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Peer Reviewed
Objective
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.
Findings/Key points
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.
Design/methods
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).
