Nursing Theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, and Foucault

Olga Petrovskaya is an assistant professor in the University of Victoria School of Nursing in British Columbia, Canada. She is an active and long-standing member of the International Philosophy of Nursing Society (IPONS), and in 2021 she was elected to serve as the vice chair of IPONS. Dr. Petrovskaya is interested in continental philosophy especially German critical theory and French post-structuralism as well as a contemporary direction in social theory called practice theory. In 2014 she won first prize in the Nursing Philosophy journal Graduate Student Writing Contest for her article, "Is There Nursing Phenomenology after Paley?" Dr. Petrovskaya’s funded program of research combines her interest in eHealth and Health Information and Communication Technology with her interest in theoretical perspectives attuned to the socio-materiality of health care practices, for example, actor network theory. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on nursing knowledge and theory development.

This book constitutes the first systematic attempt to bring together the vast field of postmodern and post-structuralist nursing literature from the late 1980s through the first decade of the 2000s. Olga Petrovskaya demonstrates this literature’s significant contribution to ‘theorizing nursing’ in a mode of critique. Critique here refers to analyses attentive to historicity, materiality, and politics of nursing practice and nursing knowledge. She contrasts this with the mostly American literature on ‘nursing theory,’ construed mainly in terms of formal systematization. Her main argument is that the American understanding of ‘nursing theory’ has dominated nursing textbooks across the globe, to the extent that the many modes of ‘theorizing nursing’ are rendered mostly invisible. She raises important questions about how these two almost radically opposed conceptualizations of theory and their methods and/or status in nursing qua knowledge influence what is taught to and studied by nursing students and scholars. The work is highly original in scope and depth and should be considered required reading for all nursing scholars.Miriam Bender, PhD RN FAANAssociate ProfessorFounding Director, Center for Nursing PhilosophySue & Bill Gross School of NursingUniversity of California, IrvineThere’s a lot to be written about the history of academic nursing theory, and this is a hefty contribution to our understanding of one prominent slice of it. Olga Petrovskaya has written an intriguing analysis of American nursing scholarship, and the way in which its parochialism, self-celebration, ex officio nursing values, and old-fashioned positivism preclude serious consideration of postmodern and poststructuralist ideas, rendering them largely unintelligible to US nurses. Petrovskaya describes American theory’s three responses to French philosophy, Foucault in particular. Ignore it. Dismiss it. Assimilate a domesticated, housebroken version of it. And she suggests that this is consistent with the ideal of an isolationist ‘unique nursing science’ – its drawbridge up, its portcullis down – freezing out any challenge to its canon from other philosophies, other disciplines, other parts of the world. Perhaps this book will turn out to be the unstoppable force that dislodges the hitherto immovable object of American nursing theory. That could be a watershed moment. But this is American nursing theory. I’m not holding my breath.John PaleyUniversity of Worcester

• 1.Early 21st Century Canadian Nursing at a Theoretical Crossroads: Between American Nursing Theory and British-Australian Post-Structural Theorizing. 2.Establishing the Field of Study: Postmodern, Post-Structural, and Foucauldian Nursing Scholarship. 3.American Nursing Science and Discipline-Specific Theory: In the Grips of Logical Positivism. 4.Postmodern and Post-Structural Ideas in American Nursing Texts I: Gortner, Dzurec, Reed, Watson, and Nursing Science Quarterly. 5.Postmodern and Post-Structural Ideas in American Nursing Texts II: Advances in Nursing Science and the Enclave Group. 6.Postmodern and Post-Structural Ideas in Non-American Nursing Literature: Examining Nurse–Patient Relationships and the Holistic Nurse. 7.It’s Not About Being Comfortable Bedfellows: Why Postmodern and Post-Structural Literacy Matters in Nursing. Appendix.