Impacts of Posthumanism on Nursing Education.

Abstract

Nursing education has long operated within humanistic and anthropocentric epistemological frameworks that centre the autonomous rational human subject as both the object and agent of care. While these foundations have shaped core professional values, they increasingly fail to account for the relational, sociomaterial, and more-than-human conditions that characterise contemporary nursing practice. This paper draws on critical posthumanism, particularly as theorised by Rosi Braidotti, to examine what a posthumanist reorientation of nursing education might look like and what it might demand. The paper proceeds in three moves. First, it traces the philosophical lineage of secular liberal humanism in nursing, showing how its normative image of 'the human' has historically marginalised feminine, racialized, non-Western, and non-human forms of agency contradicting nursing's own commitments to social justice and equity. Second, it uses Braidotti's key concepts subjectivity-as-process, monism, and autopoiesis to reconceptualize nursing's four metaparadigmatic concepts: person, environment, health, and nursing itself. Within this framework, the person is understood as embodied, embedded, and relationally constituted rather than self-contained; the environment becomes an agential ecology rather than passive context; health emerges as a relational outcome shaped by biological, technological, and sociomaterial forces; and nursing is reframed as care work distributed across more-than-human assemblages that include technologies, institutions, infrastructures, and microbial ecologies. Third, the paper translates these reconceptualizations into concrete implications for curriculum design, pedagogical practice, assessment, policy, and research arguing that posthumanist nursing education must move beyond competency-based, patient-centred models that under-theorise the entangled realities nurses navigate daily. This paper contributes to an emerging body of scholarship applying posthuman frameworks to professional nursing education. It argues that a critical posthumanist curriculum is not a rejection of nursing's ethical foundations, but their necessary expansion one capable of preparing nurses for the ecological, technological, and sociopolitical transformations that define 21st-century care.