Abstract
The purpose of this study was to make legible nursing students’ efforts and aspirations as well as the industries that shape nursing education. Utilizing constructivist grounded theory, I interviewed 33 pre-licensure nursing students and recent graduates residing in California. Findings indicate that nursing students are engaged in active struggle. Nursing students internalize, perpetuate, and resist systems of oppression by mapping nursing education priorities, navigating the power dynamics of nursing programs, laboring through colonialism internalized and collectivized within cohort dynamics, and locating themselves in relation to community and future change. Nursing programs are vital sites of contestation with opportunities to expand and transgress the bounds of nursing, academia, and health care, not merely staging grounds for licensure. This study contributes to the excavation of oppressive systems, centering individual and collective student agency within the context of increasingly exploitative systems of education, nursing, and health care.
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