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Authors: J. Smith, J. Dillard-Wright, J. Hopkins Walsh, B. Brown, P. Martin, A.-C. Laurin

Abstract: The status quo in nursing is not sustainable; as nurses, we must embrace and work with the dynamic and changing situations in which we find ourselves. New materialism and critical posthumanism are rapidly expanding theoretical approaches in scientific work across a broad range of subject areas. New materialism and critical posthumanism is also growing in popularity in the nursing and healthcare research. We explore the imperatives for nursing to approach research and practice from a critical posthuman perspective. Critical posthumanism is a philosophical and cultural movement that challenges traditional ideas about the being human and how the human is situated in the world. Critical posthumanism unpacks the category of the human itself as a product of power relations, and that how the category of human is used naturalizes and legitimates oppressive structures and hierarchies. We discuss how categories of human have been used in nursing and healthcare to legitmise oppressive practices. Through empirical data available in the public sphere, explore how the category of human is less stable than is imagined in dominant models of nursing care. We (re)think and reconfigure what it could mean to be human, and for (re)newed ways of relating to non-human beings in the ongoing creation of more-than-human worlds. A (re)composition of nursing practice with cutting-edge social, cultural and political scientific work is essential to address the sustainability and challenges of nursing as a discipline.