Socio-poetics: for an esthetic perspective of nursing research/care/education

Abstract

Socio-poetics emerged in Brazil in the 1990’s from a study performed in 1994-95, at the Celso Suckow da Fonseca Federal Center for Technology Education (CEFET, as per its acronym in Portuguese), in Rio de Janeiro. The referred study was conducted with students and educators of the SERVIR Project for Population Education, with the support of psychology graduates from the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ, as per its acronym in Portuguese), and within the setting of the Nursing Graduate Program at Rio de Janeiro Federal University. This initiative had a significant impact on the development of scientific research in nursing as well as in human and social sciences, mainly because it revealed a new way of looking at qualitative research. Jacques Gauthier, the French philosopher and educator who created socio-poetics, defined the approach on the launch of his first book, published in 1996 by the Department of University Outreach of the Rio de Janeiro State University (DEPEXT/UERJ) as: an epistemological review? This was one of many attempts to answer questions of today’s researchers about the socio-political meaning of knowledge production.

Despite the young age of socio-poetics in terms of scientificity, it is an innovative methodological proposal that strengthens the knowledge of research subjects, making them co-researchers; according to a preface by Reinaldo Fleuri, an internationally acknowledged education researcher, in one of his latest books regarding this approach.

According to the philosophical principles of socio-poetics, the body is a source of knowledge, as it explores the cognitive strength of one’s senses, emotions, and gestures, besides their imagination, intuition and reasoning. Hence, socio-poetics promotes artistic creativity in learning, knowing, researching, and providing human care. While understanding nursing as a science of sensitiveness, as it deals with affection, people’s sensations, and subjectivities, socio-poetics values cultures, both the dominated and those offering resistance, and the concepts they produce, alerting that all types of knowledge share the same rights, and emphasizes the spiritual, human, and political dimension of knowledge construction.

The validation of socio-poetics as a research method occurred through the defense of the doctoral dissertation The institution of scientificity: an institutional and socio-poetic analysis of the relationships between nursing research students and their advisers, by Iraci dos Santos, in 1997. Iraci already worked as a Free-Lecturer and Full Professor in Nursing Research at UERJ, at that time. It is observed, therefore, that the referred approach to man’s knowledge as a political and social being had, over the years, a vast field for growing, rearranging and advancing along the extensive path of philosophy, health, human, and social sciences.

Nevertheless, using the philosophical principles of socio-poetics as guidelines in research/education/care is a task that yields ethical and epistemological outcomes. If socio-poetics is used in such a way, it will be an approach that functions as a form of resistance in the field of scientific production, because the research group, the analytical device of the socio-poetic method, is self-instituted during the research process, thus becoming its own master, because it is continuously regenerated by its will and its work.