Critical Posthuman Nursing Care

Abstract

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.

From ‘if‐then’ to ‘what if?’ Rethinking healthcare algorithmics with posthuman speculative ethics

“…Who gets to be counted as ‘average’ and ‘neutral’, ‘unmarked’ in Western science has been proven to be a political question, with said average often being equated with white, European, male, property‐owning, speaking a standard language, able‐bodied subject (Braidotti, 2013). This ‘Vitruvian Man’ as the embodiment of standard subject has been reified in medicine as well (Hopkins Walsh et al, 2022; Smith et al, 2022).…”

“…This 'Vitruvian Man' as the embodiment of standard subject has been reified in medicine as well (Hopkins Walsh et al, 2022;Smith et al, 2022). Furthermore, analysis of algorithmic systems and their design has shown that similar issues of centreing the 'average man'-white prototypicality, gender and age insensitivity, eurocentrism, able-and cis-centredness, to mention a few (Benjamin, 2019;Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018;Gebru, 2020;Hutchinson et al, 2019;Keyes, 2018;Leavy, 2018).…”

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

“…Explorations of the Vitruvian Nurse illustrate the relevance of critically examining how nursing is imagined because these ideations shape policies, work practices, and healthcare outcomes. The stakes are high when it comes to living and working as a nurse, as the policies that guide nursing arise from western science and philosophy, produce what it is to be human (Haraway, 2016), and reproduce narrow definitions of who and what is allowed to be human (Da Silva, 2007; Hopkins‐Walsh et al, 2022; Jackson, 2020; Yusoff, 2018).…”

“…The role of nursing has become increasingly professionalized beginning in the 19th century and throughout the 20th century when the discipline entered university as an academic subject. As nursing is not secluded from the societies it developed in, these processes have cocreated a model of nursing that (re)produces inherently misogynistic tropes and reproduces restrictive power relations (Ashley, 1976; Hopkins‐Walsh et al, 2022). The Vitruvian Man is re/created and re/inscribed in the regulatory structures for nurses.…”

“…The first is the ways in which The Code enshrines the expectation of tolerance at all costs, implying that nurses endure violence, racism, sexism, ageism, harm, and a whole array of prejudice and sacrifice themselves in some way to provide good care. As authors, we fully acknowledge the harm that nurses have caused and are capable of causing to patients and communities in the course of providing nursing care, ideas we authors and others have written about (Dillard‐Wright et al, 2020; Foth, 2013a; Hopkins‐Walsh et al, 2022). Complaints can be valid and nurses can cause harm.…”