Although spiritual practices such as prayer are engaged by many to support well-being and coping, little research has addressed nurses and prayer, whether for themselves or facilitating patients' use of prayer. We conducted a qualitative study to explore how prayer (as a proxy for spirituality and religion) is manifest-whether embraced, tolerated, or resisted-in healthcare, and how institutional and social contexts shape how prayer is understood and enacted. This paper analyzes interviews with 21 nurses in Vancouver and London as a subset of the larger study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe global COVID-19 pandemic has revealed healthcare settings as sites of much-needed scrutiny as to the workings of racism and racialization in shaping healthcare encounters, health outcomes, and workplace conditions. Little research has focused on how healthcare chaplains experience and respond to social processes of racism and racialization. We apply a critical race lens to understand racism and racialization in healthcare chaplaincy, and inspired by Patricia Hill Collins, propose a "critical multifaith approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn sociological studies of religion and chaplaincy, there is little research on how gender plays a role in structural inequalities and experiences of women chaplains. Through research on the work of women chaplains in public healthcare in Vancouver (Canada) and London (England) this qualitative study revealed that while they have opportunities for leadership and ministry in chaplaincy, they are often on the margins of the religious institutions they are affiliated with and the secular medical organisations that employ them. Simultaneously, they confront the social structuring of gender and race that can affect them being overlooked.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough the value of spiritual care in the care of older adults is supported by research, few studies have focused specifically on prayer in residential care settings. This ethnographic study with fifteen chaplains and administrators in eleven residential care homes involved analyses of walking interviews and research diaries. Findings revealed the spaces in which prayer happens and the forms it takes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealthcare services are increasingly being provided in the home. At the same time, these home contexts are changing as global migration has brought unprecedented diversity both in the recipients of care, and home health workers. In this paper, we present findings of a Canadian study that examined the negotiation of religious and ethnic plurality in home health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral intriguing developments mark the role and expression of religion and spirituality in society in recent years. In what were deemed secular societies, flows of increased sacralization (variously referred to as 'new', 'alternative', 'emergent' and 'progressive' spiritualities) and resurgent globalizing religions (sometimes with fundamentalist expressions) are resulting in unprecedented plurality. These shifts are occurring in conjunction with increasing ethnic diversity associated with global migration, as well as other axes of difference within contemporary society.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough the importance of the researcher's embodiment has been noted in health and social sciences research, in many instances, more attention has been paid to the embodiment of the researched. Thus, more in-depth analysis of the embodied researcher can illuminate qualitative inquiry. The influence of the embodied researcher became visible in a recent critical ethnographic study examining the negotiation of religious, spiritual, and cultural plurality in health care.
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