Resistance is a concept understudied in the context of health and healthcare. This is in part because visible forms of social protest are sometimes understood as incongruent with professional identity, leading healthcare workers to separate their visible actions from their working life. Resistance takes many forms, however, and focusing exclusively on the visible means more subtle forms of everyday resistance are likely to be missed. The overarching aim of this study was to explore how resistance was enacted within the workplace (...) amongst a sample of twelve healthcare workers, based in the United Kingdom; exploring the forms that such action took and how this intersected with health and healthcare. In depth-interviews were conducted and results were analysed utilizing Lilja’s framework ( 2022 ). Our findings suggest that resistance took a number of forms, from more direct confrontational acts, to those which sought to avoid power or which sought to create alternative or prefigurative practices or norms. These findings speak to the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of resistance, as carried out by healthcare workers in the workplace. While many acts had clear political motives, with issues like climate change in mind for example, participants also described how the act of providing care itself could be an act of resistance. While saying something about our participants, this also said something about the healthcare systems in which they worked. These findings also raise a range of normative issues. Perhaps needless to say, there appears to be substantial scope to expand and interrogate our findings and apply the idea of resistance to health and healthcare. (shrink)

In this article, I will argue that the delivery of healthcare could be an act of resistance, that is, day‐to‐day, routine and perhaps mundane acts, undertaken in the course of the delivery of health services, which for many could also be considered otherwise routine care. I first consider how resistance has been conceptualised. How we understand resistance will determine if we believe healthcare could be conceptualised this way. I will show how resistance has been applied to day‐to‐day struggles elsewhere and (...) argue that it can clearly encompass open, collective dissent and more subtle, day‐to‐day action that does not necessarily make clear political demands. I go on to introduce some examples, where the delivery of health services could be conceptualised as resistance. While I advocate for a broad understanding of resistance, clearly not every act could be considered resistance; I will consider some points of tension and contention in utilising resistance to describe the delivery of health services, in particular discussing the issue of intent and opposition as they relate to resistance. Finally, while I hope that I make a convincing case, one final issue remains, namely, why turn to resistance at all, when many of the examples that I provide could be labelled using concepts that are more widely utilised. I will offer some general reflections on this point, speaking to the benefits and potential of resistance. (shrink)

As a rejection and continuous reframing of theoretical humanism, critical posthumanism questions and imagines the human condition in the current context, aligning it with nonhuman and more than human entities, past and future. While this philosophical approach has been referenced in many academic disciplines since the 1990s, it has been gradually garnering interest among nursing scholars, leading to questions such as what it means to be human and what it means to be a nurse in the here and now. As (...) a deeply ethical and political project, posthumanism, which we associate with poststructuralist concepts of power and resistance, questions the formation of posthuman subjects who more accurately reflect complex times, characterized by capitalistic commodification of life—human and nonhuman. In this article, we aim to explore how the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of critical posthumanism, specifically through Rosi Braidotti's works, can be useful to understand a posthuman subjectivity that favors affirmative actions aimed at actualizing our world in becoming. Through examples in nursing practice, education, and research, we will explore not only how critical posthumanism allows us to frame transformations in the current situation that we are embedded in as nurses and more generally as beings but also how these examples allow us to move beyond critique to the actualization of affirmative actions that correspond to the creation of new worlds. (shrink)

Care as a concept has long been central to the nursing discipline, and care ethics have consequently found their place in nursing ethics discussions. This paper briefly revisits how care and care ethics have been theorized and applied in the discipline of nursing, with an emphasis on Tronto’s political view of care. Adding to the works of other nurse scholars, we consider that Tronto’s care ethics is useful to understand caring practices in a sociopolitical context. We also contend that this (...) vision can be used specifically to politicize nurses, by encouraging them to think critically about the context in which they work and how they can participate to change the status quo, notably by prompting the democratization of care in institutional settings. We illustrate this by demonstrating how moral distress that can occur with aggressive or futile treatments in the intensive care unit can be reduced if nurses are systematically included in the decision-making process. By showing some ways in which nursing political actions can begin to change the status quo as it pertains to futile treatments at the end of life, we can help empower nurses to strive to be included in political spaces and voice their concerns to have their professional needs met. (shrink)

Professionalized nursing and anarchism could not be more at odds. And yet, if nursing wishes to have a future in the precarious times in which we live and die, the discipline must take on the lessons that anarchism has on offer. Part love note to a problematic profession we love and hate, part fever dream of what could be, we set out to think about what nursing and care might look like after it all falls down, because it is all (...) falling down. Drawing on alternate histories, alternate visions of nursing history, we imagine what nursing values would look like, embracing anarchist principles. We consider examples of community survival, mutual aid, and militant joy as strategies to achieve what nursing could be if nurses put an end to their cop shit, shrugging off their shroud of white cisheteropatriarchal femininity that manifests as professionalism and civility. We conclude with a call to action and a plan for skill-building because this can all be different. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the act of resistance by nurses and midwives at the nexus of abortion care and gender-based violence. We commence with a brief overview of a multiphased extended grounded theory doctoral project that analysed the individual, situational and socio-political experiences of Australian nurses and midwives who provide abortion care to people victimised by gender-based violence. We then turn to Essex's conceptualisation of resistance in health and healthcare and draw upon these concepts to tell a unifying and (...) cohesive story about how nurses and midwives exercise their politics. Vignettes taken from the three study phases are provided for demonstrative purposes. Finally, we discuss the potential of resistance in health and healthcare as a postmodern feminist research tool to analyse acts by nurses and midwives that could be categorised as political. (shrink)