Can the institutional systems that prepare Black nurse researchers question the ways their systemic pathways have impacted health equity knowledge development in nursing? We invite our readers to keep this question in mind and engage with our conversation as Black nurse researchers, scholars, educators, and clinicians. The purpose of our conversation, and this article, is to explore the transactional impact of knowledge development pathways and Black faculty retention pathways on the state of health equity knowledge in nursing today. Over a (...) series of conversations, we discuss the research exploitation of communities of color, deficit research funding, knowledge capitalization, the marginalization of diversity as a continuous process, a lack of sociocultural authority, and our thoughts on solutions. We conclude by using the wisdom of a generation to answer our initial question. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss nurses' ongoing difficulty in engaging with politics and address the persistent belief that political positioning is antithetical to quality nursing care. I suggest that nurses are not faced with choosing either caring for their patients or engaging with politics. I base my discussion on the assumption that such dichotomy is meaningless and that engaging with issues of relationships firmly grounds nursing in the realm of politics. I argue that the ethical merit of nursing care relies (...) instead on positioning nurses squarely at the centre of care activities, experiences, and functions. Such positioning makes possible what Foucault called ‘practices of self‐formation’, that is, micro‐level processes that balance out the ubiquitous economic, cultural, legal, and scientific technologies that steadily constitute subjects in this era of modernity. Nurses, then, become not a group that needs to be controlled and governed, but individuals who must care for their self before they may care for anyone else. (shrink)