Search

BRISKIN L. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 285-296 Resistance, mobilization and militancy: nurses on strike Drawing on nurses' strikes in many countries, this paper explores nurse militancy with reference to professionalism and the commitment to service; patriarchal practices and gendered subordination; and proletarianization and the confrontation with healthcare restructuring. These deeply entangled trajectories have had a significant impact on the work, consciousness and militancy of nurses and have shaped occupation-specific forms of resistance. They have produced a pattern of overlapping solidarities - occupational solidarity, gendered alliances and coalitions around healthcare restructuring - which have supported, indeed promoted, militancy among nurses, despite the multiple forces arrayed against them. The professional commitments of nurses to the provision of care have confronted healthcare restructuring, nursing shortages, intensification of work, precarious employment and gendered hierarchies with a militant discourse around the public interest, and a reconstitution and reclamation of 'caring', what I call the politicisation of caring. In fact, nurses' dedication to caring work in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries may encourage rather than dissuade them from going on strike. This paper uses a trans-disciplinary methodology, qualitative material in the form of strike narratives constructed from newspaper archives, and references to the popular and scholarly literature on nursing militancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sister (Sr.) Marie Simone Roach, of the Sisters of St. Martha of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, died at the Motherhouse on 2 July 2016 at the age of 93, leaving behind a rich legacy of theoretical and practical work in the areas of care, caring and nursing ethics. She was a humble soul whose deep and scholarly thinking thrust her onto the global nursing stage where she will forever be tied to a central concept in nursing, caring, through her Six Cs of Caring model. In Canada, she was the lead architect of the Canadian Nurses Association's first code of ethics, and her influence on revisions to it is still profound more than 35 years later. In this paper, four global scholars in nursing and ethics are invited to reflect on Sr. Simone's contribution to nursing and health‐care, and we link her work to nursing and health‐care going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]