Watson’s View of Nursing Science Quarterly’s 35th Anniversary

Overview

NSQ has stood the test of time; in place for 35 years, creating space for the infinite evolution for the continuing wholeness development of the discipline of nursing science and scholarship. For 35 years NSQ publications and authors have been one of the key go-to sources for nursing authority; rediscovering its unique knowledge, via critiquing diverse theories; inviting multiple paradigms and accelerating the timely and timeless quest; and questioning “What is Nursing Science?” (Barrett, 2002) and “Again, what is nursing science?” (Barrett, 2017).

Wholeness and infinity, symbolizing the number (8) eight run through the origin, history, and expectation for sustaining NSQ’s visionary mission and purpose. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of NSQ across these 35 years is sustaining the scholarly theoretical and scientific discourse, devoting its focus to clarifying, unifying, and advancing nursing as a distinct discipline, with an enduring contribution toward sustaining a worldview of unity, wholeness, and the infinite evolution of unitary phenomena of human-universe.

Disciplinary Discourse

Informed by Donaldson and Crowley’s (1978) classic manuscript on discipline, nurse scholars continue to affirm the necessity of clarifying nursing as a distinct discipline, acknowledging that the discipline informs the profession. Indeed, prominent nurse leaders continue to raise questions about the survival of nursing without a shared ontological, philosophical, and ethical disciplinary worldview (Barrett, 2017; Grace, Willis, Roy, & Jones, 2015; Philips, 2017; Watson, 2011).

NSQ has an enduring commitment and contribution to the disciplinary quest of nursing, supporting and guiding nursing as a distinct professional discipline. If the profession attempts to advance without being informed by the discipline, it lacks the ability to articulate its mission and purpose; its philosophical orientation to humanity; and its ethic, values, and focus on nursing phenomena, such as unity, wholeness, health, healing, pattern, wholeness, energy, transcendence, relationship, intentionality, consciousness, and more. Without disciplinary clarity, without the ability to critique the dominant paradigm of science, medicine, and corporate-minded institutions, nursing loses its way; succumbs to the conventional, control-paradigm mindsets; and becomes dispirited, detoured, and threatened with its survival. Part of the distinct contribution of NSQ over these 35 years is its enduring intellectual-philosophical leadership, critical discourse, and advocating and affirming nursing’s scholarly evolution. NSQ has raised and continues to raise interrogations about the ethical, ontological, epistemological, methodological, praxis, and policy underpinnings of the dominant discourse.

NSQ has helped to clarify what is meant by discipline versus profession: For example:

Without disciplinary clarity and maturity, nursing can lose its way and its own raison d'être, modeling itself on medical-technical advancements, commercial industry–Disneyworld thinking, and corporate business economics. NSQ has avoided these institutional dominant quagmires by advocating, evolving, and sustaining nursing’s scientific discourse, critique, and evolution. However, the dominant institutional, corporate, nonintellectual challenges to nursing advancing as a distinct discipline linger from nursing’s past and are constantly provoked in the current political-practice struggles and continue to face its future.

From Oral Tradition to Written Scholarship

In spite of nursing’s ancient history of service to humanity, it largely evolved and sustained itself through time through oral traditions but in practice was structured to be accountable to institutional demands, medical knowledge, skills, and procedures, in contrast to its own phenomena. Nursing like some other cultures, sans Nightingale, did not have much of a written history. Indeed, many indigenous cultures did not and still do not have a written history, and it is orally passed down from one generation to another.

These were storylines, considered rich ways of knowing and teaching one’s heritage, cosmology, and values, that are conveyed strictly from oral history, storytelling, and person-to-person teaching. As Coelho (2010) reminded us, throughout history great teachers of ancient time did not write a single word: Buddha, Pythagoras, Socrates, Lao Tzu, Jesus, and so on. However, their students wrote down their teachings to remember as an extension of memory.

In a similar way, perhaps nursing’s oral tradition gave way to the need to give voice and written language to its phenomena from one generation to another. However, while oral traditions can be and are great sources of teachings, they have little ability to give voice or language to its phenomena or locate its teachings within an exploratory framework for knowledge generation.

In moving from oral traditions to written word, messages became visible, palpable, transforming words into meaning, reflection, and critique. Thus, the written word is able to live longer than the person who first spoke it or wrote it (Coelho, 2010). For example, between Nightingale in 1800 and Harmer and Henderson in the 1960s, there was little to no written source for scientific discussion and exploration of nursing phenomena. Between Nightingale and the 1950s and beyond, nursing clinical practice was based largely on oral hospital traditions, rituals, and practical discoveries, passed on through training programs and/or past experiences, often passing on personal experiences, knowledge, and insights, through practical discoveries and traditions, without an underlying understanding or exploratory frameworks.

Before the 1970s, there were few nursing scholarly publications. In 1952, Nursing Research was the first journal dedicated to nursing research; thereafter, an increasing number of nursing specialty journals emerged.

It is only within the past five decades or so that the evolution of nursing science has been coming of age. In the early 1960s, the profession began to cry out nationally for nurses to receive higher education and have access to doctoral programs and PhD studies to advance its unique knowledge and contribution to society and academe.

As NSQ matured in its discourse, during the 1980s and 1990s, it contributed to the scholarship of an evolving nursing science momentum that was advancing between eras. Here is where NSQ identified pillars of nursing knowledge, evolving worldview of wholeness, infinity, harmony, unity, and an evolved consciousness of nursing’s unique and distinct phenomena.

NSQ Evolution of Scholarly Discourse

Across the first two decades of publications, we find early themes that are foundational to a scholarly disciplinary inquiry: questioning disciplinary meta-paradigm categories such as ontology–epistemology; ethics; critiquing views of evidence; exploring different modes of inquiry–forms of methods/methodologies–qualitative and phenomenology. With the cycle of time and maturing, more sophisticated publications evolved, including review of multiple and specific diverse theories within different paradigms, asking new questions such as “What is meant by knowledge development?” and “What counts as evidence, policy, and practice directions?”

In the third decade, NSQ continued to capture nursing’s progress. More scholarly publications in NSQ began to emerge related to human subjective experiential concepts that inform and clarify individual theories. For example, experiential subjective human concepts such as time, complexity, caring, transcendence, well-being/becoming, unity, power, loss, grief’s resilience, patterning, energy, consciousness, evolution, and many other human phenomena.

Most recently NSQ has captured contemporary, futuristic challenges, disruptions, and crises at the global-societal, human-planetary level. Here in this 2020-2021 pandemic, posttruth era, NSQ heightened the intellectual conversation and critiques of bogus conferences and journals information technology, simulation, philosophies of truth cultural dynamics–Islamic care community, pandemics, resilience, conscious dying, self-transcendence, quantum, and related phenomena.

Summary

NSQ for 35 years has created a foundation for nursing science/scholarship that embodies and transcends time and matter; balances and harmonizes the early historic traditions of diversity and complexity of nursing, of science of knowledge of ways of knowing, ways of being/becoming/transcending–evolving–symbolizing the infinity of wholeness of the human spirit of nursing science.

NSQ not only crosses three plus decades of scholarship, when viewed as a timeline, but when viewed through numerology symbolism, NSQ transcends into infinity. NSQ opens a portal for nursing’s infinite scholarly evolution as a distinct scientific discipline toward, for example, a worldview/cosmology of wholeness/ oneness and unity:

Conclusion

In conclusion, as a number, 35 stands as a timeline for NSQ as a conscious, intellectual leader for nursing science, advancing nursing as a distinct discipline for our world’s unknown future.

As an 8 in numerology years, an 8 represents wholeness, integrity, circles spiraling to infinity, in a continuously evolving universe, a universe that is calling for nursing science like never before. My hope is that NSQ will continue to evolve into an even more whole person/whole universe, unifying voice and source for nursing knowledge.

NSQ is needed for another 35 years and beyond. It has established itself as an intellectual-scientific advocate for sustaining and deepening nursing as a mature caring-healing health discipline in a world that is turning upside down. May the numerological 8 predictions of unity and infinity be fulfilled by NSQ’s conscious evolution, continuously unveiling outdated institutional patterns, paving the way into an unknown future?