Signing Communities Dealing with Non-Knowledge: Some Cases from Nursing

Abstract

This article takes signatures and practices of signing as a point of departure for exploring and understanding nurses’ work with non-knowledge as a new responsibility. In this context, non-knowledge does not relate to the absence of knowledge as such but to the practices by which nurses recognize knowledge challenges and implement strategies for specifying, explicating and further detailing what they know they do not know. Here, nurses’ work with procedures is used as a specific example of non-knowledge. Considering signatures as a community-forming device takes us directly into these new work situations. It provides fertile starting points for the analysis of engagement with non-knowledge, traces different ways in which the signature is achieved and points to significant changes in professional work.