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The purpose of this article is to convey a conversation that occurred over a period of months between a unitary-transformative scholar and a critical feminist scholar. The intention of our conversation was to uncover, through dialogue and engagement, ways in which these two paradigms might help us understand the forces and conditions which impede and may liberate full expression of health and well-being. Areas of essential tensions addressed were the relationships of action and theory, sense and soul, stories and numbers, and aesthetics and empirics. Critical conversational points were notions of liberation, consciousness and social conditions, unpredictability and acausality, and potentials for reconciliation that would serve nursing and society. We concluded that although there are significant differences that exist between the two paradigms, there are areas in which we might begin to speak with one voice for the betterment of nursing and health care.
At the National Forum on Doctoral Education in Nursing in 1992, representatives of four major paradigmatic perspectives in nursing shared the stage. The paradigms presented were the particulate-deterministic, interactive-integrative, unitary-transformative (Newman, Sime, & Corcoran-Perry, 1991) and feminist/ critical theory. The focus of that conference was to articulate the implications of these paradigms for the development of doctoral education in nursing. It was rare to have these four views discussed in one setting and, as representatives of two of these paradigms, we both found the experience illuminated the distinctions nursing knowledge and serving as context for the preparation of nursing scientists. It was the format of that particular conference that allowed presenters to give participants an encapsulated view of each paradigm represented and to describe implications for doctoral education after which the audience was given an opportunity to respond and/or ask questions of the four panelists. There was little time, however, for an in-depth conversation across these paradigms.
This article details a conversation between a unitary-transformative theory scholar and a critical feminist theory scholar. The dialogue focuses on areas of essential tension and mutuality between the two paradigms with the intent of creating the possibility of emergent reconciliation, elaboration, clarification, illumination, and innovation. A basic assumption underlying the conversation is that both of these paradigmatic perspectives individually have features which clearly serve nursing science and practice. Yet emerging ideas could arise...