Until August 5, 2022, IPONS members have the opportunity to vote for a Chair, Secretary, and five members of the Executive Committee. If you are a member, you have already received a ballot link by email. (If you have not, please contact Mark Risjord, IPONS Secretary at mrisjor@emory.edu)
Each candidate has been asked to provide a short biography and statement of their ideas or vision for IPONS. Their personal statements are below.
Candidate for Chair:
- Darlaine Jantzen, PhD, RN, Associate Professor, School of Nursing, Trinity Western University, Canada
Candidate for Secretary
- Jess Dillard-Wright, PhD, MA, RN, CNM, Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst Elaine Marieb College of Nursing, USA
Candidates for the Executive Committee:
- Jane Hopkins Walsh, MSN, PNP, RNC, Boston College, USA
- Pawel Krol, RN, PhD, Assistant Professor, Laval University, Canada
- Aimee B. Milliken, RN, PhD, HEC-C, Clinical Associate Professor, Boston College, USA
- Cristian Mustafa, RN, BsN, PhM, Departamento de Enfermería, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina
- Virginia Ramos, NP, Caremore Medical Group, USA
- Maya Zumstein-Shaha, PhD, RN, FAAN, Professor, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Darlaine Jantzen
Darlaine Jantzen, PhD, RN, has focused her academic career on how nurses learn to nurse well across the continuum of education, from undergraduate nursing education to continuing professional education, and across settings. Specific areas of interest include philosophy of nursing education, adult learning theory, experiential learning, and healthcare organizational culture, as it relates to workplace learning and excellence in nursing practice. Darlaine Jantzen is an Associate Professor (Trinity Western University) and teaches from first year undergraduate to the MSN elective in nursing education, to the PhD level (beginning Fall 2022). Darlaine’s interest in philosophy began long before her academic career. She is currently engaged in a new interest in moral philosophy! She has attended and presented at a number of IPONS conferences and co-hosted the 2019 IPONS conference in Victoria, BC.
Jess Dillard Wright
Jess Dillard-Wright, PhD, MA, RN, CNM (she/they) lives, works, and plays in Western Massachusetts. She/they are an Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst Elaine Marieb College of Nursing. Jess was the 2021-22 University of California Irvine Center for Nursing Philosophy fellow. Her/their scholarship examines the confluence of healthcare, activism, history, and philosophy, influenced by poststructuralism, critical posthumanism, queer theory, feminist thought, anarchism, and abolition. You can find Jess’s scholarship in Nursing Philosophy, Advances in Nursing Science, Witness (forthcoming), and Teaching and Learning in Nursing, as well as other sorts of writing on blogs including Nursology.net, RadicalNurses.com, the ANS Blog, and NursingFuturities.org. In October, Nursing a Radical Imagination: Moving from History and Theory to Action and Alternatives is set to be released by Routledge, an anthology Jess co-edited with collaborators Jane Hopkins Walsh and Brandon Blaine Brown. Jess has been a member of IPONS since 2016 and served on the Executive Committee since 2019. As a member of the EC, Jess helped develop the social media committee and is serving on the 2022 Nursing Philosophy Conference planning committee. If elected to the position of Secretary, Jess will continue her/their efforts to continue to grow our international network promoting philosophy of nursing and healthcare as a field for philosophical inquiry
Jane Hopkins Walsh
I am a PhD candidate at Boston College, and a Spanish speaking Pediatric Nurse Practitioner at Boston Children’s Hospital. At Boston College I completed a graduate certificate in Human Rights and International Justice, leading to child advocacy work for the Flores legal counsel representing the rights of detained minors in US immigration detention centers at the southern US border in 2018-2020. I am passionate about global health equity, and have over a decade of work in rural primary care delivery in Honduras. My philosophical views and life work are guided by justice, activism, antiracism and anti-oppression. Together with an international writing and thinking collaborative, my areas of research and scholarship are inspired by critical posthumanism, new materialism, abolition, Black feminism, and liberation and emancipatory philosophies. I joined IPONS in 2017 and present at yearly conferences, joining the executive committee in 2019. I have been a part of the organizing committees of two IPONS virtual panels in 2020 and 2021, and I moderated the discussion session for the 2020 virtual panel. I currently serve on the social media committee. I would be honored to continue to support the IPONS Executive Committee to further advance philosophy as a foundational guide for nurses to think through- and act upon important issues.
Pawel Krol
I am Assistant Professor of Nursing at Laval University in Quebec, Canada. My scientific interests focus on philosophical and critical analyses of nursing practices related to euthanasia and emancipatory study of the nursing condition in modern health systems. My current funded research programme fosters critical analysis of the paradoxical ethical issues between the liberalisation of euthanasia for the “disadvantaged” and the promotion of transhumanist discourses and technologies favouring the extension of the quality / quantity of life for the « privileged » of our societies. To these emancipatory ends, I employ alternative epistemology informed by the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger. I have written several articles in critical theory in French / English promoting the quality and accessibility to nursing care. I’ve organised the 20th IPONS/uNPR congress « Revisiting the roots of nursing philosophy and critical theory » in Quebec in 2017. We are finishing an important academic book Philosophy, Critical Theory and Nursing Science with ULaval Press (Krol & Holmes 2023). The inescapable role of philosophy for nursing science is my career goal: therefore, I aspire to become an executive member of IPONS with a medium-term aim at the higher ranks. In this mandate, I will promote the activities of IPONS, involving myself in the organisation, administration, and promotion of IPONS events and internal activities.
Aimee B. Milliken
I am a nurse, ethicist, and scholar. Most recently, I served as the Executive Director of the Ethics Service at a large academic medical center in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. I am joining the faculty in the Connell School of Nursing at Boston College this summer. Prior to my work as a clinical ethicist, I was a critical care nurse for over a decade. I received my PhD from Boston College and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical ethics. I have conducted research, published, and presented nationally and internationally on the topics of nursing ethics and clinical ethics including at IPONS where I won the Student Paper Award in 2016. As officer, my priority would be keeping the most pressing ethical issues at top of mind, and I’d aim to engage the great thinkers of the IPONS community in chartering a path forward for our profession during these unprecedented times.
Maya Zumstein-Shaha
I am Professor and Adjunct Head of the Master of Science in Nursing Program at the Bern University of Applied Sciences. For my academic training, I studied in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. I teach and conduct research, and my expertise includes philosophy of science in Nursing, Nursing theory development, Advanced Practice Nursing and Ethics. Since 2012, I serve as a member on the National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics. Since 2020, I am Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and since 2021, I serve as a member on the Board of the Swiss National Nurses’ Association. I would very much enjoy serving on the Executive Council of the IPONS. I believe that I may provide additional viewpoints of interest for the IPONS. Previously, I have had the opportunity of getting to know the society also as a presenter. I particularly welcome the possibility of focusing on philosophical and ethical issues in more detail. These two areas remain underserved in my country and, thus, exchanges are somewhat limited. Should I be elected on the Council, I would wish to focus on promoting the role of philosophy and philosophy of science in nursing, education, and practice, as I strongly believe in their importance for our profession and discipline.