ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Olga Petrovskaya unpacks the philosophic implications of clinically situated technological innovation in nursing and health care. She describes the influence of technology on professional status and developing nurse-patient and nurse-health care worker relationships over time. Drawing on the work of nurse scholars, primarily Margarete Sandelowski, as well as writers on socio-materiality and actor network theory, she explores nursing’s contrasting positions towards technology, which can be summarized as anti- and pro-: nurses are warm and caring and technology is cold and inhuman. Petrovskaya deconstructs this binary perspective, arguing that the human and the technological mutually constitute each other. In describing a non-essentialist, non-deterministic, non-instrumental, and non-technical view of technology, she shows readers that a robust theorizing of technology can and does include nurses’ practical knowledge, caring, and embodied ways of knowing as well as the latest developments in medical technology.
