As nurses on this pale blue dot, the impending climate crisis requires us to engage with our world and communities differently if we hope to ensure our planetary survival, human and non. Imagining the next 50 years of nursing theory, we advance a posthuman critique of the discipline. In this article, we lay out a posthumanist critique of nursing. We urge nurses to critically engage with the realities that shape our present and future on a deteriorating planet, decentering the primacy of humans as we engage with the world all around and assemble posthuman tools for our analyses.

Nursing care is an embodied and co-creative world-building practice made hypervisible in pandemic times. A traditional praxis that became a professionalized care practice, nursing bares the indelible mark of the ideologies that have come to shape the discipline like whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism to name a few. Embracing a critical feminist posthuman and new materialist perspective, in this paper we advance the notion that nursing care is a situated and embodied endeavor that cannot and should not be disconnected from sites of care, people receiving care, and the powers that structure care relations. Even in idealised contexts, nursing care is shaped by the confines of these forces. We tease out ideas that have molded nursing across time and within the epoch of the Covid pandemic. We draw upon imaginations from Arundhati Roy that the pandemic is a portal, an opportunity for rebirth. Care practices are proposed with a critical posthuman perspective, in the spirit of Haraway’s idea of composting. Composting is used metaphorically as actions to morph and decay the boundaries beyond traditional notions of care based in humanism. We imagine this in an effort to rethink what worlds we want to co-produce, a call to action where care can be revisioned as an arena where nurses, people, all matter, all creatures and worlds are co-created.

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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.

This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled 'What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?' examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra-activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany-including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter.