Rural Primary Care Nurses: Governing (Im)mobile Selves

Abstract

This paper investigates the ways that rural/remote nurses construct professional identities in relative isolation. Rural/remote primary care nurses in southern New Zealand engage in complex spatial negotiations within their work. Discourses of autonomy and independence are used in order to make sense of their decisions to relocate to this rural work. Even as they do this, nurses are caught up in complex and contradictory reworkings of mobility and space, since within the work that they do they are extremely spatially constrained. The Foucauldian idea of governmentality, understood here as the conceptual point of intersection between technologies of power and technologies of the self, is used in this paper as a tool to attempt to make sense of the ways that these rural professionals are simultaneously mobile and confined. The particular focus is on technologies of the self.

Key Words:

• Rural sociology
• rural nursing
• governmentality
• mobility