#AbolishNursing: An Ethics for Creating Safer Realities

Abstract

The radical imaginations discussed in Part 3 of this anthology are some of our dreams, and yet we are nowhere close to any possible radical imaginations for nursing's, or any healthcare's, future conceptualizations. Abolition, a collective struggle, is the best model for stepping toward our liberatory futures, and we can only do this together, not alone. Our existences, our taking and holding space, should be a manifestation of abolition, yet this alone is not enough. In this chapter, I work from my colleagues’, my students’, my patients’, and their collective communities’ radical imaginations—and especially those from radical queer Black feminism, disability justice, trans liberation, Indigenization, and other abolitionist critical sociopolitical theory and lived empirical reality existence—to name what steps are mandatory to bring us toward those liberatory futures, how we get there from here where we are right now. Abolition requires that we destroy what is oppressive, and then those who have been hurt the most can create something else, should they desire to. We who are here right now have examples of those peoples and groups of people who have made moves toward abolition and of abolitionist organizers. We have guidebooks. Our roles include joining together for abolition, because “nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone” (Kaba, 2020).