Jane, Jess, Annie-Claude, Patrick, Jamie, Rae

Collectively, the world enters the fourth year of the pandemic, terrain now complicated by growing economic depression, pernicious sociopolitical inequities, authoritarian drift, and worsening planetary conditions. Nurses struggle to provide safe, ethical care within institutions built upon ontologies at odds with mandates of nursing. Following the proliferation of neoliberalism, models of healthcare increasingly center priorities and expectations of capital, concentrating decision-making power at the top of the hierarchy without the voices of liberation-minded nurses or the people they accompany. However, depriving the debate of these voices considerably weakens the quality of the public debate, and does not allow informed decision-making. In our view, political freedom presupposes equal respect for all. Taking inspiration from political philosophers Arendt, Freire, and Martin Baró, abolition scholar-activists Mariame Kaba and Angela Davis, anarchist and nurse Emma Goldman, and global labor organizers, we propose a radical imagination for nursing. Sociologist Ruha Benjamin proposes moving away from descriptive critique to affirming solutions and action. One path for nursing action is manifest through radical principles of solidarity. Nonhierarchical models of solidarity center people and communities in care planning and shift power. We draw upon historical examples showing that people and communities are experts in providing mutual aid, finding solutions to challenges, yet hierarchies traditionally exclude them in solution building. Drawing on Rancière and later Breaugh and Penafiel, we assert that within conflict and struggle, boundaries of freedom expand and emancipation becomes conceivable. Through these lines of thinking we present Solidarity is a Nursing Intervention.