Embodied knowing? The constitution of expertise as moral practice in nursing

• Autor(a) principal: Nelson,Sioban
• Data de Publicação: 2007
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Texto & contexto enfermagem (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-07072007000100017
• topic: Ethics; Professional practice; Morale; Nursing

Prominent nursing authors, such as Patricia Benner, are influential in the increasing trend to conceptualize ethics as a contextual and embodied way of knowing, embedded in nursing expertise. It will be argued here that rather than revealing a moral truth manifest in practice, the idea of ethics as expertise constitutes nursing practice as a moral endeavour and the nurse as a practitioner who has acquired a particular moral deportment. In fact, the case will be made that the expert nurse as a moral and ethical category is the result of the elaboration of prestigious humanistic discourses in the educational and professional shaping of nurses. These discourses act on and are enacted by the individual nurse through his or her participation in specific ethical exercises that result in the constitution of the desired subjectivity. Of critical importance here is the widespread adoption in nursing pedagogy and professional literature of phenomenological perspectives on the body and nursing practice. This paper examines both the intellectual origins and contemporary implications of this trend for practicing nurses.