Performing Presence

This chapter completes Part 2 and presents and discusses findings revolving around the last main theme of my study, ‘performing presence’. This chapter and the theme it explores represents the culmination of the journey from the creation of a conceptual framing, to interlinking this with the findings of my study in the previous three chapters. By centralising the idea of sympathetic presence to this study, specific, meaningful, and exciting outcomes have been discovered, and this is the most vibrant chapter for those findings. This chapter outlines the discovery that applying concepts and practices from drama has highlighted that sympathetic presence is performative and dialogical. Evidence in this chapter explores how the participants learnt to see sympathetic presence in performance-based terms, and indeed how to perform presence. How presence relies on engaging authentically in a given moment with a given person or group is an argument made and supported by the responses of the participants of my study in this chapter. This leads to an intriguing outcome that one can feel and practice sympathetic presence, and that though difficult to define it is easier to do this after it has been experienced. The concluding section of this chapter considers the role of sympathetic presence in person-centred nursing, significantly contributing to an argument that it should be the first step we take when being person-centred as an active process, and that it enhances other approaches to person-centred nursing practice in myriad ways. This chapter closes by suggesting sympathetic presence is a key characteristic of the person-centred nurse and helps us to define the often difficult-to-articulate embodied experiences in nursing.