Palliative care and hospice philosophies, practice, and research can be understood as a movement to counter dehumanizing aspects of the medicalization of death—a movement to “reclaim” the individuality of dying. However, this push to singularize dying (as one’s own) becomes part of a universalizing process as death is managed within institutional spaces and medical discourses. From an ontological perspective, the individuality of mortality—i.e., dying—can be understood in opposition to the universality of death. In contemporary society, there is a paradoxical relationship within the management of death: there is an attempt to universalize the singularity of dying. This thesis is proposed to address contemporary conceptual “problems” of dying and responses to them, as historically and contextually situated, through a Heideggerian phenomenological understanding and methodological critique of selected phenomenological nursing research related to dying. The intent is to explore the ways dying is constructed as an object of phenomenology through an analysis of the ontological and epistemological ambiguities within this literature to pose the ensuing methodological implications. The thesis hopes to propose an alternate way to conceptualize dying for this literature and it aims to suggest implications for theory and method in this field of research. / Graduate / 0344
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/4712 |
| Date | 29 July 2013 |
| Creators | Whitney, Al |
| Contributors | Smith, André Philippe |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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