Dr. Jess Dillard-Wright

Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst

IPONS Secretary, 2022 – 2025

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Jess Dillard-Wright, PhD, MA, RN, CNM (she/they) lives and works in Western Massachusetts. Jess is a fat, queer, genderqueer, feminist, nurse dissident, parent, partner, and activist-scholar. Her/their scholarship resides in the confluence of healthcare, activism, history, and philosophy. Jess works in collaboration with folks across the country and around the world to first imagine and then build worlds that are just, equitable, sustainable, radical. Examples of this work include Nursing Mutual Aid, Call to Action for Health + Liberation alternate nurses week actions, and an ongoing collaborative project on Nursing Futurities. Jess is the coeditor of Nursing a Radical Imagination: From Theory and History to Action and Alternate Futures, recently published by Routledge.

I have been an active member of IPONS since 2017.

Selected Publications

  • Dillard‐Wright, J. (2022). A radical imagination for nursing: Generative insurrection, creative resistance. Nursing Philosophy, 23(1), e12371.
  • Hopkins-Walsh, J., Dillard-Wright, J., Brown, B., Smith, J., Willis, E., & Hopkins-Walsh, J. (2022). Critical posthuman nursing care: Bodies reborn and the ethical imperative for composting. Witness: The Canadian Journal of Critical Nursing Discourse, 4(1), 16-35.
  • Dillard-Wright, J., & Shields-Haas, V. (2021). Nursing with the people: Reimagining futures for nursing. Advances in Nursing Science, 44(3), 195-209.
  • Dillard-Wright, J., Walsh, J. H., & Brown, B. B. (2020). We have never been nurses: nursing in the anthropocene, undoing the capitalocene. Advances in Nursing Science, 43(2), 132-146.
  • Hopkins Walsh, J., & Dillard‐Wright, J. (2020). The case for “structural missingness:” A critical discourse of missed care. Nursing Philosophy, 21(1), e12279.
  • Dillard‐Wright, J. (2019). Electronic health record as a panopticon: A disciplinary apparatus in nursing practice. Nursing Philosophy, 20(2), e12239.

Education

  • PhD, 2020, Augusta University College of Nursing
  • MSN, 2015, Frontier Nursing University
  • MSN, 2009, Medical College of Georgia
  • MA, 2006, Sarah Lawrence College
  • BS, 2004, Georgia Institute of Technology