Social justice as nursing resistance: a foucauldian discourse analysis within emergency departments

• Published in: Nursing philosophy 2025-01, Vol.26 (1), p.e12508
• Main Authors: Slemon, Allie, Bungay, Vicky, Varcoe, Colleen, Blanchet Garneau, Amélie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Emergency Service, Hospital - organization & administration; Humans; Qualitative Research; Social Justice
• ISSN: 1466-7681; 1466-769X; 1466-769X
• DOI: 10.1111/nup.12508

Social justice is consistently upheld as a central value within the nursing profession, yet there are persistent inconsistencies in how this construct is conceptualized, further compounded by a lack of empirical inquiry into how nurses enact social justice in everyday practice. In the current context in which structural inequities are perpetuated throughout the health care system, and the emergency department in particular, it is crucial to understand how nurses understand and enact social justice as a disciplinary commitment. This research examines how nurses' talk and institutional texts discursively construct social justice within the institutional context of the emergency department, and how such discourses shape the enactment of social justice within nursing practice. Guided by Iris Marion Young's theorizing of distributive and systemic social justice paradigms, this Foucauldian discourse analysis draws on emergency department nurses' talk (N = 25 interviews) and institutional documents (N = 27) as key texts that visibilize dominant and excluded discourses of social justice within the institutional context of the emergency department, and implications for how social justice is enacted through nursing practices. This analysis identified one overarching discursive pattern, in which social justice was discursively constructed through a hegemonic distributive paradigm, yet also resisted through nurses' conceptualization and enactment of a systemic social justice paradigm that facilitated their recognition and remediation of inequities. This central discursive pattern is explored through three exemplars of nurses' enactment of social justice as resistance: triage, harm reduction, and care planning. Findings from this analysis demonstrate that while a hegemonic distributive paradigm has dominated conceptualizations of social justice within nursing, a re-construction of social justice through a systemic paradigm may guide nurses in enacting practices that remediate inequities in health and health care.