Author: IPONS Secretary - Pawel Krol

Dear members of the International Philosophy of Nursing Society (IPONS),

We are currently seeking up to six executive members to join the IPONS executive team for a three-year term starting in September 2025. Additionally, we are in search of a new treasurer for the society, this person must be currently on the IPONS Executive Board

• The role of an executive member involves participating in two or three annual meetings (including the annual general meeting AGM) where IPONS matters are discussed, such as upcoming conferences, budgets, and various activities related to the Nursing Philosophy journal or other scholarly Societies or Journals, as well as other IPONS-related affairs. During the AGM (either in-person or remotely), which typically takes place at the current year’s conference, new elected members are announced along with various resolutions and matters concerning IPONS. We would be delighted to have your in our team, and we invite you to submit your application before August 15^th.

• The treasurer’s role primarily involves maintaining the financial accounts regarding memberships and overseeing certain IPONS affairs and is open to a current member of the Executive Board.

Furthermore, if you have received this email but at the wrong address, please reply to this email and provide us with your institutional email address (university, research center, or other) to facilitate easier communication.

As a reminder:

The aims of IPONS are:

1. To promote and establish philosophy of nursing, and health care in general, as a credible and important field of philosophical and critical inquiry.
2. To establish a growing international network for this purpose.
3. To conduct and support philosophical inquiry in a manner that informs and engages with health care practice, theory, research, education and policy from national and international perspectives.
4. To support philosophical inquiry into nursing and health care across cultures and countries, including those who may find it difficult for their voices to be heard.
5. To advance the education of the public and health care professionals in philosophy of nursing by arranging meetings, conferences and seminars, and by such other means as the executive committee in their absolute discretion think fit.

Pawel Krol, PhD, RN

IPONS Secretary

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

The Nursing Philosophy theme issue on Personhood: Philosophies, Applications and Critique in Health Care with contributions presented at the 24^th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference in Nursing is now available online and this included one of the articles to be reserved for a paper authored, or first author, by a doctoral student. The winner of this award is Julie Gunby who is the first author of “Clinical reasoning as midwifery: A Socratic model for shared decision making in person‐centred care”; co-authored with Jennifer Ryan Lockhart.

Julie Gunby is in her second year of coursework as a PhD student in Theology & Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. Her research interests are philosophical ethics, theological ethics, and perinatal care. She has practiced for ten years as a Certified Nurse Midwife and serves on the ethics committee at Northside Hospital Gwinnett in Atlanta, Georgia, where she delivers babies for underinsured women and teaches obstetrics to medical residents. Prior to becoming a nurse-midwife, Julie received a Master of Theological Studies from Duke Divinity School and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Georgia. 

Warm congratulations to Julie to this Doctoral Student Award and good luck with your important work.

The guest editorial team of the theme issue: Joakim Öhlén, Ida Björkman, Elin Siira & Marit Kirkevold

Edited by Pamela Grace and Aimee Milliken

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This handbook provides tools for nurse educators, ethics educators, practicing nurses and allied health professionals for developing confidence and skill in ethical decision making in interdisciplinary settings such as acute and chronic care hospitals and clinics. It is useful for all healthcare personnel who face ethical issues in the course of their work and who work with nurses to resolve these issues. While the content is based on a US context, the concerns of nurses internationally are discussed and emphasized. Nurses working in acute and chronic care settings face many obstacles to providing good care and are often the first line of defense related to patient safety and meeting the needs of patients and their families. Some of the obstacles to optimal patient care are institutional, some sociocultural, and others the result of inadequate communication.  Evidence points to the idea that while nurses do have the knowledge and skills to address practice problems of various sorts, they may not be confident in their skills of ethical decision making and advocacy actions. This is a resource to develop moral agency on behalf of individuals and to address broader barriers to good care raised at the local, community, or social levels. 

Available soon from Springer and can be pre-ordered from your favorite book vendor.

FRIDAY MARCH 25, 2022
2-3:30pm California USA, 4-5:30pm Chía Colombia, 6-7:30pm Belo Horizonte
Brazil, 10-11:30pm Netherlands, 8-9:30am (3/26) Sydney Australia

Speaker panel featuring:

• Meiriele Tavares Araujo RN MSN PhD | Professor | Department of Applied Nursing | Schoolof Nursing | Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
• Rochelle Einboden RN PhD | Lecturer | Faculty of Medicine and Health | Susan Wakil Schoolof Nursing and Midwifery | University of Sydney, Australia
• María Elisa Moreno Fergusson BSN DNS | Profesora Titular & Directora programa de Doctorado en Enfermería |Facultad de Enfermería y Rehabilitación | Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia

RSVP/registration is required. For more information, please contact
Miriam Bender miriamb@uci.edu or Olga Petrovskaya
olga.petrovskaya@ualberta.ca

Sponsored by IPONS in conjunction with the UCI Center for Nursing Philosophy

Description

Nursing philosophy has been an important part of nursing scholarship since the inception of the discipline. Philosophical writing, however, is a distinct genre.  This workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to learn the genre: to learn how to critically read works in philosophy and to turn their critiques into publishable nursing philosophy essays. 

The workshop will be a one semester/two quarter duration (from January 2022 to May 2022), during which we will meet via Zoom weekly at the start and move towards independent writing and group review toward the end of the workshop.

The workshop will begin with targeted readings and discussion of philosophical texts that will be selected based on participants’ stated interests. During the course of the workshop, participants will experiment with philosophical writing and be mentored by experienced faculty. By the end of the workshop the participant is expected to have produced a solid basis for an essay suitable for publication or conference presentation.

Note: The workshop is open to students/faculty from any university, but there are no course credits being offered.

Location

The workshop will be completely virtual and conducted via Zoom. We intend to create meeting times that will allow participants from multiple locations/countries to be able to attend. All participants will therefore need a computer with internet access and ability to use the Zoom portal.

Audience

This workshop is primarily intended for nursing PhD graduate students who have already obtained candidacy status. Nursing faculty are also encouraged to apply, especially those new to philosophical writing and scholarship.

A maximum of 10 participants will be admitted into the workshop. 

Instructors

Dr. Mark Risjord is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University and a Center for Nursing Philosophy steering committee member. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. With respect to issues in health care, Risjord’s primary focus has been issues in nursing research. His book Nursing Knowledge: Science, Practice, and Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) studies the history of nursing scholarship and contributes to contemporary discussions in nursing about the character of nursing research.

Dr. Miriam Bender is Associate Professor at the University of California Irvine’s Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing and the Director of the Center for Nursing Philosophy. Empirically, Dr. Bender’s research focuses on the relationality between the organization of healthcare delivery, multi-professional practice dynamics, and patient care quality and safety outcomes. The challenges of inquiring into the dynamic complexities of healthcare has spurred a philosophical turn in her scholarship, including efforts to unpack and critique epistemological and methodological paradigms that paradoxically advance determinate theories in a discipline that is defined by a commitment to the non-reducibility of the health/care experience.

Josh Dolin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests lie primarily in virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. His essays have appeared in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice and American Philosophical Quarterly. Josh will serve as a graduate student researcher in the Center for Nursing Philosophy (supported through a Mellon-funded grant) and facilitate instruction in this workshop.

Application Period

The application period opens Sept. 1, 2021 and closes Oct. 15, 2021. Notification of acceptance into the workshop will happen by Nov. 15. A syllabus of readings and meeting times will follow, based on the interests and time zone locations of accepted participants.

The workshop will start the week of Jan. 10, 2022 and end the week of May 2, 2022.

Accepted participants must commit to full participation in all aspects of the workshop, which include weekly readings, weekly meetings, and regular writing.

Application Materials

Please submit the following application documents:

1. Topic Proposal: Describe the philosophical questions or ideas you would like to explore in the workshop. Highlight the philosophical questions or ideas and explain how they are related to nursing scholarship or practice. (250 words maximum) Sample proposals are provided on the Center for Nursing Philosophy website.
2. Personal Statement: Describe how nursing philosophy fits into your expected nursing career or practice, what attracts you to doing philosophy, and any previous education in or experience with philosophy (250 words maximum)
3. A letter of support from your PhD advisor (for graduate students) or Chair/Dean (for faculty). This letter should acknowledge that the workshop will take time away from the participant’s other academic duties and make clear how the participant’s time will be protected by the participant’s department/school to ensure they can attend and complete all workshop activities (for example by being able to enroll in a directed studies course at their university to account for and provides credit for the workshop activities)
4. Up-to-date curriculum vitae

Contacts

For questions, please contact either Dr. Mark Risjord (mrisjor@emory.edu) or Dr. Miriam Bender (miriamb@uci.edu)