S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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generation of psychiatric medications mental healthcare was labour intensive and mostly required full time confinement for the seriously mentally ill. As previously discussed (p. 15), knowledge is embodied in a variety of material forms (Latour & Woolgar, 1979). Knowledge according to actor-network theory is the end product of heterogeneous ‘bits’ and ‘pieces’ juxtaposed into a patterned network which overcomes their resistance. Hence psychiatric medications are bits and pieces from the social, technical, conceptual and textual which are combined, and ‘translated’ into a heterogeneous product. Remote nurses know that a sedative medication is appropriate and of great assistance in managing an aggressive and violent mental health presentation What is invisible to them is that the sedative medication table or injection is a scientific object of knowledge (Chapter 7). The required level of heterogeneous engineering to create the psychiatric medication, with its benefit to the remote nurse, is a black box (Callon, 1986). Remote nurses do not observe that the medication is a point of punctualisation in their network of support (Callon, 1986). They only ‘see’ or consider the effect (Chapter 7). For an actor-network theorist, the removal of the medication prevents the remote nurse from being a nurse sedating a violent and aggressive mental health patient. They become a different nurse or ‘body’ (individual). Hence from an actor-network perspective, a remote nurse is not just a body that has knowledge, skills and values, but an agent who inhabits a set of elements (including a body) that expands out into the network of materials, somatic and otherwise, that encapsulates, permeates or imbues their body. This is not to suggest that the remote nurse does not have an ‘inner life’ (Goffman, 1968), but consistent with symbolic interactionism (Star, 1990, 1992), social agents