title: The deconstructing angel: nursing, reflection and evidence-based practice.
abstract: This paper explores Jacques Derrida's strategy of deconstruction as a way of understanding and critiquing nursing theory and practice. Deconstruction has its origins in philosophy, but I argue that it is useful and relevant as a way of challenging the dominant paradigm of any discipline, including nursing. Because deconstruction is notoriously difficult to define, I offer a number of examples of deconstruction in action. In particular, I focus on three critiques of reflective practice by the meta-narrative of evidence-based practice (EBP) and attempt to show how those critiques can be directed back at EBP itself. I conclude with the observation that EBP is open to many of the criticisms that it directs at other discourses, including problems of a lack of empirical evidence, of distortions due to memory, and of falsification of the 'facts'.
authors.affiliation: School of Health Science, University of Wales, Swansea, UK. g.rolfe@swan.ac.uk
authors.forename: Gary
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rolfe
mesh_terms: D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D019545:Intuition; D019359:Knowledge; D008128:Logic; D008568:Memory; D033262:Narration; D015404:Nursing Methodology Research; D009742:Nursing Theory; D010687:Philosophy, Nursing; D033302:Postmodernism; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic; D012586:Science; D012660:Semantics; D013850:Thinking