Exploring that which lies beyond nursing's historic humanist preoccupation

Critical posthumanism, or the deconstruction of humanism (Herbrechter, 2017), has become an important project in the social sciences and humanities, and more recently in applied fields such as nursing (Aranda, 2019). We are therefore excited to be bringing this special Nursing Inquiry issue on Critical Posthumanism to press. Over recent years, nurse scholars have been experimenting with what our disciplinary world might look like from the perspective of a critical posthumanist stance, not only with respect to the impact of technology and artificial intelligence on health and health care (e.g., Archibald & Barnard, 2018; Ireland, 2017; Locsin et al., 2021; Zhao, 2023), but also as it might be applied to such global matters as planetary and social justice (Braidotti, 2013), and ultimately to an understanding of the fundamental premises, practices and processes of our own discipline (Petrovskaya, 2023). As Smith (2023, p. 22) has recently noted, “In a context in which the interconnectedness of life on earth is brought to the fore by rapid climate change and axioms of advanced capitalism, what it is to be human becomes interpellated.” Arguably, the COVID pandemic has accelerated the kind of nursing theorizing that takes us beyond the portrayal of persons as they have historically been situated within traditional humanism as the central focus of nursing concern (Anderson, 2023). In this light, nurse scholars have begun to seriously reflect on considerations of that which was not (or is not) considered human under ideological systems such as white supremacy, as well as the relevance of that which is nonhuman, other-than-human and more-than-human on our conceptualizations of the fundamental purpose of nursing and health care (Adam et al., 2021). As members of a scientifically informed applied professional discipline situated firmly in the material and affective worlds, nursing occupies a somewhat wobbly and constantly shifting space in which its attention is increasingly drawn to much that exists within the virtual and nonhuman domain. As a consequence, it has come to understand that it must lift its gaze from its traditional primary focus on the bedside so that it can reckon with such weighty matters as planetary destruction, ongoing colonialism, racism, oppression, authoritarianism, neoliberal political economies, and much more. As Dillard-Wright et al. (2020, p. 144) have explained, “This embrace requires that we critique our disciplinary norms to identify and dismantle the pernicious influences that constrain us, including our own racist, sexist, ableist, and elitist tendencies as a profession.” To accomplish this, we need not only to decenter our fixation on conceptualizations of person as the core of our disciplinary theorizing (Thorne, 2024), but also grapple with the idea that there is continuity, rather than binary division, between nature and culture in understanding the impact of that personhood within the wider planetary context (Braidotti, 2013). I feel confident that Nursing Inquiry, with its special emphasis on promoting critical reflection upon the ideas that shape nursing and healthcare, has at least in part been contributing over the years to building the foundation for that evolving disciplinary direction. In planning for this Special Issue, I was quite captivated by the interpretations of a stellar group of scholars—Jane Hopkins-Walsh, Jessica Dillard-Wright, Brandon Blaine Brown, Jamie Smith, and Eva Willis (who self-reference as founding members of the Compost Collaborative https://www.compostcollaborative.online/). This group has played a key role in urging nursing to recognize the value of this perspective, arguing that “Dwelling in and attending to these borderlands suggest to us a rich topography of compostable imagination and possibility” (Hopkins-Walsh et al., 2022, p. 18). And indeed this special issue process has clearly demonstrated that potential. I had the privilege of working closely with these creative and imaginative thought leaders to clarify the intended scope for this issue, send out a wide call for submissions of manuscripts, and identify potential peer reviewers within this emerging field internationally. They helped me determine who might be best placed not only to appreciate the intricacies of the theoretical arguments inherent in critical posthumanism, but also to critically reflect in their written review reports on the nature of the arguments each prospective author was attempting to make with respect to the relevance of these arguments for nursing, and to articulate these at a level of sophistication that would pique the interest of this journal's community of readers. And we owe a debt of gratitude to the exceptional cadre of anonymous peer reviewers who stepped up to the challenge and in many instances contributed in a manner that significantly strengthened the origin submissions before acceptance for publication. The shared passion of this Compost Collaborative for the potential of these various angles of vision and their scholarly generosity when called upon to provide advice and guidance as the submissions worked their way through the review process have been truly inspiring. That they deconstruct in such a delightfully reconstructive spirit seems so fitting for what our profession needs at this juncture in its history. At the same time, I must be clear that, as Editor-in-Chief, I retained editorial control for all publication decisions throughout the process. Therefore, if any eyebrows are raised with respect to what was and was not included in this collection, they must be squarely aimed in my direction. I am truly excited by the direction of thinking toward which this collection of papers takes us, and I hope that the arguments put forward by these authors will inspire the next generation of nurse scholars to press beyond that which has traditionally been considered the domain of nursing theorizing and philosophizing and into this much larger and more complex world of embedded ideologies and impacts. It is a world within which I believe nursing has much to offer.

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