Nursing practice and ethnography: a mental health nursing response to threatened violence in ethnographic fieldwork

This paper reverses the usual argument about the relationship between research and nursing by showing how mental health nursing knowledge can be used to facilitate ethnographic research. It focuses on the use of mental health nursing in ethnographic data generation from Serbian Australian participants living in the shadow of the Balkan war 1991-96. Beginning with a fieldwork episode at the scene of property damage, it traces the main features of participants' distress, and describes a mental health nursing response to a threat of violence against the author. A background in mental health nursing facilitated a productive and safe interaction under difficult and extremely emotionally charged circumstances.