Cartographies of rural community nursing and primary health care: mapping the in-between spaces

This postmodern feminist ethnographies research aimed to explore the everyday meanings of primary health care (PHC) held by rural community nurses. Secondly, the research aimed to explore the everyday meanings of care held by the clients of the rural community nurses who participated in the study. The representation of this research is written in four voices which converse with each other to varying degrees in each chapter. This writing strategy is a deliberate one aimed at destabilising the usual approach to representation of research. It is also a strategy which seeks methodological coherence. The third aim therefore is to deliberately trouble the acceptable grounds concerning how nursing research is represented. The research utilised dialogical (conversational)and participant observation methods concerning the everyday meanings of nurses and their clients.The meanings I made of the information were created from a deconstruction of the texts. These texts included fieldnotes of participant observations and transcripts of conversations with nurses and their clients. The form of deconstruction utilised was informed from multiple sources and involved three levels of analysis. A realist interpretation was followed by an oppositional interpretation and then a reconstructive movement. The results revealed that rural community nurses practice is both spatio-temporally contextualised and metaphorically situated in an in-between space. This in-between space is situated between margin and the centre. Rural community nurses working on the margins traverse this space in order to overcome further marginalisation whilst working with Indigenous Australians and the aged. Moreover, the in-between space encompasses and creates opportunities to mutually exchange the gift of desire that being - empowering and compassionate relationships with clients and colleagues. Futhermore, whilst rural community nurses are strongly committed to the philosophy of PHC, their evryday working life is discursively constructed by powerful discourses which result in oppositional tensions. The tensions and the 'in-between' space allow the rhetoric of PHC to be resisted and reframed. Consequently, the oppositional constructs of their practice were displaced. Moreover, this necessitated the negotiation of space and place, and required the reconstruction of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and becomin