AbstractNursing and research coexist in a‘troubled’relationship. The culture of nursing and the discourses of research together generate tensions and conflicts which often work to constrain nurses’attempts to engage in research activity. In this paper I attempt to expose possible reasons why this might be so. Drawing on critical feminist post-structuralist theories and recent empirical research with clinical nurses some of the‘challenges’to thinking and doing research in nursing are given voice and brought to critical expression.