1,720,962 research outputs found
Analyzing Nursing as a Dispositif : Healing and Devastation in the Name of Biopower. A Historical, Biopolitical Analysis of Psychiatric Nursing Care under the Nazi Regime, 1933-1945
No full textUnder the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945) a calculated killing of chronic “mentally ill” patients took place that was part of a large biopolitical program using well-established, contemporary scientific standards on the understanding of eugenics. Nearly 300,000 patients were assassinated during this period. Nurses executed this program through their everyday practice. However, suspicions have been raised that psychiatric patients were already assassinated before and after the Nazi regime, suggesting that the motives for these killings must be investigated within psychiatric practice itself. My research aims to highlight the mechanisms and scientific discourses in place that allowed nurses to perceive patients as unworthy of life, and thus able to be killed.
Using Foucauldian concepts of “biopower” and “State racism,” this discourse analysis is carried out on several levels. First, it analyzes nursing notes in one specific patient record and interprets them in relation to the kinds of scientific discourses that are identified, for example, in nursing journals between 1900 and 1945. Second, it argues that records are not static but rather produce certain effects; they are “performative” because they are active agents. Psychiatry, with its need to make patients completely visible and its desire to maintain its dominance in the psychiatric field, requires the utilization of writing in order to register everything that happens to individuals, everything they do and everything they talk about. Furthermore, writing enables nurses to pass along information from the “bottom-up,” and written documents allow all information to be accessible at any time. It is a method of centralizing information and of coordinating different levels within disciplinary systems. By following this approach it is possible to demonstrate that the production of meaning within nurses’ notes is not based on the intentionality of the writer but rather depends on discursive patterns constructed by contemporary scientific discourses. Using a form of “institutional ethnography,” the study analyzes documents as “inscriptions” that actively interven in interactions in institutions and that create a specific reality on their own accord. The question is not whether the reality represented within the documents is true, but rather how documents worked in institutions and what their effects were. Third, the study demonstrates how nurses were actively involved in the construction of patients’ identities and how these “documentary identities” led to the death of thousands of humans whose lives were considered to be “unworthy lives.”
Documents are able to constitute the identities of psychiatric patients and, conversely, are able to deconstruct them. The result of de-subjectification was that “zones for the unliving” existed in psychiatric hospitals long before the Nazi regime and within these zones, patients were exposed to an increased risk of death. An analysis of the nursing notes highlights that nurses played a decisive role in constructing these “zones” and had an important strategic function in them. Psychiatric hospitals became spaces where patients were reduced to a “bare life;” these spaces were comparable with the concentration camps of the Holocaust.
This analysis enables the integration of nursing practices under National Socialism into the history of modernity. Nursing under Nazism was not simply a relapse into barbarism; Nazi exclusionary practices were extreme variants of scientific, social, and political exclusionary practices that were already in place. Different types of power are identifiable in the Nazi regime, even those that Foucault called “technologies of the self” were demonstrated, for example, by the denunciation of “disabled persons” by nurses. Nurses themselves were able to employ techniques of power in the Nazi regime
"Led by the spirit of humanity": Canadian military nursing, 1914-1929.
No full textThis study examines Canadian military nursing from the onset of the 1914 Great War to the end of the first post-War decade in 1929. Its purpose is to focus on the experience of military nursing in an attempt to discover the specifics of the profession, particularly during the interwar years, and to analyse the factors that affected military nursing during that era. The analysis of military nursing in context with the era revealed three main conclusions. First, unlike the peacetime experience, military nursing during the Great War was a professionally and culturally liberating experience that set Military Nurses apart form their civil peers. Unfortunately, during the interwar years, the re-instatement of Nursing Sisters to pre-War military positions of administration, removed them from the clinical setting, was deleterious to the profession, and did not accord them the opportunity to apply the practice element of their profession. Second, the introduction of non-commissioned men as hospital orderlies provided the major hospital military workforce that maintained the Nursing Sister's distance from the bedside and usurped them of their clinical focus and the opportunity to provide patient care. As an unfavourable offshoot to this, Military Nurses were restricted to administration. Without a practice component to their profession, Military Nurses had little in common with their civil peers who were actively engaged in practice and in activities to advance the profession. Last, the limitation imposed upon Nursing Sisters' by their appointment of relative rank precluded them from advancing within the military organization, from participating in the re-structuring of the CAMC and from influencing any policy that affected patient services or the Nursing profession. (Abstract shortened by UMI.
Analyzing Nursing as a Dispositif : Healing and Devastation in the Name of Biopower. A Historical, Biopolitical Analysis of Psychiatric Nursing Care under the Nazi Regime, 1933-1945
No full textUnder the Nazi regime in Germany (1933-1945) a calculated killing of chronic “mentally ill” patients took place that was part of a large biopolitical program using well-established, contemporary scientific standards on the understanding of eugenics. Nearly 300,000 patients were assassinated during this period. Nurses executed this program through their everyday practice. However, suspicions have been raised that psychiatric patients were already assassinated before and after the Nazi regime, suggesting that the motives for these killings must be investigated within psychiatric practice itself. My research aims to highlight the mechanisms and scientific discourses in place that allowed nurses to perceive patients as unworthy of life, and thus able to be killed.
Using Foucauldian concepts of “biopower” and “State racism,” this discourse analysis is carried out on several levels. First, it analyzes nursing notes in one specific patient record and interprets them in relation to the kinds of scientific discourses that are identified, for example, in nursing journals between 1900 and 1945. Second, it argues that records are not static but rather produce certain effects; they are “performative” because they are active agents. Psychiatry, with its need to make patients completely visible and its desire to maintain its dominance in the psychiatric field, requires the utilization of writing in order to register everything that happens to individuals, everything they do and everything they talk about. Furthermore, writing enables nurses to pass along information from the “bottom-up,” and written documents allow all information to be accessible at any time. It is a method of centralizing information and of coordinating different levels within disciplinary systems. By following this approach it is possible to demonstrate that the production of meaning within nurses’ notes is not based on the intentionality of the writer but rather depends on discursive patterns constructed by contemporary scientific discourses. Using a form of “institutional ethnography,” the study analyzes documents as “inscriptions” that actively interven in interactions in institutions and that create a specific reality on their own accord. The question is not whether the reality represented within the documents is true, but rather how documents worked in institutions and what their effects were. Third, the study demonstrates how nurses were actively involved in the construction of patients’ identities and how these “documentary identities” led to the death of thousands of humans whose lives were considered to be “unworthy lives.”
Documents are able to constitute the identities of psychiatric patients and, conversely, are able to deconstruct them. The result of de-subjectification was that “zones for the unliving” existed in psychiatric hospitals long before the Nazi regime and within these zones, patients were exposed to an increased risk of death. An analysis of the nursing notes highlights that nurses played a decisive role in constructing these “zones” and had an important strategic function in them. Psychiatric hospitals became spaces where patients were reduced to a “bare life;” these spaces were comparable with the concentration camps of the Holocaust.
This analysis enables the integration of nursing practices under National Socialism into the history of modernity. Nursing under Nazism was not simply a relapse into barbarism; Nazi exclusionary practices were extreme variants of scientific, social, and political exclusionary practices that were already in place. Different types of power are identifiable in the Nazi regime, even those that Foucault called “technologies of the self” were demonstrated, for example, by the denunciation of “disabled persons” by nurses. Nurses themselves were able to employ techniques of power in the Nazi regime
"Officers and ladies": Canadian Nursing Sisters, women's work, and the Second World War
No full textCanadian nurses volunteered for military service in overwhelming numbers during the Second World War (1939--1945), comprising a second generation of military nurses known by rank and title as Nursing Sisters. Prevailing discourses portray them as 'extraordinary women,' patriots, heroines, feminists, and technological change agents. A small, diffuse body of literature documents their enlistments and postings but we know relatively little regarding how multiple identities and variables intersected to shape their experiences.
This research examines Canadian military nurses' work from a feminist perspective through the lens of medical technology and discourse analysis, analyzing how variables such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, nation, marital status, and age intersected to shape their experiences during the Second World War. Based on oral histories, military records, professional literature, and archival sources, I ask: Who enlisted as Nursing Sisters? How did the military transform them into military nurses? What influenced decisions concerning where and how they served? In what technological and military contexts did they practice? How did these contexts shape the nursing care of soldiers? What influenced the transfer of technology to nurses? How did these experiences shape wartime and postwar civilian nursing practice? How did shared experiences as military nurses and as soldiers influence postwar identity as Nursing Sisters?
War enabled the transformation of at least 4381 civilian nurses into Canadian Nursing Sisters who served 'for the duration.' They were posted to England, Northwest Europe, the Mediterranean, Hong Kong, and military hospitals across Canada, in Newfoundland, the United States, and South Africa. They worked in military general and specialty hospitals, hospital ships and trains, prisoner of war and internment camps, casualty clearing stations, field dressing stations, and field surgical units. Medical technology legitimated their presence within a complex military-medical-technological system while gender shaped their presence there as professional nurses, professional soldiers, and quintessential women. I argue that medical technology, gender, and war situated the Nursing Sisters as an expandable and expendable feminine workforce for the military, legitimated their presence at the frontlines of both war and medical technology, and facilitated the formation of a symbolic community and a social memory as military nurses
"Officers and ladies": Canadian Nursing Sisters, women's work, and the Second World War
No full textCanadian nurses volunteered for military service in overwhelming numbers during the Second World War (1939--1945), comprising a second generation of military nurses known by rank and title as Nursing Sisters. Prevailing discourses portray them as 'extraordinary women,' patriots, heroines, feminists, and technological change agents. A small, diffuse body of literature documents their enlistments and postings but we know relatively little regarding how multiple identities and variables intersected to shape their experiences.
This research examines Canadian military nurses' work from a feminist perspective through the lens of medical technology and discourse analysis, analyzing how variables such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, nation, marital status, and age intersected to shape their experiences during the Second World War. Based on oral histories, military records, professional literature, and archival sources, I ask: Who enlisted as Nursing Sisters? How did the military transform them into military nurses? What influenced decisions concerning where and how they served? In what technological and military contexts did they practice? How did these contexts shape the nursing care of soldiers? What influenced the transfer of technology to nurses? How did these experiences shape wartime and postwar civilian nursing practice? How did shared experiences as military nurses and as soldiers influence postwar identity as Nursing Sisters?
War enabled the transformation of at least 4381 civilian nurses into Canadian Nursing Sisters who served 'for the duration.' They were posted to England, Northwest Europe, the Mediterranean, Hong Kong, and military hospitals across Canada, in Newfoundland, the United States, and South Africa. They worked in military general and specialty hospitals, hospital ships and trains, prisoner of war and internment camps, casualty clearing stations, field dressing stations, and field surgical units. Medical technology legitimated their presence within a complex military-medical-technological system while gender shaped their presence there as professional nurses, professional soldiers, and quintessential women. I argue that medical technology, gender, and war situated the Nursing Sisters as an expandable and expendable feminine workforce for the military, legitimated their presence at the frontlines of both war and medical technology, and facilitated the formation of a symbolic community and a social memory as military nurses
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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