Critical ethnography and its others: Entanglement of matter/meaning/madness.

Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts-based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist-based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated in this inquiry is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning-making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment.

From Subjective Opinion to Medical Fact: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mental Health Nursing Education.

Using various methods and strategies of Critical Discourse Analysis, this article demonstrates how certain influential nursing texts generate a certain biomedical framing of the mental health nursing assessment. Accordingly, the mental health assessment in undergraduate nursing education becomes imbricated in processes of governance that legitimate psychiatric discourse by 1. Presenting the opinions and judgements of mental health professionals as objective scientific facts; 2. Utilizing grammatical mood and modality to convey a matter-of-fact urgency and necessity for psychiatric intervention that is made to appear largely through conjecture and passive logical leaps; and 3. Through hybrid fusion with other scientific and medical disciplines that lend credibility to psychiatry through association. While we largely focus on critique of the mental health assessment, we buttress this critique using two other institutional texts that draw on a psychiatric framing of mental health, to demonstrate how these texts reinforce and work in discursive cohesion with the mental health assessment. We conclude by discussing the implications of these consequences to nursing education and nursing students and educators alike.