Hyunjung Lee

Self‐care occupies a central, often taken‐for‐granted and normatively privileged position in contemporary nursing discourse, consistently framed as a marker of empowerment, autonomy and responsible health behaviour. Although critical scholarship has contested this framing through work on relational care, feminist critiques of individualism and the neoliberal responsibilisation of health, the normative work self‐care performs within nursing's own conceptual frameworks remains insufficiently examined. This paper offers a theoretical analysis of self‐care as a subject‐forming discourse. It revisits Orem's Self‐Care Deficit Nursing Theory as a conceptual baseline in which vulnerability and dependence are ethically acceptable conditions that legitimately call forth nursing intervention, and traces how neoliberal health discourse has reconfigured self‐care from capacity into obligation. Building on existing structural critiques, the paper argues that a further, subjective transformation warrants attention: self‐care discourse contributes to the formation of subject positions in which responsibility is internalised, vulnerability experienced as inadequacy and care‐seeking as personal failure. These subject positions are unevenly taken up across class, gender, age and health status, and may be resisted or reinterpreted. Drawing on Byung‐Chul Han's account of the achievement subject, the paper conceptualises this dynamic here as the self‐care paradox and considers what it asks of nursing theory.

The Rohingyas, the longest-standing stateless refugees in Malaysia, are continuously denied access to formal education. The UN Refugee Agency and local non-government organizations run learning centers that offer non-formal education to Rohingya children. Existing literature highlights that, in the absence of formal openings, alternative educational programmes remain the main provider of refugee education in Malaysia. This study, using the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies' five-domain framework, examines the educational standards provided to Rohingya refugees in Malaysia. The findings suggest that most learning centers lack financial, human, and infrastructural resources. Lack of opportunity for secondary schooling makes primary education less worth it. Moreover, prevailing cultural and religious norms make it challenging for Rohingya children (especially girls) to access educational opportunities outside the community. National examinations and academic accreditation for learning are inaccessible to refugees, including Rohingyas. This paper deliberates on some immediate and long-term measures that can potentially address these issues. However, all actors, including UNHCR and the Malaysian government, must collaborate towards formulating a sustainable solution to this critical problem.