Jess Wright

Political action has a long history in the health workforce. There are multiple historical examples, from civil disobedience to marches and even sabotage that can be attributed to health workers. Such actions remain a feature of the healthcare community to this day; their status with professional and regulatory bodies is far less clear, however. This has created uncertainty for those undertaking such action, particularly those who are engaged in what could be termed ‘contentious’ forms of action. This study explored how advocacy and activism were presented in nursing and medical codes of ethics, comparing disciplinary and temporo‐spatial differences to understand how such action may be promoted or constrained by codes. The data for this study comes from 217 codes of ethics. Because of the size of the corpus and to facilitate analysis, natural language processing was utilised, which allowed for an automated exploration of the data and for comparisons to be drawn between groups. This was complemented by a manual search and contextualisation of the data. While there were noticeable differences between medical and nursing codes, overall, advocacy, activism and even politics were rarely discussed explicitly in most codes. When such action was spoken about, this was often vague and imprecise with codes speaking of ‘political action’ and ‘advocacy’ in general terms. While some codes were far more forthright in what they meant about advocacy or broader political action (i.e., Nursing codes in Denmark, Norway, Canada) more forceful language that spoke in specific terms or in terms of oppositional or specific actions (e.g., civil disobedience or marches) was almost completely avoided. These results are discussed in relation to the broader literature on codes and the normative questions they raise, namely whether such action should be included in codes of ethics at all.

The nursing imaginary is populated with a plurality of feminine and feminized archetypes. These images reinforce a particular order of things for nurses and nursing, marching out well‐worn stereotypes link gender and sexuality. Less attention has been paid to the productive, affirmative, and playful dimensions of these archetypes and the possibilities they offer. Using feminist theory, queer theory, and lessons from camp, I ask why sometimes it might be useful to be a Madonna or a whore or a battleax. Recognising some potential for misunderstanding, I want to be clear that I am neither dismissing these myths as innocuous or unproblematic nor am I endorsing any particular version as the way, the truth, the life for nurses. Rather than a fixed identity or intractable cage, I want to stay with the trouble to think through what happens when we conceptualise these tropes as personas or characters nurses may don and doff at will like personal protective equipment, stylized to suit the cast with whom they perform, inclusive of patients and colleagues alike. I do this not as a technique to undermine the professionalism of nurses or nursing but rather to recognise this kind of performance as an important piece of emotional triage, acknowledging the skilful affective decision‐making that goes into choosing how to occupy a particular role in a particular moment to elicit particular outcomes, conjuring the realities and feelings and ethics. Attending to nursing in this way, I think, can offer some points of entry for thinking about nursing and its work differently: playful, practiced, performative, powerful.

Nursing education has long operated within humanistic and anthropocentric epistemological frameworks that centre the autonomous rational human subject as both the object and agent of care. While these foundations have shaped core professional values, they increasingly fail to account for the relational, sociomaterial, and more‐than‐human conditions that characterise contemporary nursing practice. This paper draws on critical posthumanism, particularly as theorised by Rosi Braidotti, to examine what a posthumanist reorientation of nursing education might look like and what it might demand. The paper proceeds in three moves. First, it traces the philosophical lineage of secular liberal humanism in nursing, showing how its normative image of ‘the human’ has historically marginalised feminine, racialized, non‐Western, and non‐human forms of agency contradicting nursing's own commitments to social justice and equity. Second, it uses Braidotti's key concepts subjectivity‐as‐process, monism, and autopoiesis to reconceptualize nursing's four metaparadigmatic concepts: person, environment, health, and nursing itself. Within this framework, the person is understood as embodied, embedded, and relationally constituted rather than self‐contained; the environment becomes an agential ecology rather than passive context; health emerges as a relational outcome shaped by biological, technological, and sociomaterial forces; and nursing is reframed as care work distributed across more‐than‐human assemblages that include technologies, institutions, infrastructures, and microbial ecologies. Third, the paper translates these reconceptualizations into concrete implications for curriculum design, pedagogical practice, assessment, policy, and research arguing that posthumanist nursing education must move beyond competency‐based, patient‐centred models that under‐theorise the entangled realities nurses navigate daily. This paper contributes to an emerging body of scholarship applying posthuman frameworks to professional nursing education. It argues that a critical posthumanist curriculum is not a rejection of nursing's ethical foundations, but their necessary expansion one capable of preparing nurses for the ecological, technological, and sociopolitical transformations that define 21st‐century care.

ABSTRACT This is a tribute to Sam Porter's 2019 paper, ‘Why Nurses Should be Marxists’ in honour of the 25th anniversary of the journal Nursing Philosophy. In that paper, Porter made the case that nurses should be Marxist. While Porter was clear that Marxism could not solve all of nursing's problems, he made the case that it was an important start. I thought I would take up Porter's call to Marxism, to engage with it seriously, to offer up some extensions, to call folks to action. With this paper, in homage to Porter and also all the dreamers, movers, actors, organisers, and carers, I want to offer up the imperative to speak and act up in the face of rising authoritarianism and its threats to health, wellbeing, and liberation for us all. I get there by first outlining Porter's (2019), argument about why nurses should be Marxists. I then add the prefigurative potentials of anarchism as a praxis for nursing. From here, I go on to make the case that, whether communist or anarchist or abolitionist, nursing must be radical should we wish to survive our fascist present. After outlining the current order of things, I move to thinking about what might be possible, a speculative exercise in dreaming pushing off from current events. Possibility gives way to making things different, some provisional moves to build the futures we dream of in the face of perilous presents.

Healthcare under the auspices of late‐stage capitalism is a total institution that mortifies nurses and patients alike, demanding conformity, obedience, perfection. This capture, which resembles Deleuze's enclosure, entangles nurses in carceral systems and gives way to a postenclosure society, an institution without walls. These societies of control constitute another sort of total institution, more covert and insidious for their invisibility (Deleuze, 1992). While Delezue (1992) named physical technologies like electronic identification badges as key to understanding these societies of control, the political economy of late‐stage capitalism functions as a total institution with no cohesive, centralized, connected material apparatus required. In this manuscript, we outline the ways in which the healthcare industrial complex demands nurse conformity and how that, in turn, operationalizes nurses in service to the institution. This foundation leads to the assertion that nursing must foster a radical imagination for itself, unbound by reality as it presently exists, in order that we might conjure more just, equitable futures for caregivers and care receivers alike. To tease out what a radical imagination might look like, we dwell in paradox: getting folks the care they need in capitalist healthcare systems; engaging nursing's deep history to inspire alternative understandings for the future of the discipline; and how nursing might divest from extractive institutional structures. This paper is a jumping‐off place to interrogate the ways institutions telescope and where nursing fits into the arrangement.

This paper explores how contemporary US healthcare, shaped by neoliberal biopolitics and thanatopolitics, functions as a death-making institution that commodifies care while systematically disposing of certain lives, reflecting an ethics not of care but of capital. Drawing from critical theory, historical analysis, and lived experience, we examine how death is deeply embedded in the structures of power and capitalism. Through the lens of haunting and organized forgetting, we analyze how institutions sanitize death, muting human loss into metrics and decontextualized data points, while erasing the tragedies of systemic violence. We argue that nurses, who are situated in physical and spiritual proximity to death, are uniquely positioned to act as witnesses, truth-tellers, and conjurers of the dead. Rather than comply with the institutional imperative to forget, we advocate for a practice of conjuring; calling forth the ghosts of those lost to violence of medical neglect, structural racism, and economic abandonment as a form of parrhesia: dangerous, necessary truth-telling. We explore how organized forgetting rewrites radical histories into palatable myths, disciplining contemporary activism and muting its transformative potential. We turn to examples like the Marys of ACT UP, whose embodied activism illustrates the power of public grief and haunting to incite justice. Inspired by theorists such as Foucault, Giroux, Derrida, and Ahmed, we locate in mourning a form of resistance, in memory a political act, and in storytelling a path to rehumanization. Ultimately, we argue that to conjure our dead is not only to remember them but to be transformed by them, allowing their voices to shape our ethical responsibilities, professional identities, and collective futures. In being possessed by our dead, we foreclose upon the institutional disavowal of suffering and reclaim a politics rooted in compassionate reckoning and the belief that another world is possible.

This is a tribute to Sam Porter's 2019 paper, ‘Why Nurses Should be Marxists’ in honour of the 25th anniversary of the journal Nursing Philosophy. In that paper, Porter made the case that nurses should be Marxist. While Porter was clear that Marxism could not solve all of nursing's problems, he made the case that it was an important start. I thought I would take up Porter's call to Marxism, to engage with it seriously, to offer up some extensions, to call folks to action. With this paper, in homage to Porter and also all the dreamers, movers, actors, organisers, and carers, I want to offer up the imperative to speak and act up in the face of rising authoritarianism and its threats to health, wellbeing, and liberation for us all. I get there by first outlining Porter's (2019), argument about why nurses should be Marxists. I then add the prefigurative potentials of anarchism as a praxis for nursing. From here, I go on to make the case that, whether communist or anarchist or abolitionist, nursing must be radical should we wish to survive our fascist present. After outlining the current order of things, I move to thinking about what might be possible, a speculative exercise in dreaming pushing off from current events. Possibility gives way to making things different, some provisional moves to build the futures we dream of in the face of perilous presents.

During the COVIDicine, many nurses awoke to the ways that the Healthcare‐Industrial Complex (HIC) dictates the care we are able to provide. Using the Foucauldian concepts of pastoral power and governmentality, we explore the ways that nurses participate in upholding power structures within the HIC and reproducing them in our work, contributing to a carceral culture based on hierarchy and power dynamics. We also explore the ways nurses are both agentic in this system and subject to it, reluctant to make waves and lose our place within a system that can offer nurses safety and security in, and most importantly, a paycheck. This paper articulates a prefigurative anarchist approach to nursing praxis. Through the writing of Emma Goldman, we locate a historically founded philosophical basis for practical tactics that nurses can use to actualise this praxis. Both individually and as a collective, nurses can assert their own ethic and power through direct action, micro‐insurgency and solidarity to build the world we know can be. Our only limitation is our imagination.

Overtaxed by the realities laid bare in the pandemic, nursing has imminent decisions to make. The exigencies of pandemic times overextend a health care infrastructure already groaning under the weight of inequitable distribution of resources and care commodified for profit. We can choose to prioritise different values. Invoking philosopher of science Isbelle Stengers's manifesto for slow science, this is not the only nursing that is possible. With this paper, I pick up threads of nursing's historical ontology, drawing previous scholarship on the historical narratives nurses use to understand themselves. Peeling back nursing's myth to alternate points of origin allows me to consider alternate lines of flight, a speculative adventure in paths not taken but paths that exist nonetheless. I go on to examine what a collective ethic of nursing could be, when we make space for these alternate histories, considering the confluences and conflicts that enable nurses to care and those that inhibit them from doing so. The imperative for this lies in the central importance of the reproductive labour of nursing health care, which leads me to a critique of nursing's capitulation to the pressures of late stage capitalism. This is a problem with ethical and ontological implications both for nursing, and also for those who require nursing care, an imperative to think about the kinds of present/futures for health, care, and health care we might cocreate in collaboration and solidarity with the communities in which nurses are imbricated, shedding the trappings of neoliberalism. There is significant power in the vision and praxis of 28 million nurses and midwives worldwide. Our ethics can guide our imagination which can in turn create possibility. This kind of endeavour—that of dreams and imagination—leads us to what could be, if only we leap.

Professionalized nursing and anarchism could not be more at odds. And yet, if nursing wishes to have a future in the precarious times in which we live and die, the discipline must take on the lessons that anarchism has on offer. Part love note to a problematic profession we love and hate, part fever dream of what could be, we set out to think about what nursing and care might look like after it all falls down, because it is all falling down. Drawing on alternate histories, alternate visions of nursing history, we imagine what nursing values would look like, embracing anarchist principles. We consider examples of community survival, mutual aid, and militant joy as strategies to achieve what nursing could be if nurses put an end to their cop shit, shrugging off their shroud of white cisheteropatriarchal femininity that manifests as professionalism and civility. We conclude with a call to action and a plan for skill-building because this can all be different.

Healthcare under the auspices of late‐stage capitalism is a total institution that mortifies nurses and patients alike, demanding conformity, obedience, perfection. This capture, which resembles Deleuze's enclosure, entangles nurses in carceral systems and gives way to a postenclosure society, an institution without walls. These societies of control constitute another sort of total institution, more covert and insidious for their invisibility (Deleuze, 1992). While Delezue (1992) named physical technologies like electronic identification badges as key to understanding these societies of control, the political economy of late‐stage capitalism functions as a total institution with no cohesive, centralized, connected material apparatus required. In this manuscript, we outline the ways in which the healthcare industrial complex demands nurse conformity and how that, in turn, operationalizes nurses in service to the institution. This foundation leads to the assertion that nursing must foster a radical imagination for itself, unbound by reality as it presently exists, in order that we might conjure more just, equitable futures for caregivers and care receivers alike. To tease out what a radical imagination might look like, we dwell in paradox: getting folks the care they need in capitalist healthcare systems; engaging nursing's deep history to inspire alternative understandings for the future of the discipline; and how nursing might divest from extractive institutional structures. This paper is a jumping‐off place to interrogate the ways institutions telescope and where nursing fits into the arrangement.