ABSTRACT
We are currently living in an unprecedented time known as the Anthropocene—an epoch built, produced, and manufactured by the neoliberal interests of a capitalist society through extraction, human exceptionalism, and technological advancement. These practices have resulted in numerous hierarchical and dualistic binaries separating the human from the non-human and culture from nature. As a result of this received worldview, we have become steeped in the ethos of humanism—of which nursing anchors its core. We, however, are living in a posthuman time. Haraway (2016) presents us no longer as humans but instead as humus – in which all materials of the universe—both organic and inorganic—are composing, decomposing, and composting together, ultimately prompting us to consider that we have become more than human through the blending of worlds. This amalgamation does not come without consequences: climate change, environmental degradation, systemic racism, marginalization, global oppression, and health disparities all of which threaten the wholeness of our symbiotic ecosystem. Addressing these more than human problems of the Anthropocene will require a reconceptualization of the way in which we educate the nurses of tomorrow through the development of a pedagogy that deconstructs the often taken-for-granted naturalness of humanism. In this chapter, I advance a new ontological and epistemological vision to undergird nursing pedagogy to cultivate a sense of multi-species responsibility—calling us to think beyond our current anthropocentric frame to address the complexities of our posthuman world. This includes educating nurses through an immanent, embodied, and relational approach—prompting us to think with and through multiple connections—both human and non-human, organic and inorganic others by reclaiming the human as animal and transcending regimes of truth. Ultimately, in this pedagogical reconceptualization, the environment and community become the central focus of the discipline—moving beyond the human/nature opposition.
