INTERPRETING POSTHUMANISM WITH NURSE WORK

The scarcity of research into care work shows that it is still unclear what constitutes the discrete fundamentals of care. It is this invisibility of care in the time of posthuman convergence in which we find ourselves. In this article we argue that care work (understood in this article through nursing) and posthumanism illuminate human and more-than-human world making. Practical experiences of nursing can help us understand world making with posthuman philosophies and knowledge production, while the critical theories of posthumanism can point us to a humanistic understanding of care work. Posthumanism challenges commonplace assumptions of concepts from which we frame our everyday lives. We show nurse work through a posthuman lens and begin to demonstrate opportunities to make posthumanism perceptible. In approaching nursing from this perspective, we then suggest new possibilities for approaching nurse work and care.