Queering the Poster: Disruptive Knowledge at the AACN Diversity Symposium.

BACKGROUND: This article advances theory to practice by describing the application of queer norm-critical pedagogy to a poster given as part of a virtual session at the 2021 American Association of Colleges of Nursing Diversity Symposium. METHOD: The authors created and facilitated the experience of a queered, conceptual poster, inviting a critical appraisal of both the limits and the possibilities of knowledge sharing and co-creation among nurse educators and nursing scholars. RESULTS: The poster was and remains a multimodal, democratic, space/time-transgressing performance whose reach extended well beyond the Symposium in both time and (virtual) space. CONCLUSION: Inviting learners into this co-created, ongoing educational activity up-ends the hierarchies of conference participation, breaking the fourth wall. This kind of work also has potential for the classroom. With planning and creativity, nursing educators can use the methods described here to queer their teaching. [J Nurs Educ. 2024;63(4):265-267.].

Facilitating Gender-Affirming Nursing Encounters.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the essentials for facilitating gender-affirming nursing encounters for transgender, nonbinary, and other gender expansive (TNGE) people. The authors illustrate what constitutes as gender-affirming nursing encounters by characterizing gender-affirming approaches to conducting and documenting a nursing assessment and describing techniques to overcome institutional-level challenges that may hinder a nurse's ability to establish gender-affirming therapeutic relationships with TNGE people. The authors also provide strategies that nurses can use to improve their health care organization and interprofessional collaborative practice to create psychologically and physically safe health care spaces for TNGE people.

Nursing as total institution.

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.

Notes on [post]human nursing: What It MIGHT Be, What it is Not.

With this paper, we walk out some central ideas about posthumanisms and the ways in which nursing is already deeply entangled with them. At the same time, we point to ways in which nursing might benefit from further entanglement with other ideas emerging from posthumanisms. We first offer up a brief history of posthumanisms, following multiple roots to several points of formation. We then turn to key flavors of posthuman thought to differentiate between them and clarify our collective understanding and use of the terms. This includes considerations of the threads of transhumanism, critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism, and the speculative, affirmative ethics that arise from critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism. These ideas are fruitful for nursing, and already in action in many cases, which is the matter we occupy ourselves with in the final third of the paper. We consider the ways nursing is already posthuman-sometimes even critically so-and the speculative worldbuilding of nursing as praxis. We conclude with visions for a critical posthumanist nursing that attends to humans and other/more/nonhumans, situated and material and embodied and connected, in relation.

Everyday Resistance in the U.K.'s National Health Service.

Resistance is a concept understudied in the context of health and healthcare. This is in part because visible forms of social protest are sometimes understood as incongruent with professional identity, leading healthcare workers to separate their visible actions from their working life. Resistance takes many forms, however, and focusing exclusively on the visible means more subtle forms of everyday resistance are likely to be missed. The overarching aim of this study was to explore how resistance was enacted within the workplace amongst a sample of twelve healthcare workers, based in the United Kingdom; exploring the forms that such action took and how this intersected with health and healthcare. In depth-interviews were conducted and results were analysed utilizing Lilja's framework (2022). Our findings suggest that resistance took a number of forms, from more direct confrontational acts, to those which sought to avoid power or which sought to create alternative or prefigurative practices or norms. These findings speak to the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of resistance, as carried out by healthcare workers in the workplace. While many acts had clear political motives, with issues like climate change in mind for example, participants also described how the act of providing care itself could be an act of resistance. While saying something about our participants, this also said something about the healthcare systems in which they worked. These findings also raise a range of normative issues. Perhaps needless to say, there appears to be substantial scope to expand and interrogate our findings and apply the idea of resistance to health and healthcare.

Algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence is a problem-And the root issue is power.

BACKGROUND: Artificial intelligence (AI) in health care continues to expand at a rapid rate, impacting both nurses and communities we accompany in care. PURPOSE: We argue algorithmic bias is but a symptom of a more systemic and longstanding problem: power imbalances related to the creation, development, and use of health care technologies. METHODS: This commentary responds to Drs. O'Connor and Booth's 2022 article, "Algorithmic bias in health care: Opportunities for nurses to improve equality in the age of artificial intelligence." DISCUSSION: Nurses need not 'reinvent the wheel' when it comes to AI policy, curricula, or ethics. We can and should follow the lead of communities already working 'from the margins' who provide ample guidance. CONCLUSION: Its neither feasible nor just to expect individual nurses to counter systemic injustice in health care through individual actions, more technocentric curricula, or industry partnerships. We need disciplinary supports for collective action to renegotiate power for AI tech.

Nurses as Disciplinary Agents of the State: Ethical Practice and Mandatory Reporting in the United States.

This article reviews legislative initiatives that mandate nurses to report patients, families, and clinicians to law enforcement. Most recently, these laws target transgender and gender diverse (TGD) youth and people seeking abortion. In this article, we examine the ethics of such laws through professional ethical codes. Furthermore, through a biopolitical lens, we critically analyze examples of nurses' participation in complying with laws that harm patients. Finally, we discuss the damage these laws have on the nursing profession and assert the necessity of a resituating of professional ethics that considers the complexity of nursing care amidst increasingly blatant state-sanctioned violence.

Queering the Classroom: Teaching Nurses Against Oppression.

BACKGROUND: Teaching about oppression risks replicating harm and reproducing othering. This occurs despite nurse educators' best intentions, with implications for both learners and recipients of nursing care. Teaching against oppression attends to the interlocking matrices of domination that construct otherness and propagate harm. METHOD: This article presents a norm-critical approach to education that interrogates the power and praxes that structure nursing education through a queer theoretical lens. First, terms, such as norm-criticism, norms, power, othering, and queerness, are defined. Next, the stakes of norm-critical, queer perspectives in nursing education praxis are discussed. Finally, these concepts are applied to brief case scenarios. RESULTS: A queered perspective reveals the co-construction of norms, power, and othering in familiar nursing education praxis scenarios. CONCLUSION: This article serves as a call to action for nursing educators, inviting them into critical reflexivity by offering a queered lens through which to dismantle oppression within the practice and praxis of nursing education. [J Nurs Educ. 2023;62(4):193-198.].

The Vitruvian nurse and burnout: New materialist approaches to impossible ideals.

The Vitruvian Man is a metaphor for the "ideal man" by feminist posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2013) as a proxy for eurocentric humanist ideals. The first half of this paper extends Braidotti's concept by thinking about the metaphor of the "ideal nurse" (Vitruvian nurse) and how this metaphor contributes to racism, oppression, and burnout in nursing and might restrict the professionalization of nursing. The Vitruvian nurse is an idealized and perfected form of a nurse with self-sacrificial language (re)producing self-sacrificing expectations. The second half of this paper looks at how regulatory frameworks (using the example of UK's Nursing and Midwifery Council Code of Conduct) institutionalize the conditions of possibility through collective imaginations. The domineering expectations found within the Vitruvian nurse metaphor and further codified by regulatory frameworks give rise to boredom and burnout. The paper ends by suggesting possible ways to diffract regulatory frameworks to practice with affirmative ethics and reduce feelings of self-sacrifice and exhaustion among nurses.