Routledge Research in Nursing and Midwifery

Nursing Theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, and Foucault critiques mainstream American nursing theory and its use of post-structural theory, comparing and contrasting how postmodern and post-structural ideas have been used fruitfully in nursing research and theorizing elsewhere. In the late 1980s, references to post-structuralism and Michel Foucault started to appear in nursing journals. Since then, hundreds of nursing publications have cited postmodernism and key post-structural ideas such as power/knowledge, discourse, and de-centring the human subject. In Nursing Theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, and Foucault, Olga Petrovskaya argues that the application of these ideas is markedly different in American nursing theory scholarship compared to nursing theoretical scholarship generated outside the canon of "unique" nursing theory. Analysing relevant literature from the late 1980s through 2010s, she demonstrates this difference, arguing that