributes some confusion with regard to imputed meanings of ‘place’. While it is clear that most nurse clinicians and researchers certainly understand that place of care matters to their practices and patients, many diverse uses of ‘place’ are found within nursing literature, and contemporary understandings of the term ‘place’ within nursing are not immediately clear. It is in this context that this article plans to advance the discussion of place. More specifically, the aims of this paper are threefold: to critique ‘place’ as it appears in nursing literature, to explore the use of ‘place’ within health geography, whence notions of place and ‘geographies of’ have originated and, finally, to compare and contrast the use of ‘place’ in both disciplines. This critique intends to address a deficit in the literature, in this era of growing spatialization in nursing research. The specific questions of interest here are: ‘what is “place” in nursing?’ and ‘how do concepts of place in nursing compare to concepts of place in health geography?’. (shrink)

During the last 3 years the interface between geography and nursing has provided fertile ground for research. Not only has a conceptual emphasis on space and place provided nurse researchers with a robust and subtly different way to deconstruct and articulate nursing environments, but also their studies have provided a much needed focus on certain areas of health‐care, and in particular clinical practice, not currently prioritized by health geographers. We argue that, as something that is forcing fundamental re‐considerations of the (...) nature of both nursing and geography, cyberspace is a particularly important phenomenon that lies comparatively under‐researched at this interface. To encourage some interest in researching nursing and cyberspace through a geographical lens, and at least to showcase a range of potentially useful and transportable concepts, we provide an overview of some of the key debates pertaining to cyberspace developed by human geographers, and make some initial and tentative connections to nursing. (shrink)