Eleştirel Araştırma ve Praksis Olarak Kesişimsellik Ekseninde Hemşireler ve Sendikalar
Nurses and Syndicates on The Axis of Intersectionality as Critical Research and Practice

Summary/Abstract: Within the scope of this research, it is aimed to understand nurses' views on the existence of unions and their expectations from unions during the Covid-19 period and to construct a hypothetical model to explain this process. In this sense, our study is based on the assumption that nurses' perceptions of power relations, which have an intersectional impact on their daily and professional experiences, are related to their expectations towards unions. In this sense, intersectionality offers an important perspective for understanding the socio-cultural, economic and political inequalities experienced by nurses. In this context, the opinions of nurses on whether they considered the support of trade unions sufficient during the pandemic were evaluated as a critical part of the productive structures and mechanisms in the field of praxis that should be addressed with intersectionality towards power relations. Intersectionality offers a transformative perspective for making sense of the many forms of inequality and disadvantage that nurses experience in both ordinary and extraordinary times, across multiple socio-cultural, economic and political areas. In this sense, the main problematic of the research is to investigate “whether unions are sufficiently effective from the perspective of health workers in terms of taking into account the demands of nurses in the context of human rights and civil rights, protecting and improving their rights”. The basic assumption of the research is that in both ordinary and extraordinary periods, there should be no “sacrificed” (ignored) individuals in the society when viewed in the context of human rights and civil rights. In this sense, the issue of whether individuals can work in humane conditions is considered an important socio-ethical problematic in terms of both human rights and civil rights. On the axis of this basic problem, a data collection and analysis strategy that takes into account the individual demands of nurses regarding the existence of unions and their expectations regarding unions, using a data collection technique suitable for qualitative data analysis within the framework of grounded theory design, in which in-depth interviews were conducted, was adopted. The MAXQDA program was used to analyze the data. Based on individuals' explanations, the relationship between the components of the current socio-cultural-economic and political structure and the praxis of nurses in the health field was analyzed. From a critical realist methodological perspective, the experiences of nurses working during the Covid-19 period were first subjected to a meta-theoretical inquiry within the framework of the ontological and epistemological assumptions of critical realism, and reasoning, coding and analysis processes based on abduction and retroduction were carried out. Among the findings of the study, the majority of nurses emphasized the inadequacy of unions, but also emphasized that unions do their best, make efforts, but often face political obstacles or fail to take into account the interests of nurses. Therefore, it was observed that most nurses lacked confidence in the defense of nurses' union rights in the existing health unions within the health sector. As a result, explanations for hypothetical generative structures and mechanisms in this field were developed from nurses' views on unions. The importance of addressing the attitudes of unions with intersectionality in the development of explanations for these structural problems is emphasized. In this axis, it has been emphasized that it is important to address the attitudes of unions towards the multidimensional structural problems that nurses face in the axis of intersectionality theory. It is thought that a perspective that takes intersectionality into account will make it much more possible to realize transformative social policies that address the multidimensional structural problems that nurses face.

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