Health data are born of a person's lived reality and carry that reality with them. They inhabit the systems that receive them, they feed the algorithms that learn from them, and they outlive the encounter in which they were produced. Nursing has begun to theorise its own side of this scene, from technological competency to frameworks for responsible artificial intelligence; the side of the person whose data have departed remains theoretically unattended. This essay proposes the Theory of the Entrustment of the Data-Person. Its founding act is the entrustment. Handing over one's need for care at a stage of vulnerability hands over body, history and data together, and the obligation of care travels with the data wherever they go. From within the relational ethics of care, the essay develops the theory by answering the ontological question (what a data-person is, namely value, origin and biographical bond, belonging to the person and partly constituting her), the metaphysical question (what remains after death, the echoes and the mirror composed of them, a consent that becomes a last will, and a guardian who answers when the source is silent), the epistemic question (what a professional can honestly promise, namely a stepped custody, an organisational duty to disclose, and a duty of awareness in generalisation), the ethical question (why the obligation is enforceable rather than charitable, and why a duty succeeds where new rights would fail, since a right requires a claimant and a duty only an obligated party) and the methodological question (why a theory born at the bedside is legitimate nursing philosophy). The implications propose a three-layer architecture of consent: one may refuse the mirror, not the census. The discipline that manages care, whose object is the person, already occupies the custodian's post in fact. What remained was to name it.

This paper develops the recognition paradox in nursing practice: expertise can increase the capacity to manage clinically complex situations while rendering the relational work through which they are managed less available for reflective recognition. Nursing complexity is commonly identified through visible proxies-workload, acuity, care intensity, number or difficulty of interventions. Clancy (2024) has shown how attempts to represent complex practice frequently reduce it to discrete components. Building on that critique, the paper identifies a distinct site of selectivity: complexity may become only partially recognizable to the nurses who enact it, a form of selectivity analytically distinct from that introduced by organizational representation. Drawing on accounts of expertise, tacit knowing and invisible work, it distinguishes experienced complexity (the difficulty, uncertainty or effort perceived by the practitioner) from enacted complexity (the heterogeneity and interdependence of clinically relevant relations on which appropriate performance depends, as established through converging evidence). These can diverge because experience reorganizes attention, allowing multiple cues and contextual relations to be integrated without separate focal inspection. The paper treats possession, exercise, recognition and articulation as analytically distinct sites of possible epistemic loss rather than as stages of a linear process, and shows how selectivity at each site shapes what becomes organizationally visible. The central claim is modest but consequential: representational systems can preserve only those dimensions of complexity that become professionally available for description.

The nursing imaginary is populated with a plurality of feminine and feminized archetypes. These images reinforce a particular order of things for nurses and nursing, marching out well-worn stereotypes link gender and sexuality. Less attention has been paid to the productive, affirmative, and playful dimensions of these archetypes and the possibilities they offer. Using feminist theory, queer theory, and lessons from camp, I ask why sometimes it might be useful to be a Madonna or a whore or a battleax. Recognising some potential for misunderstanding, I want to be clear that I am neither dismissing these myths as innocuous or unproblematic nor am I endorsing any particular version as the way, the truth, the life for nurses. Rather than a fixed identity or intractable cage, I want to stay with the trouble to think through what happens when we conceptualise these tropes as personas or characters nurses may don and doff at will like personal protective equipment, stylized to suit the cast with whom they perform, inclusive of patients and colleagues alike. I do this not as a technique to undermine the professionalism of nurses or nursing but rather to recognise this kind of performance as an important piece of emotional triage, acknowledging the skilful affective decision-making that goes into choosing how to occupy a particular role in a particular moment to elicit particular outcomes, conjuring the realities and feelings and ethics. Attending to nursing in this way, I think, can offer some points of entry for thinking about nursing and its work differently: playful, practiced, performative, powerful.

This article argues that the 'politics of seriousness' in nursing operates as a cis-normative control mechanism that imposes sterile professional distances. To address the care of transvestite-trans people, it proposes-drawing on the epistemologies of the Global South and through Latin American Transvestite-Trans Theory (LATTT)-the adoption of an aesthetic of care based on Camp: a form of care that exalts the 'Trava', celebrates Affect and the Art of transvestite-trans self-determination, and replaces the hierarchical clinical protocol with 'Nostredad'. To this end, a critical analysis was conducted using a theoretical framework that integrates Walker and Avant's model with Wayar's Latin American Transvestite-Trans Theory. This contributed to the development of new theoretical concepts applicable to the practice of nursing care for transgender people. We conclude that transnormative care is truly ethical and must therefore be 'unserious': it must be exaggeratedly affective, complicit, and deeply relational to dismantle systemic violence.

Pain assessment often follows a hierarchy: self-report is treated as the gold standard, while behavioural and physiological evidence are used when the report is unavailable. This protects patients against professional disbelief but can make those unable to self-report appear unable to contribute to knowledge about their pain. I argue that verbal report and nonverbal expression belong to one interpretive practice while retaining different epistemic roles. Self-report carries presumptive first-person authority because it conveys experience, meaning, and preferences. Behavioural evidence is indirect, context-dependent, and fallible, but it is genuine evidence. Physiological evidence is less specific and should remain an adjunct. When self-report is unavailable, what changes is not the kind of pain a patient may have but the evidence available and what it can justify. Drawing on the social communication model of pain, nursing accounts of tacit and relational knowledge, phenomenology, and epistemic injustice, I use functional distress to name an organised pattern of clinically significant change. The functional-distress framework explains when that pattern supports suspicion of pain. It is not another assessment instrument; it shows how clinicians combine validated tools with timing, relationships, clinical context, alternative explanations, and reassessment. Functional distress does not prove pain. It can provide reversible grounds for suspicion; separately, risk, vulnerability, and reversibility may justify a proportionate precautionary response. The ethical task is to preserve first-person authority without treating patients who cannot exercise it as epistemically absent.

Vulnerability is widely invoked in healthcare, bioethics, and nursing, yet it remains poorly defined because universal human susceptibility, situational exposure to harm, and clinical frailty are frequently treated as interchangeable. This conceptual ambiguity is particularly significant following a fall, when older adults may be understood predominantly through physical risk, functional decline, and the need for protection. Through an interpretative analysis drawing on nursing philosophy, feminist bioethics, phenomenological accounts of embodiment, and nursing ethics, this paper critically examines the distinction between frailty and vulnerability in older adults following a fall. It argues that frailty describes a multidimensional clinical condition involving reduced physiological reserve, whereas vulnerability also emerges through lived experience, relationships, material resources, and institutional practices. A fall may therefore intensify vulnerability not only through bodily disruption but also through changes in dependence, decision-making authority, and participation in everyday life. Nursing care occupies an ethically ambivalent position within this process: protective interventions may reduce avoidable harm while simultaneously restricting agency or generating pathogenic vulnerability. To address this tension, the paper develops the concept of responsive protection as an ethical orientation for post-fall nursing care. Responsive protection requires protective practices to be negotiated with older adults, proportionate to the risks and burdens involved, and revisable as circumstances and capacities change. The paper concludes that safety, relational autonomy, and dignity should be understood as interdependent dimensions of an ethical nursing response to post-fall vulnerability.

Organisational justice has emerged as a key area of interest given the challenges of protecting the health and well-being of nurses in healthcare organisations. Existing research shows significant conceptual and methodological limitations that must be addressed to achieve a more comprehensive and ethically grounded understanding of nurses' needs in the healthcare system. This article explores how nurses experience their working conditions within public healthcare organisations through a theoretical lens of social justice to unveil the systemic injustices embedded within them. Adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, this study draws on 31 semi-structured interviews with nurses working within the public healthcare sector in the Balearic Islands (Spain), informed by Nancy Fraser's feminist theory of justice. The findings illustrate that nurses conceptualised organisational justice as the condition that allows them to practice their profession in accordance with their professional ethos. This novel understanding of organisational justice underscores the economic, social, cultural and political manifestations of gendered injustices nurses face in their daily practice and that prevent them from being considered as peers in the social life of healthcare organisations. This study highlights the imperative to rethink organisational justice through a lens that accounts for the gendered nature of care and nursing work. Nancy Fraser's theory of justice emerges as a groundbreaking framework that offers novel insights to guide this transformative endeavour.

Lateral violence among nurses is most often explained as oppressed group behavior: aggression displaced from an external oppressor onto peers. Drawing on the Korean phenomenon of taeeum, the harsh "breaking-in" of novice nurses, this paper argues that such accounts leave two things unexplained. Why should the violence wear the language of care, teaching, and community? And why does it persist despite being named and condemned? It proposes that these features become intelligible only when the phenomenon is read not as an absence of community but as its forgery. Taking Ubuntu's proposition that a person becomes a person through other persons, and Menkiti's claim that personhood is a communal attainment that can fail, the paper reconstructs the community as a directional apparatus whose purpose is to raise the novice into a person. It then rereads a meta-synthesis of qualitative studies of taeeum and shows that the forms of community, including hierarchy, belonging, dialog, and care, remain fully in place while their direction is reversed. This state is named forgery: a structure that possesses every form of the genuine while betraying its purpose. The paper defends the concept against neighboring terms by a substitution test, argues that forgery has no single forger because in taeeum circulation is itself production, and thereby explains persistence: like counterfeit currency, forgery passes by acceptance rather than belief, so condemnation aimed at malice misses it. The same diagnosis is shown to hold in Confucian terms, where taeeum takes the ritual and discards the humaneness, and Ubuntu itself is shown to be subject to betrayal, distinguishing erosion (recoverable absence) from forgery (persisting misdirection). The account offers not a criterion for adjudicating cases but a way of seeing, returning to the nursing community a set of questions about the direction of its own relationships.

This paper offers a philosophical critique of the moral economy of nursing research under conditions of commodification and metricisation. Using the concept of the junkification of research as an analytic lens, it examines tensions that may arise when institutional criteria such as publication volume, journal prestige, citation visibility, grant capture and speed of dissemination operate alongside criteria concerned with methodological rigour, conceptual contribution, ethical seriousness and practical significance. The paper does not claim that nursing research as a whole has become junkified or that particular areas of nursing knowledge have been empirically demonstrated to be marginalised. Rather, it asks how contemporary evaluative conditions may shape what forms of scholarship are feasible, recognised and circulated. It argues that this question is especially important in nursing because nursing knowledge is simultaneously empirical, explanatory, interpretive, relational, situated and practice-accountable. The paper further examines how marketised access and prestige structures can affect participation and epistemic recognition, and concludes by framing doctoral education, academic leadership, publishing, institutional assessment and professional governance as sites of disciplinary stewardship.

In the United States context, incivility in nursing education is widely studied as a behavioral problem to be measured and remedied. In contrast, civility has been conceptualized as a professional virtue that is foundational to nursing identity. Together, these civility and incivility orientations sustain a moral binary for nursing education in which civility functions as virtue and incivility as its violation. This paper re-orients the discourse by reading incivility through camp. Drawing on Susan Sontag and Fabio Cleto, camp serves as an analytic lens to show how exaggerated seriousness, affective escalation, and performative staging produce incivility as a violation of moral authority. We offer a synthesis of how civility and incivility are written in the nursing education literature and reflect on their conceptual asymmetry. Then, we present and examine a three-scene vignette featuring two behaviors codified in the Incivility in Nursing Education-Revised (INE-R) scale: lateness and eye-rolling. Through a camp analysis of the vignette, we trace moral regulation via policy, surveillance, affective escalation, and racialized cultural coding. What can appear as a behavioral violation according to the literature is shown through camp and contextualization to be instead affective attachments to normative expectations of comportment and professionalism. We show how incivility and its associated behaviors function as performative judgments of disposition within a moral binary. Camp transforms how incivility is perceived by revealing how ordinary behaviors become moralized in nursing education. By unsettling the civility/incivility binary, this conceptual analysis invites greater reflexivity in scholarship and pedagogy and opens space for more contextually attentive engagement with professional identity.

Pain remains a persistent and ethically consequential problem in healthcare because recognizing another person's suffering requires judgements about testimony, credibility, and appropriate response. Yet, nursing responses to pain continue to be shaped by uncertainty about what pain is, how it is known, and how it should be responded to. Although nursing scholarship contains extensive work on pain knowledge, attitudes, barriers, and assessment tools, it offers less conceptual clarity on a central question raised by emerging technologies: what happens to nursing judgement when artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted systems claim to recognize pain? This paper argues that AI-assisted pain recognition should be treated as a fallible adjunct to nursing judgement rather than as an objective arbiter of pain. Drawing on nursing philosophy, epistemic injustice, contemporary pain theory, and recent debates on nonverbal assessment and AI, I argue that pain is not merely a signal to be measured but a personal, embodied, and interpretively mediated experience disclosed through testimony, context, and clinical judgement. I further argue that epistemic humility, while necessary, is not sufficient for nursing practice. In response, I develop a nursing framework of relational discernment, grounded in presumptive respect for pain testimony, contextual triangulation, bias-aware credibility judgement, relational accountability, and contestability of algorithmic outputs. This framework clarifies the nurse's role in recognizing and responding to pain under conditions of technological mediation and offers a philosophically grounded basis for more humane and ethically defensible pain assessment and management.

Confidential conversations constitute an important, still insufficiently explored, aspect of palliative care. While described as valuable in clinical practice, their relational and existential significance remains difficult to conceptualise. This article examines confidential conversations through a philosophical dialogue between empirical insights from specialised palliative care and Paul Ricœur's philosophy of Homo Capax. Ricœur is not applied as a theoretical framework; rather, confidential conversations both illuminate and invite further reflection on his understanding of capability, vulnerability, practical wisdom, solicitude, and narrative identity. The article is based on a philosophical reflection of a synthesis of four qualitative studies conducted in specialised palliative care. It begins from recurring tensions within confidential conversations concerning spontaneity and structure, safety and uncertainty, everyday small talk and existential disclosure, professional responsibility and interpersonal presence. These tensions remain unresolved and are understood as relational conditions through which confidential conversations become possible. Dialogue with Ricœur suggests that confidential conversations can be understood as fragile relational events in which capability and vulnerability are mutually constitutive rather than opposed. This interpretation invites further philosophical reflection on autonomy, asymmetrical vulnerability, and the limits of practical wisdom. To deepen these questions, perspectives from Martin Buber and Hartmut Rosa are brought into dialogue with Ricœur, illuminating how confidential conversations become encounters characterised by responsiveness and resonance while remaining situated within asymmetrical relationships of care. This article suggests that confidential conversations are less understood as communicative interventions or professional techniques than as relational events in which meaning emerges through responsiveness under conditions of suffering, finitude, and institutional constraint. Their significance lies in the possibility that patient and nurse become responsive to one another within a relationship that neither fully controls. The article offers a philosophical interpretation of confidential conversations grounded in empirical experience.

Nursing education has long operated within humanistic and anthropocentric epistemological frameworks that centre the autonomous rational human subject as both the object and agent of care. While these foundations have shaped core professional values, they increasingly fail to account for the relational, sociomaterial, and more-than-human conditions that characterise contemporary nursing practice. This paper draws on critical posthumanism, particularly as theorised by Rosi Braidotti, to examine what a posthumanist reorientation of nursing education might look like and what it might demand. The paper proceeds in three moves. First, it traces the philosophical lineage of secular liberal humanism in nursing, showing how its normative image of 'the human' has historically marginalised feminine, racialized, non-Western, and non-human forms of agency contradicting nursing's own commitments to social justice and equity. Second, it uses Braidotti's key concepts subjectivity-as-process, monism, and autopoiesis to reconceptualize nursing's four metaparadigmatic concepts: person, environment, health, and nursing itself. Within this framework, the person is understood as embodied, embedded, and relationally constituted rather than self-contained; the environment becomes an agential ecology rather than passive context; health emerges as a relational outcome shaped by biological, technological, and sociomaterial forces; and nursing is reframed as care work distributed across more-than-human assemblages that include technologies, institutions, infrastructures, and microbial ecologies. Third, the paper translates these reconceptualizations into concrete implications for curriculum design, pedagogical practice, assessment, policy, and research arguing that posthumanist nursing education must move beyond competency-based, patient-centred models that under-theorise the entangled realities nurses navigate daily. This paper contributes to an emerging body of scholarship applying posthuman frameworks to professional nursing education. It argues that a critical posthumanist curriculum is not a rejection of nursing's ethical foundations, but their necessary expansion one capable of preparing nurses for the ecological, technological, and sociopolitical transformations that define 21st-century care.

Discrimination in healthcare is conventionally framed as a matter of patient experience or individual clinician bias. What is notably absent from the theoretical and empirical landscape of nursing is a systematic engagement with nurses' own witnessing of discrimination-not as neutral observers, but as professionals embedded within organisational structures that impose, encourage, or normalise discriminatory practices. This article argues that this absence is not a mere oversight but an epistemological pattern: nursing knowledge has historically privileged individualistic, depoliticised, and clinically neutral frameworks, thereby indirectly marginalising and rendering structural inequality less visible. Situating this argument within the ongoing critical conversation on epistemic silence and silencing in nursing, the paper articulates how the erasure of nurses' own perceptions of discrimination contributes to the reproduction of systemic inequity. Drawing on critical nursing epistemology, this paper constructs a critical dialogue among three theoretical traditions-Bourdieu's social capital, organisational justice theory, and Foucauldian-Habermasian critical thought-to demonstrate how the production of professional knowledge itself may be complicit in sustaining discrimination. Rather than offering a prescriptive model, the Nursing Justice Reflexivity Framework (NJRF) is introduced as a conceptual intervention aimed at challenging disciplinary silences and redirecting nursing research and practice toward structural reflexivity, power literacy, and justice-oriented praxis. This paper contributes to global debates on health equity by reframing nurses' perceived discrimination not merely as a clinical or ethical issue, but as an epistemological crisis with deep roots in the politics of nursing knowledge.

Since its expansion in the 1980s, nursing research has aimed to develop knowledge to produce evidence-based results that can help nurses to guide and improve decision-making regarding patient care. Nursing research is based on a rigorous methodology that meets the criteria determined by the scientific method. However, nursing research predominantly adopts approaches such as gap-spotting and problematization that remain centred on existing knowledge about phenomena. Gap-spotting seeks to identify unanswered questions in the literature, whereas problematization challenges the assumptions underlying previous research. Although these approaches differ, neither necessarily directs questioning towards nursing reality itself or towards the questioning through which that reality is apprehended. Beyond gap-spotting and problematization, this reflection is based on problematology, a philosophical approach that consists of questioning reality and reflexively interrogating the questioning through which that reality is approached. It involves questioning when we want to know which questions to ask and how to distinguish them from questions that seem insoluble. Such a stance will allow us to show the limits of ontologization and examine how the prevailing manner of not questioning reality in nursing can hinder the development of new knowledge in nursing. In this regard, this article uses the example of the nurse's role as a sociopolitical agent to provide an overview of the possibilities offered by the use of problematology.