This research is about a shared journey of being together. It involved thirteen women nurses (including myself) in a process approach to working with data collected through audio transcriptions of conversations during group get-togethers, field notes and journalling over twelve months. The project was conducted in a large acute care metropolitan hospital where the ward staff interests lie in a practice history of the medical specialty of gynaecology and women's health.
Prior to commencement ethical approval was gained from both the University and hospital ethics committees. Accessing the group was complicated by the political climate of the hospital, possibly exaggerated further by the health politics across the state of Victoria, at a time of major upheaval characterised by regionalism, rationalisation and debt servicing.
In order to ascertain women clinical nurses' constructions of collegiality I adopted an ethnomethodological approach informed by a critical feminist lens to enable the participants to engage in a process of openly ideological inquiry, in critiquing and transforming practice. I felt the choice of methodology had to be consistent with my own ideological position to enable me to be myself (as much as I could) during the project. I wanted to work with women to illuminate the ways in which dominant ideologies had come to be apprehended, inscribed, embodied and/or resisted in the everyday intersubjective realities of participants. The research itself became a site of resistance as the group became aware of how and in what ways their lives had become distorted, while at the same time it collaboratively transformed their individual and collective practice understandings, enabling them to see the self and other anew.
Set against the background of dominant discourses on collegiality, women's understandings of collegiality have remained a submerged discourse. Revealed in this work are complex inter-relationships that might be described by some as collegial!, but for others relations amongst these women depict alternative meanings in a rich picture of the fabric of ward life. The participants understand these relations through a connectedness that has empathy as its starting point.
In keeping with my commitment to engage with these women I endeavoured to remain faithful to the dialogical approach to this inquiry. Moreover I have brought the voices of the women to the foreground, peeling away the rhizomatic interconnections in and between understandings. What this has meant in terms of the thesis is that the work has become artificially distanced for the purposes of academic requirements. Nevertheless it speaks to the understandings the participants have of their relationships; of the various locations of the visible and invisible voices; of the many landscapes and images, genealogies, subjectivities and multiple selves that inform the selves with(in) others and being-in-relation. Throughout the journey meanings are revealed, revisited and reconstructed. Many nuances comprise the subtexts illuminating the depths of various moral locations underpinning the ways these women engage with one another in practice. The process of the research weaves through multiple positions, conveying the centrality of shared goals, multiple identities, resistances and differences which contribute to a holding environment, a location in which women value one another in their being-in-relation and in which they stand separately yet together.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/217118 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Cash, Penelope Anne, mikewood@deakin.edu.au |
| Publisher | Deakin University. School of Nursing |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.deakin.edu.au/disclaimer.html), Copyright Penelope Anne Cash |
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