sociology

Sharing our research on student volunteering, critical pedagogy and compassion in nurse education

Research by Professors Sue Dyson and Olga van den Akker, Dr Liang Liu  and Mike O’Driscoll uniquely draws together three important concepts for the first time:  namely student volunteering, critical thinking skills for nurses, and caring and compassionate nursing practice and shows how these relate to critical pedagogy in the nurse education.  The programme of research has so far resulted in three conference papers, one peer-reviewed publication, a book and international collaboration with Dr Kwadwo Korsah  at the University of Ghana School of Nursing in Accra and the establishment of academic networks in Canada, Australia, and Latvia.

Conference papers Mike O’Driscoll, a researcher in CCRNM, presented findings of research into the role that volunteering  can play in developing critical pedagogy within nurse education at the AITNER Sociology conference in Athens in May  and at the National Council of Voluntary Organisations Research Conference in Nottingham, in September. Also in September, Professor Sue Dyson presented findings from the research at the World Congress on Nursing & Nurse Education Conference in Rome.

The presentations were very well received and led to many interesting discussions around volunteering in health professional education and how critical pedagogy relates to compassionate care.

The presentation titled ‘The extent, variability and attitudes towards volunteering among nursing students: Implications for pedagogy in nurse education’  presented by Mike O’Driscoll at the AITNER conference in Athens can be downloaded here AITNER 2017 PRESENTATION.

Peer-reviewed publication Findings from this research have also been published in the peer reviewed journal Nurse Education in Practice.

Book The research is the subject of the book by Professor Sue Dyson to be published on October 7th. 2017: Critical Pedagogy in Nursing: Transformational Approaches to Nurse Education in a Globalized World (Palgrave Macmillan).

The programme of research continues and for further information please contact Professor Sue Dyson (s.dyson@derby.ac.uk).

 

The prohibition is prohibited: new managerialism

I found this on the Zizek Studies Facebook page: (It probably makes most sense to those familiar with his way of thinking – and who can imagine him saying this at some public lecture)

In our permissive times, a new form of the unsayable is more and more acquiring a ­central role: it is not only that certain things are prohibited to say – the prohibition itself is prohibited: we are not allowed to say openly what is prohibited.ZIZEK

Already in Stalinism, it was not only prohibited to criticise Stalin and the party publicly, it was even more prohibited to announce this prohibition publicly. If someone were to shout back at a critic of Stalin, “Are you crazy? Don’t you know that we are not allowed to do this?” he would have disappeared into the Gulag even faster than the open critic of Stalin. Unexpectedly, the same holds for the relations of domination in our permissive post-patriarchal societies: a modern boss is tolerant, he behaves like a colleague of ours, sharing dirty jokes, inviting us for a drink, openly displaying his weaknesses, admitting that he is “merely human like us”. He is deeply offended if we remind him that he is our boss – however, it is this very rejection of explicit authority that guarantees his de facto power.

This is why the first gesture of liberation is to force the master to act as one: our only defence is to reject his “warm human” approach and to insist that he should treat us with cold distance. We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude.

Slavoj Žižek

Our Sociology book launched at RCN Research Conference

After a year of meeting at secret locations in London we finished our book Understanding Sociology in Nursing with Danny Kelly and Pam Smith, 2016 ISBN: 9781473913592 Available from Wordery or from the publisher Sage. The idea of the book is to do something different to the sociological-theory-for-nurses format. To me (MT) those kinds of books seem to be aimed at other academics rather than student nurses or practitioners. Our book starts with issues that this kind of reader will have to face e.g. becoming a nurse, or when things go wrong and looks at how basic sociological concepts can help make sense of these things. The book was launched by sociologist Julia Lawton.

book cover

Sage launched the book at this year’s RCN International Research Conference in Edinburgh. Here are the authors, attempting symmetry.
author