Editorial

Abstract

Ten years ago, in the inaugural issue of Nursing Inquiry, Editor Judith Parker introduced a journal that would offer Australian nursing scholarship to the world and, in turn, invite scholarship from around the world. She promised a journal that would be a forum for nurses actively to engage the postmodern ideas and critical methodologies that were then increasingly shaping scholarship across the academic and practice disciplines. In the pages of Nursing Inquiry, nurses would use these ideas and methods to re-examine taken-for-granted practices in nursing. She conceived the journal as a venue for complex ideas that would be made accessible to readers and would be demonstrably relevant to nursing practice. Looking back over the last decade, Nursing Inquiry has more than lived up to its promise, becoming the premier journal in nursing for the advancement of truly critical inquiry. I hope I will be forgiven for national stereotyping, but I have often said to colleagues and students that nobody in nursing does critical inquiry better than Australians and nothing embodies this talent better than Nursing Inquiry. The very first issue contains one of my favourite papers, namely, Kim Walker's article on nursing, science, and representation, a masterful discursive treatment of nursing identity and the quest for legitimacy. This paper and others by him and outstanding scholars such as Jocalyn Lawler, Trudy Rudge and Gavin Andrews is why I have saved every copy of this journal. Nursing Inquiry has provided a venue for the best in critical inquiry, taking on such diverse entities as evidence-based practice, research methodology, technological innovation, and clinical practices (such as wound care) by engaging their politics, poetics, and polemics. Although I have, at times, thought some authors went to unwarrantable extremes in advancing an agenda, I have always been intellectually challenged and aroused. This is no small feat given the numbers of journals available today and the too frequent recycling of the same old and tired ideas. And I do appreciate that, sometimes, going to extremes is required simply to move people anywhere from where they have been. This anniversary issue shows why the journal promises to remain the best in critical scholarship. Several papers in this issue offer new insights into nursing practice and ideas about nursing. Judith Parker uses psychoanalytic theories to address the confinement and containment functions of nurses. Sioban Nelson and Mary-Ellen Purkis trouble competency as it is conceived in Canadian nursing. Davina Allen showcases the contradiction between the idea of nursing as unmediated caring and the reality of nursing practice as an intermediary. And Elizabeth Peter and Joan Lischenko illuminate the moral ambiguities in the professed location of nursing vis-à-vis patients. The other papers in this issue offer a Foucauldian-inspired ethnographic treatment of men's sexual identity in a genitourinary clinic (Anthony Pryce), a Foucauldian-inspired analysis of post-World War II and contemporary posters advertising smoking (Annette Street), and a consideration of the promise of postcolonial feminist scholarship to promote health (Joan Anderson). All of these entries are characterized by vibrant critique and innovative treatment of subject matters of importance in nursing and health-care. They set a course and standard for nursing scholarship. So, Happy Birthday Nursing Inquiry! I wish you many more decades of success. You have done nursing scholarship proud.