This book constitutes the first systematic attempt to bring together the vast field of postmodern and post-structuralist nursing literature from the late 1980s through the first decade of the 2000s. Olga Petrovskaya demonstrates this literature’s significant contribution to ‘theorizing nursing’ in a mode of critique. Critique here refers to analyses attentive to historicity, materiality, and politics of nursing practice and nursing knowledge. She contrasts this with the mostly American literature on ‘nursing theory,’ construed mainly in terms of formal systematization. Her main argument is that the American understanding of ‘nursing theory’ has dominated nursing textbooks across the globe, to the extent that the many modes of ‘theorizing nursing’ are rendered mostly invisible. She raises important questions about how these two almost radically opposed conceptualizations of theory and their methods and/or status in nursing qua knowledge influence what is taught to and studied by nursing students and scholars. The work is highly original in scope and depth and should be considered required reading for all nursing scholars.Miriam Bender, PhD RN FAANAssociate ProfessorFounding Director, Center for Nursing PhilosophySue & Bill Gross School of NursingUniversity of California, IrvineThere’s a lot to be written about the history of academic nursing theory, and this is a hefty contribution to our understanding of one prominent slice of it. Olga Petrovskaya has written an intriguing analysis of American nursing scholarship, and the way in which its parochialism, self-celebration, ex officio nursing values, and old-fashioned positivism preclude serious consideration of postmodern and poststructuralist ideas, rendering them largely unintelligible to US nurses. Petrovskaya describes American theory’s three responses to French philosophy, Foucault in particular. Ignore it. Dismiss it. Assimilate a domesticated, housebroken version of it. And she suggests that this is consistent with the ideal of an isolationist ‘unique nursing science’ – its drawbridge up, its portcullis down – freezing out any challenge to its canon from other philosophies, other disciplines, other parts of the world. Perhaps this book will turn out to be the unstoppable force that dislodges the hitherto immovable object of American nursing theory. That could be a watershed moment. But this is American nursing theory. I’m not holding my breath.John PaleyUniversity of Worcester
