Through technical rationality, healthcare professionals address instrumental problems by applying the theory and technique arising from scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, the divergent situations of practice characterised by uncertainty, instability, and uniqueness place nurses in a positivist epistemological dilemma. Decision‐making under uncertainty is a challenge that nurses face in clinical practice daily. Nurses anticipate critical events based on the interaction between (un)known factors of clinical reasoning, putting uncertainty tolerance into perspective. With undeniable epistemological relevance, few nursing researchers have addressed this issue. Based (...) on the insights garnered from the panel held at the 26th International Nursing Philosophy Conference, this discussion paper examines the inception of uncertainty within nursing reasoning, intertwining introspection, abstraction, and the rich discussions from the conference. Accordingly, the philosophical underpinnings of the perceived experience of uncertainty will be briefly addressed, while framing the decision‐making challenges faced by nurses. A compelling dimension of nursing care emerges when we delve into the inception of uncertainty, prompting a deeper examination of the interplay between its perception and consciousness in clinical practice, and the gravitation of uncertainty in the process of empirical reasoning. Navigating uncertainty involves varying individual responses, influenced by tolerance levels. Moral appropriateness is determined by their adaptability rather than solely their positivity or logical consistency, highlighting constancy as a quality demanding alignment with an understanding of challenges. (shrink)

Nursing education, as with professionalization projects, is fraught with epistemicide, false separations, and a focus on expertise over relations and accountability. This is a critical reflection of the first 5 years of a four‐semester prelicensure Community Engagement course series. As the course lead, I have consistently initiated adjustments, based on experiences teaching multiple sections and synthesizing comments and feedback from students and faculty, with an eye toward longstanding and pressing concerns in the world around us. Two broad epistemic arrangements emerge (...) from this critical excavation: (1) naturalized hierarchy, false separations, and appraisals of relevance and (2) relationality and reflection as unsettling. There is a need for sustained collective examination and shift in how the nursing education and healthcare industries curate the meanings and practice of “community,” “health,” and “nursing,” peering out from the regulatory oversight of neoliberal forces. How might we situate student progression, program implementation, institutional contracts, and curricular standards within the contexts of nursing programs' responsibilities to local communities in light of unfolding events locally and globally and their historical antecedents? How are we all, as faculty, disrupting siloes, false separations, and the contradictions of professionalism and the biomedical model to intentionally advance health equity? May we continue to illuminate the presence of community as being everywhere, not merely in juxtaposition to acute care. May we unsettle the prevailing theorization and practices of community throughout nursing education and commit to imagining and practicing relational praxis. (shrink)

Nursing's efforts at organizing in the United States have encompassed various approaches to creating change at a systemic and political level, namely shared governance, professional associations, and nurse unions. The United States is currently experiencing the effects of an authoritarian sociopolitical agenda that has taken aim at our profession's ethic of providing equitable care for all people through legislation that bans gender‐affirming care and abortions. Nursing is simultaneously experiencing a crisis of burnout and moral distress, as we navigate the everyday (...) functions of a for‐profit healthcare system under the Capitalocene. As we situate ourselves within these policies and practices of late‐stage capitalism and an increasingly authoritarian nation‐state, we are compelled to think deeply about how nursing is currently organizing ourselves. Our paper will explore the evolution of various forms of organizing through the lens of intersectionality, which offers a framework for considering the ways that power operates, creating a matrix of sociostructural processes that fuel injustice. Intersectionality also compels us to examine whether our organizing has resisted, or perpetuated, a matrix of oppression. We will conclude by offering examples of radical imagining for a future of nursing resistance, where our collective organizing has a greater impact and responsibility for dismantling the status quo to achieve justice and liberation. (shrink)