What nursing chooses not to know: Practices of epistemic silence/silencing

Abstract

Drawing from a keynote panel held at the hybrid 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference, this discussion paper examines the question of epistemic silence in nursing from five different perspectives. Contributors include US‐based scholar Claire Valderama‐Wallace, who meditated on ecosystems of settler colonial logics of nursing; American scholar Lucinda Canty discussed the epistemic silencing of nurses of colour; Canadian scholar Amelie Perron interrogated the use of disobedience and parrhesia in and for nursing; Canada‐based scholar Ismalia De Sousa considered what nursing protects in its silences; and Australian scholar Janice Gullick spoke to trans invisibility in nursing.

Echoes of silence

“…Silence is all at once comfortable and uncomfortable, enabling and constraining, revealing and concealing, questioning and answering in a never ending spiral of retaining and discarding, personally and professionally. Literal, epistemological and ontological silences (van Manen, 1990) echo throughout nursing (see e.g., Dillard‐Wright et al, 2023).…”

Special issue guest editorial: The thoughts we think with—As philosophers, as nurses—Matter

“…Contrasting with these panegyric offerings, Canty et al (2023) lend insight into the question, ‘what nurses of color want from nursing philosophers’, reflecting both desires and critiques of nursing philosophy as well as the conference itself. In a related dialogue entitled, ‘What Nursing Chooses Not to Know: Practices of Epistemic Silence/Silencing’ based on an eponymous keynote panel, Dillard‐Wright, Valderama‐Wallace, et al (2023) examine the knowledge practices nursing prioritizes, protects, and polices. Extending the conversation further, Iradukunda's (2023) dialogue piece interrogates the discourses of decolonization, so readily adopted, so rarely substantiated.…”