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Note: The workshop is open to students/faculty from any university, but there are no course credits being offered.

Required materials

Please submit the following application documents by Nov. 30:

• Topic Proposal (see Sample Topic Proposals tab): Describe the philosophical questions or ideas you would like to explore in the workshop. Highlight the philosophical questions or ideas and explain how they are related to nursing scholarship or practice. (250 words maximum)
• Personal Statement: Describe how nursing philosophy fits into your expected nursing career or practice, what attracts you to doing philosophy, and any previous education in or experience with philosophy (250 words maximum)
• A letter of support from your PhD advisor (for graduate students) or Chair/Dean (for faculty) or supervisor (for those in other roles). This letter should acknowledge that the workshop will take time away from the participant’s other academic duties and make clear how the participant’s time will be protected by the participant’s department/school to ensure they can attend and complete all workshop activities (for example by being able to enroll in a directed studies course at their university to account for and provides credit for the workshop activities)
• Up-to-date curriculum vitae

Sample topic proposals

Example 1: The intersection of science and philosophy related to nursing phenomena

My dissertation research concerns the gut microbiome’s role in pregnancy outcomes.  Both in my lab and in the papers I am reading, “race” is used as a variable.  This disturbs me because it seems to presuppose that the relationship between gut microbiome and pregnancy outcomes are mediated by genetics, and that there are genetic differences among races.  However, I believe race to be a social construction, not biological.  If the results of this research are used in nursing practice, nurses would be tailoring their recommendations to the “race” of the patient.  But this would just reinscribe on the body all of the intersectional injustices of racism.  In the workshop, I would like to explore the philosophy of race and how race figures in microbiome research.  My questions are: if race is a social construction, then how can it be a variable in research?  And when science invokes “race” as a variable, then is it racist?  Can microbiome research contribute to social justice?

Example 2: The idea of virtue ethics and nursing’s orientation to patients

When asked to name a trait of good nurses, what comes to many minds is that they’re empathic. Being a good nurse requires a felt understanding of patients’ desires, fears, confusions, and needs. And yet, despite the importance of empathy in nursing practice, its ethical relevance is unclear. In the field of nursing, what exactly is ethically relevant about empathy? Is it that nurses without empathy are negligent? That the empathic nurse is better able to discern and garner legitimate patient consent? That the empathic nurse is ethically virtuous? These sorts of questions interest me.

Example 3: How to philosophize the practice of nursing?

Nursing as a discipline is committed to the non‐reducibility of the health/care experience, which makes it a defining challenge to describe what precisely it is that nurses do day in and day out and how they do it. That nursing, literally, struggles to ‘come to terms’ with itself, in discourse if not in practice. This may be because it is truly difficult (impossible?) to theorize what refuses to remain static. As a nurse, how are we to obtain clarity about our fundamental concepts when our patients and our world will not stand still long enough to ‘pin them down’, so to speak? The philosophical question is, CAN the dynamic empirics of nursing practice be framed into a static matrix of explanation, and if so how, and if not, what then?