Nursing theory’s history reflects a movement from scientific legitimacy toward epistemic reflexivity. We situate that shift within nursing’s metatheoretical evolution, expanding from hierarchies of abstraction to include pluricentric, context-responsive, and justice-oriented paradigms. It advances a reflexive grammar of theorizing organized around 6 prepositions ( from, about, through, for, with , and towards ), each identifying a locus of reflexivity. This grammar of interdependent reflexive loci reconceives theorizing as contingent, embodied, relational, and political labor that makes it explicit how positionality, onto-epistemologies, beneficiaries, sociomaterialities, and values shape knowledge creation. This transcends theorizing from being a procedural task to a dialogical, ethical, and imaginative act.
Cleofas et al. (Mon,) studied this question.