Situating the political in nurses' lives: The intersection of policy, practice and career for lesbian health advocates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite professional imperatives for nurses to engage with policy and political work, there is little research describing nurses' involvement with lesbian health in a Canadian context. This study focuses on the social and material influences informing the lives of nurses who have a career focus on lesbian health and the impacts of their everyday political work on nurses themselves, their institutions and communities. I used feminist comparative life history methodology and purposive convenience sampling to explore how policies and other factors influence nurses' capacity to enhance policy change. Ten female nurses across Ontario who are publicly known as lesbian health advocates in their communities participated. They had high social privilege, were well-experienced, highly educated and represented diverse sexual orientations, geographic locations and professional settings. Semi-structured interviews addressed their personal and professional experiences, career lives, and the meanings attributed to their work. The findings indicate that complex gender dynamics inform how nurses, both insiders and outsiders to lesbian communities, experience, understand and act politically in particular contexts. As policy actors working within and outside of institutions, they accommodate to and resist dominant heteronormative discourses to enhance social reform. Their capacity to advocate is related to systems of knowledge-making in education, research, and policy domains that authorize particular knowledge-makers and forms of knowledge or inquiry over others. These lesbian, bisexual, questioning, and heterosexual nurses encounter variable institutional support to advocate and unpredictable negative career/workplace dynamics despite their high credentials. A three-part conceptual framework grounded in these career histories situates the political in nurses' lives with a focus on the interrelationships among political knowledges, political practices, and political impacts. This study opens space to discuss often-silenced nursing practices and negotiation of professional identities, while validating nurses' multiple and complex contributions to policy processes. The findings enhance understandings of political socialization processes and nursing theories related to transformative practice, ethics, political competence, and social consciousness. There are implications for theory, practice, and research that facilitate the visibility of subjugated knowledges. Policy recommendations call for institutional support by the profession and organizations to enhance career and workplace climates for sexual minorities and their political allies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".