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)

“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re-explain Derrida's (...) “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory. (shrink)

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, (...) we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related. (shrink)

In the clinical practice of palliative medicine, recommended communication models fail to approximate the truth of suffering associated with an impending death. I provide evidence from patients' stories and empiric research alike to support this observation. Rather than attributing this deficiency to inadequate training or communication skills, I examine the epistemological premises of the biomedical language governing the patient-physician communication. I demonstrate that the contemporary biomedicine faces a fundamental aporetic occlusion in attempting to examine death. This review asserts that the (...) occlusion defines, rather than simply complicating, palliative care. Given the defining place of aporia in the care for the dying, I suggest that this finding shape the clinicians' responses to the needs of patients in clinical care and in designing palliative research. Lastly, I briefly signal that a genuinely apophatic voice construing the occlusion as a mystery rather than an aporia may be superior to the present communication and empathy models. (shrink)