Month: June 2024

Call for Papers

Thinking the Event of Nursing

Submission deadline: Friday, 1 December 2024

This special issue of Nursing Philosophy invites papers that address the question of nursing today through the event of current nursing theory and practice. The question of the event has been at the centre of work in 20th and 21st-century continental philosophy and process thought, unsettling our ready-made conceptualizations and habits of seeing and doing, of knowing and thinking. For example, Charles Sanders Peirce noted, “that the world lives, and moves, and has its being, in a logic of events” (1976, p. 439, italics in original). Gilles Deleuze was explicit in saying “I’ve tried in all my books to discover the nature of events; it’s a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb ‘to be’ and its attributes” (1995, p. 141).

However, this philosophical effort has not yet fully registered in the nursing literature. Indeed, one could argue that the event of nursing has for the most part been covered over by a ‘matrix of (un)intelligibility’ (Petrovskaya, 2023 resourcing Butler’s original concept, 1990), a dogmatic image of thought that actively eliminates the eventfulness at the heart of nursing. Notions of agency, selfhood, causality and substance are central to this image, which seeks to secure for nursing its autonomous identity and its clarified, well-bounded structures of knowledge for practice. While nursing scholars have done the work challenging these more conventional modes of intelligibility in this journal, demonstrating the ways they make invisible or paper over the actual contextualities and practices that comprise nursing, there is much more to do.

We want to continue this stream of scholarship by inviting papers that address how we might express what it means to think, live and act within the event of nursing. Just as Evidence-Based Practice attempts to make nursing programmable, predictable and calculable (see for example Kirkham et al., 2007; Thorne & Sawatzsky 2014), how could expressions of the event of nursing help us to conceive nursing in ways that move beyond this?

At the heart of the event is the new, the present or a now that is in passage. How can we bear witness to this passage, be carried along with it and, at the same time, better attune to and/or counter-actualize its emerging possibilities? How might we learn to think and act otherwise as nurses within the event, incorporating its ruptures, intensities and unanticipated encounters into our practices? Can we imagine and create for ourselves new event-driven nursing ideas, concepts, and even methodologies?

To think with the event of nursing, the journal welcomes a wide range of theoretical and philosophical approaches. For example, nurse scholar John Drummond (2002) has argued, from a position informed by the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, that we might draw on the concept of ‘care’ to think about the event of nursing. Or, we might try to think with agential realism “how matter comes to matter” (Barad, 2007, p. 192) in the event of nursing. Can nursing engage with what Whitehead (1978) has taught us; that concrescing the event involves both retroactive selection (prehension) and futural orientation (superjection) without simple location? Perhaps, borrowing from Braidotti (2005), we might contribute to a new cartography of nursing with alternative figurations of what the event of nursing might become in the present. In all cases to think the event of nursing does not mean its appropriation by the resources of a newly restored ‘reason’, but an encounter with the unthought, the untimely and the outside.

Topics for this call for papers include but not restricted to:

• Novel expressions what it means to think, live and act within the event of nursing
• Cartographies of nursing disclosing alternative figurations of nursing
• Reconceiving traditional nursing concepts to re-think the event of nursing
• Expressions of event-driven nursing ideas, concepts, and even methodologies

Guest Editor

Keith Robinson
University of Arkansas
United States of America

Keywords: Nursing Philosophy; Event of Nursing; Nursing Theory; Philosophy of Nursing

Submission Guidelines/Instructions

All manuscripts will be blind peer reviewed in line with the journal’s policy. When submitting your manuscript, in the Special Issue section of the submission process, you will be asked to indicate what Special Issue your submission is for. Please select “Thinking the Event of Nursing” from the drop-down menu to ensure your manuscript is identified as a Special Issue submission for this Call for Papers.

Submit now

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke university Press.

Braidotti, R. (2005). A critical cartography of feminist post-postmodernism. Australian feminist studies, 20(47), 169-180.

Butler, J. (1990, 2002). Gender trouble. Routledge.

Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972-1990. Columbia University Press.

Drummond, J. (2002). Freedom to roam: A Deleuzian overture for the concept of care in nursing. Nursing Philosophy, 3(3), 222-233.

Kirkham, S. R., Baumbusch, J. L., Schultz, A. S., & Anderson, J. M. (2007). Knowledge development and evidence-based practice: Insights and opportunities from a postcolonial feminist perspective for transformative nursing practice. Advances in Nursing Science, 30(1), 26-40.

Peirce, C. S. (1976). The elements of mathematics: Volume IV mathematical philosophy. Mouton Publishers and Humanities Press.

Petrovskaya, O. (2023). Nursing theory, postmodernism, post-structuralism, and Foucault. Taylor & Francis.

Thorne, S., & Sawatzky, R. (2014). Particularizing the General. Advances in Nursing Science, 37(1), 5–18.

Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. New York: The Free Press