We all care, ALL the time

Abstract

Care does not happen in a vacuum, including nursing care. With this in mind, we—Jess, Jane, Jamie, Brandon, and Eva—partnered with critical posthuman scholars Goda Klumbytė from Kassel University in Germany and Dr. Kay Sidebottom from Stirling University in Scotland for a discussion of care. Goda's research straddles critical algorithm studies, systems design, and feminist theory, drawing together these critical perspectives with applied informatics. Kay focuses on posthuman approaches to curriculum and education, affirmative ethics, and how philosophy and art can be used to reimagine education. Although on the surface, their scholarship appears to be exogenous to nursing, critical posthumanism emphasizes the convergence of thinking inter-, trans-, anti-, and postdisciplinarity (Braidotti, 2019). Features that unite the work of nursing with Goda and Kay's foci include the explorations of bodies, control, education, and labor. This points to mutual interests along the axes of critical analyses of humanism, and moving toward more transversal methodologies and posthumanities praxes when it comes to care. Specifically, we are interested in the potentiality of transdisciplinary methodologies of caring and care that are situated outside of capitalist and state enclosures which include all human, other-than-human, more-than-human, and nonhuman matter. These ideas are important for nurses and non-nurses alike as everybody is, has, or will be in need of both nursing and other forms of care. We all care all the time. Nursing sometimes lays claim to care as proprietary, under its sole purview, happening in acute care spaces, within the nurse/patient dyad and centered on neoliberalized individualistic assumptions (Dillard-Wright et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2022). We challenge this notion. Our discussion begins with the politics of care, and the idea that care is overdetermined, exploring who gets to define care. We then turn to the time-space of care, which is multiple. We conclude with considerations of how care is situated and contextual.