Collaboration across the hyphen

This paper presents a part of a collaborative project aiming to explore dialogic aspects of the encounter between nurses in somatic hospital departments and persons with lived experience of mental distress. Experience as well as (decades of) research (Kuzel et al., 2004; Alexander et al., 2016; Daumit & McGinty, 2018; Lyndon et al., 2023) has shown that this encounter can be overwhelming for both nurses and patients with severe consequences for patients´ safety and trust in health care systems as well as for nurses´ work environment.
First part of the project was based on narratives of persons with lived experience of mental distress (Andersen, 2023, in review). Through a dialogical narrative analysis inspired by Frank (2010), this study locates the concept of Othering in the center of the encounter: “the dirty business of boundary maintenance” (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 204), where we decide whether the Other are “us” or “them”. The self-Other hyphen, originally coined by Fine (1994) and further developed by Jones with Jenkins (2008),relate to historically and socially contingent mechanisms and power dynamics, placing some groups at the center and some in the margin.
Therefore, this second part of my project is based on “working the hyphen” (Jones, with Jenkins, 2008) of the nurse-patient encounter with nurses and experts by experience as co-researchers. We explore the dynamics of this encounter together through a series of collaborative workshops, “to further human co-existence across differences by harnessing difference as a generative force” (Phillips & Napan, 2016, p. 3). The project is guided by relational ethics. Through the use of aesthetic and creative methods I aim to democratize knowledge by opening up to embodied, affective, and experiential knowledge forms. Collaboration across the hyphen can cultivate critical reflexivity and, as suggested by Rose & Kalathil (2019), disrupt power hierarchies to bring the marginalised to the center.