This article examines the persistence of hierarchy within nursing education and argues that its replication in universities represents a serious contemporary issue for the discipline. Drawing on recent scholarship, sociological theory and critical reflection, it explores how managerialism and audit culture in nursing schools reproduce the hierarchical structures historically embedded in nursing. These structures, inherited from colonial, patriarchal and classed traditions, are sustained through institutional cultures that privilege visibility, control and compliance over intellectual freedom, reflection and care. The argument developed here is not that nurses welcome control, but that the profession has been socialised into systems of authority that constrain both clinical and academic practice. Within nursing faculties, this manifests in the surveillance of work, performance metrics and the erosion of academic autonomy. Such conditions, it is argued, damage not only individual wellbeing but also the legitimacy of nursing as a field of knowledge. Using the lens of Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Skeggs's analysis of value and respectability, this article highlights how hierarchy reproduces classed and gendered inequalities in nursing academia. It calls for a reimagining of leadership that prioritises relational ethics, trust and intellectual freedom. The issue is international in scope: the corporatisation of higher education and the managerial governance of academic labour affect nursing educators across diverse national contexts. Reclaiming autonomy, therefore, is not only a local struggle but a collective, global imperative. The future of nursing education depends on our ability to teach and lead without permission, to create academic spaces grounded in care, critical inquiry and the courage to dissent.

This manuscript examines corruption in Africa through an integrated governance, democracy, and psycho-logical wellbeing framework. It argues that corruption is not merely a legal or economic failure but a deep-ly embedded psychosocial and moral crisis rooted in colonial administrative systems, post-independence political consolidation, structural inequality, and institutional fragility. Drawing on continental governance frameworks of the African Union (AU) global economic analyses of corruption, and moral disengagement theory, the study conceptualizes corruption as a staged developmental process sustained by social learn-ing, cognitive dissonance, fear-based compliance, and identity fusion within corrupt institutions. The analysis situates African governance within hybrid political and economic systems shaped by patronage, elite capture, and weak accountability structures. Governance measurement tools such as the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) of the World Bank and the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of Trans-parency International (TI) illustrate how institutional erosion correlates with inequality and declining rule of law. Drawing on capability theory and development scholarship, the manuscript reframes corruption as a barrier to human freedom and social capital formation. Psychologically, corruption generates moral inju-ry, collective trauma, and learned helplessness among citizens, contributing to anxiety, distrust, and dem-ocratic disengagement. Procedural justice theory and state fragility research further demonstrate how per-ceived illegitimacy weakens compliance and public trust. African philosophical perspectives, including cultural particularism and relational ethics, provide normative foundations for reconstruction.Moving be-yond punitive responses, the manuscript proposes multidimensional reform integrating institutional strengthening, ethical leadership development, civic empowerment, restorative justice, and Ubuntu-informed relational governance. By synthesizing corruption scholarship, African political thought, moral psychology, and governance research, the study advances an interdisciplinary model positioning anti-corruption reform as essential to restoring dignity, democratic legitimacy, and psychological wellbeing across African societies.

An urgent need exists to elevate the agenda of family ethics, rooted in family nursing's moral commitment to the well-being of families and society. This paper highlights the practice, research, and educational implications for this agenda. Grounded in relational ethics, this vision calls for a curriculum and practice landscape that reflects the lived realities of diverse families and communities. Clinically, it recommends the creation of interdisciplinary care protocols that embed structured family ethics conversations, drawing on an understanding of family systems. In research, it advocates for expanding studies that examine how familial and cultural values shape moral distress and care outcomes, and for broadening traditional bioethical inquiries to include family-centered perspectives. Educationally, it urges the integration of real-world scenarios, cultural analysis, and emotional intelligence training into classrooms and skills labs. Together, these strategies aim to cultivate ethically grounded, socially responsive nurses equipped to lead transformative changes in family health care.

Abstract This paper explores what can be learned when educational research “fails.” Drawing on a Welland Trust–funded project in the North East of England that aimed to support care‐experienced students transitioning from further to higher education, we reflect on why, despite sustained effort, there was a lack of engagement. We situate this “failure” within wider debates on participation and ethics in research with marginalised people. Rather than treating non‐participation as absence or dis‐engagement, we argue that it constitutes data ‐ a response that signposts to systemic, relational and methodological tensions between researchers, institutions and the communities they seek to involve. Considering research fatigue, institutional gatekeeping and top‐down assumptions within widening‐participation work and drawing on concepts of refusal, silence and relational ethics, we reposition “failure” as an opportunity for learning about how research constructs and constrains voice, agency and belonging. We conclude with implications for design and governance of future studies with care‐experienced and other seldom‐heard groups, emphasising slower timelines, genuinely co‐created processes and attention to relational trust.

ABSTRACT Cultural competence is widely invoked in multilingual and heritage language education, yet it remains under-theorised in migrant family contexts. This study examines how Chinese migrant parents in Aotearoa New Zealand conceptualise the forms of cultural competence they expect their children to develop. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten Mainland Chinese migrant parents in Auckland, data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings indicate that parents do not frame cultural competence simply as the acquisition of cultural knowledge or adherence to fixed identity categories. Instead, they describe it as a situated capacity that emerges through intergenerational interaction and engagement with multiple social environments. Across three dimensions – moral grounding, identity negotiation, and contextual practice – parents’ reasoning consistently reorients cultural competence from content toward ethical reasoning, from affiliation toward moral coherence, and from reproduction toward situated negotiation. By foregrounding parental epistemic frameworks, the study reconceptualises the family as an epistemic site of cultural production and proposes a thickened understanding of cultural competence that foregrounds relational ethics, contextual calibration, and intergenerational negotiation within migrant family life. The findings carry implications for heritage language educators, curriculum designers, and policymakers working within superdiverse and bicultural educational contexts.

ABSTRACT Bodies of water are not merely rhetorical devices in Jeanette Winterson's novels; they are new posthuman subject images that carry profound political and ethical connotations, directly responding to the urgent water crisis of the Anthropocene. Grounded in close reading of Sexing the Cherry, The Stone Gods, Written on the Body and other key texts, this study integrates Astrida Neimanis's theory of ‘bodies of water’ to challenge two interrelated yet distinct predicaments: modern water discourse reduces water to a universal and isolated abstract resource (H2O), engendering hydroschizophrenia – a cognitive fragmentation that severs water from its ecological and cultural specificity, leading to severe water resource destruction. Paralleling this, Nietzsche's ‘eternal recurrence’ embodies a philosophical rupture: it frames repetition as a sterile, non-generative cycle by severing life from its aqueous origins. Winterson subverts both paradigms by reimagining bodies of water as posthuman embodied images. Through connecting amniotic fluid with primordial evolutionary soup and revealing the abyssal qualities of the human body as a watery cyborg, Winterson endows water with gestationality, transcorporeality, and unknowability, impeling us to recognise material water as an integral part of the planetary hydrocommons we co-create. Ultimately, these figurations dismantle humanist myths of self-sufficiency and isolation, disintegrate its illusory unitary subject, and forge a relational ethic. They embody a hydrocommons ‘we’ – a porous, aqueous subjectivity that dissolves human/non-human binaries and extends responsibility across time and space, offering a textually grounded framework for posthuman ecocriticism and blue humanities.

The positive impact of patient and public involvement (PPI) on the relevance, accessibility and acceptability of mental health research is well documented. Much of this reporting comes from researchers; less is known about the perspectives of PPI contributors. We are interested in exploring which issues people with lived experience (LE) prioritise when reviewing mental health research, with a view to identifying some of the underlying factors which facilitate or hinder those impacts. We conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of meeting minutes reviewing 233 studies from two PPI research advisory groups supported by the Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre over a period of 8 years. Our results foreground participants' experiences and show that PPI contributors want a greater emphasis on relational ethics within mental health research practice. We have identified key issues that have the potential to have a positive effect on the whole research cycle. These include ensuring fully inclusive research designs and practices, having transparent processes and increasing researcher reflexivity regarding power dynamics, stigma and participants' experiences. This study demonstrates the potential that PPI has to supplement existing ethical processes and positively impact research processes. People with lived experience of mental distress were involved throughout the study, including study design, data collection, synthesis and authorship.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and care robots into healthcare raises a central ethical question: what constitutes care, and how should it be delivered when machines perform caregiving tasks? Dominant AI ethics frameworks, including principlism, deontology, and consequentialism, focus on fairness, duties, and outcomes. While important, these approaches often view care primarily as technical compliance or efficiency, overlooking its relational and evaluative aspects. This analysis employs a normative, conceptual approach rooted in care and relational ethics, examining duty-based, outcome-oriented, and virtue-based care frameworks to highlight how they differ from care ethics as a structured moral practice. Tronto's four stages of care (attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness) serve as a framework for assessing moral labor in caregiving. Literature on social robots in healthcare is used illustratively. Conceptual analysis compares the interpersonal and moral dimensions of human caregiving with forms of AI interaction, noting changes when machines mediate or perform caregiving tasks. The analysis shows that although AI systems can improve monitoring, coordination, and task performance, they do not assume moral responsibility or provide the relational and evaluative work that caregiving requires. Social and assistive robots reorganize moral labor by shifting attentiveness toward sensing, responsibility toward oversight, competence toward optimization, and responsiveness toward adaptive feedback. These changes create a functional resemblance to care without reproducing the moral engagement that characterizes genuine caregiving. Care ethics elucidates the moral practices of caregiving and how these practices are transformed through the integration of AI into healthcare relationships. Since caregiving involves vulnerability, interdependence, and judgment, it cannot rely solely on efficiency. A care-ethical perspective demonstrates that AI does not replace moral labor; rather, it reorganizes it in ways that reduce the conditions under which authentic caregiving can be conducted. The incorporation of care ethics into AI governance frameworks provides tools for assessing not just what these technologies do but what they cost the moral practice of caregiving.

Healthcare systems routinely frame breastfeeding as an ethical and clinical priority requiring institutional protection, particularly in maternity and newborn services. The Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative represents a global effort to embed these commitments through policy, practice, and environmental support. While these protections are well established for patient-mothers, far less attention has been given to how they are applied to the nursing workforce responsible for enacting them.The authors critically appraise an ethical contradiction experienced by lactating nurse-mothers. Breastfeeding is institutionally supported for patients but structurally constrained within nurses' own workplaces. Using relational ethics as the primary interpretive lens, supported by clinical and organizational ethics frameworks, the analysis positions nurse-mothers as embodied ethical agents whose experiences reveal systemic moral incoherence within maternal-centered institutions.Evidence suggests that nurse-mothers frequently encounter delayed or denied pumping breaks, inadequate lactation facilities, stigmatization, and career penalties despite strong breastfeeding knowledge and commitment. These conditions generate ethical tension, moral distress, and professional disengagement. Achieving ethical integrity in Baby-Friendly Hospitals therefore requires enforceable structural protections that recognize maternal embodiment and caregiving as legitimate dimensions of ethically sustainable professional life.

ABSTRACT This paper presents a conceptualisation of (Q/q) quality in physical education teaching (Q/qPET), that focuses on the quality enacted by teachers in pedagogical practice, rather than ‘Quality Physical Education’ (QPE) as a curriculum product. Developed through a mixed-methods doctoral inquiry into teachers' lived constructions of Q/qPET, the paper builds on critical traditions in pragmatism, phenomenology, relational ethics and critical pedagogy. Q/qPET distinguishes yet simultaneously seeks to relate, ‘little q’ (representing externally defined, performative standards of quality), and ‘Big Q’ (representing relational, embodied and co-constructed experiences of pedagogical flourishing). Drawing these together, Q/qPET is defined as experience: an indeterminate, changeable and aesthetic phenomenon enacted phronetically through teachers’ wise, situated judgement. The paper proceeds in three main sections. First, it examines the dominance of the little q through neoliberal policies, inspection cultures and professional-standards regimes that formalise quality as measurable compliance. Second, it reclaims the Big Q as embodied, ethical and aesthetic endeavour, situating teaching within traditions of phronesis and somaesthetic awareness. Third, it introduces the Q/qPET framework, which conceptualises (Q/q) quality as a dynamic negotiation across structure, embodied agency and lived experience. The discussion positions this framework as a conceptual bridge that links international frameworks such as UNESCO’s Quality Physical Education agenda, national professional-standards frameworks and the enacted practices shaped by them. In doing so, it highlights their interdependence rather than opposition. The paper concludes by arguing that Q/qPET offers a relational, embodied and ethically grounded reimagining of Q/qPET, with implications for policy, teacher education and professional learning.

Autoethnography is increasingly used in nursing education research to examine the relational, embodied, and often hidden dimensions of teaching, learning, and professional socialization. Yet uneven use of variant-sensitive approaches, quality frameworks, and ethics reporting suggests continuing methodological inconsistency. We conducted an integrative review of autoethnographic nursing education literature published between 2010 and 2025, examining five dimensions: (1) variant definitions and operationalization, (2) quality appraisal frameworks, (3) reflexivity and positionality practices, (4) credibility strategies, and (5) ethical procedures, including attention to implicated others. Systematic searches of CINAHL, MEDLINE, ERIC, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science yielded 23 eligible studies. Collaborative autoethnography predominated (56%), and several studies, especially those examining the experiences of racially minoritized faculty, explicitly positioned autoethnography as a decolonizing approach and demonstrated stronger reported reflexive practices. Reflexivity, as represented in published manuscripts, ranged from integrated positionality analyses that informed analytic decisions to brief, largely token acknowledgment. Findings suggest that nursing education scholarship may benefit from a fit-for-variant approach to appraisal and clearer field expectations for relational ethics reporting, especially given power differentials when faculty write about students, colleagues, and institutions. More explicit linking of standpoint to analysis may advance methodological transparency and interpretive credibility.

The introduction of artificial intelligence into healthcare is a reality. Drawing on literature, this critical reflection uses McCance and McCormack's Person-Centred Practice Framework to examine how artificial intelligence can both advance and undermine the humanisation of care. Through structured dialogue and literature synthesis, we identify opportunities alongside challenges. We argue for context-sensitive implementation that integrates artificial intelligence into everyday practice while safeguarding relational ethics, professional judgement, and core person-centred values.

ABSTRACT While Black Lives Matter protests continue to resonate around the world, the silence surrounding black lives lost at sea remains strikingly persistent. Two migration narratives bring drowned Sub-Saharans back from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean: the parable L’Archipel du Chien (2018) written by French novelist and film director Philippe Claudel and the feature film Atlantique (2019) directed by French-Senegalese Mati Diop. The presence of black corpses haunts the inhabitants of the island as much as the absence of bodies haunts the grieving widows of Dakar, whilst the castaways permeate both landscapes and psyches, seizing minds and elements alike. By transcending the modern binaries of individualism and communalism, mind and body, living and dead, Claudel and Diop’s otherworldly fictions blur all borders by drawing a world ‘other’: a utopian space, that is radically open, that resists the politics of closure and impossibility underpinning neoliberal democracies and racialised oppression, which currently drive border policies and makes migrants acutely vulnerable. In this space, migrant ghosts do not merely haunt; they act. I propose the term spectropolitics to describe this agency as a force of resurgence, an offensive care to the politics of death that dominates Europe’s response to the refugee crisis. This article explores how narrative practices, viewed through the lenses of ethics, political philosophy and ecocriticism, can reframe our understanding of human mobility. Specifically, I examine how resurgence from and by the Sub-Saharan revenants offers a relational ethics of care. Ultimately, I argue that the power of narrative lies in its capacity to expand our sense of the possible by actively shaping our reality, a capacity that is ethically vital when confronting the lived experiences of displacement and mourning.

This scoping review will systematically map and synthesize the ethical aspects addressed in the scientific literature on participatory research involving older adults. It will examine both procedural or principle-based research ethics and relational or situational ethics, exploring how these are shaped by contexts and considerations of diversity. The review will also identify conceptual frameworks and gaps to inform research and ethical practice. Participatory research with older adults is gaining momentum, with ethical considerations central to such approaches. Yet the ethical complexity of participatory processes is often underreported. This review will explore how ethical aspects are described in the literature. Studies will be included if they focus on individuals aged 60 and over who are involved in research through consultative, collaborative, or co-decisional roles. Eligible studies must explicitly address ethical aspects related to procedural or principle-based research ethics, relational or situational ethics, or both. Given the growing emphasis on ethical considerations in participatory research involving older adults, a scoping review is appropriate for mapping the extent, range, and nature of the available evidence. The review will follow JBI methodology and established scoping review frameworks, incorporating both descriptive quantitative and qualitative analyses. Six databases will be searched: Web of Science, Scopus, PsycINFO, PubMed, CINAHL, and Sociological Abstracts. Two reviewers will independently screen titles and abstracts, and assess full texts for inclusion, with a third reviewer consulted as needed. Findings will be organized under conceptual and thematic headings and presented in tables, figures, and descriptive synthesis. OSF https://osf.io/mr89x.

The world and mental health nursing face several crises that, in different ways, reflect problems of dominance. Global politics are afflicted with a growth of support for right-wing ideologies associated with domineering authoritarian leaders. Mental health services are dominated by a singular application of bio-psychiatric ideas and practices. Both forms of dominance are potentially alienating and harmful. Psychosocial theories offer ways to make sense of authoritarian tendencies across both realms and point to how dominance can be resisted towards progressive transformation. Authoritarian right-wing politics arguably pose an existential threat to society, which is implicated in growing mental distress at the population level and damages services by squeezing resources. Dominant bio-psychiatry visits epistemic and material harms upon the mentally distressed and restricts choice over care and support. Nurses operate at the relational and political nexus of these harms, so must be able to make sense of generative factors and be active in providing remedies. Applying psychosocial theory can raise political consciousness for mental health nurses and support development of a new politicised professional identity. Advocacy and activist-oriented nurses can mitigate harms across societal and practice-level political engagement. We can, and arguably must, be part of resistance movements grounded in a relational ethic of care.

Countries in Southern Africa have taken efforts to implement inclusive education. While policies exist and some efforts are made around inclusion in schools, limited attention has been given to the work required of teachers to actualise inclusivity. What is missing are mechanisms that can enable teacher education to develop inclusive pedagogical proficiency in future teachers. This study reimagined teacher education for inclusive education in Southern Africa through Ubuntu philosophy that positions disability as the moral and analytical basis of inclusivity. A qualitative conceptual-policy analysis approach was used to analyse the regional Policy Framework on Care and Support for Teaching and Learning. The analysis was theoretically guided by critical disability perspectives and Ubuntu relational ethics. The analysis showed that disability is framed in the policy framework as intersecting with multiple forms of vulnerability, and that inclusivity is conceptualised as a multisectoral agenda. However, the policy framework under-theorises teacher education for ethical decision-making, reflexivity and collaborative practice in crisis-affected contexts. This article argues that reforming teacher education to support inclusive education requires more than policy adherence. It also requires educating relational and reflexive teachers grounded in Ubuntu ethics by strengthening disability inclusivity as the foundation for such transformation. Contribution: The Ubuntu framework has been primarily applied in school research. There is limited application of this framework in teacher education research. This creates a lacuna in understanding how school teachers are expected to practise Ubuntu, yet their training has not adequately prepared them. Therefore, this study applies the Ubuntu framework to teacher education by linking disability, inclusive education and Ubuntu ethics to offer insights that can inform debates on teacher education development in Southern Africa.

Purpose This study examines how responsible leadership influences the sustainability performance of health and sanitation projects in Uganda. Despite substantial investments, many projects fail to achieve lasting impact due to weak leadership, fragmented coordination and limited community ownership. The study investigates how ethical, inclusive and relational leadership practices can enhance the social, economic and environmental sustainability of these essential services. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative design was employed, involving in-depth interviews with 21 participants working in health and sanitation initiatives across Uganda. Data were analyzed thematically using a constant comparison approach, guided by relational leadership theory (RLT), which views leadership as a relational process grounded in social interaction, mutual respect and shared accountability. Findings Findings show that sustainability performance is strongly leadership-driven and shaped by four interconnected dimensions of responsible leadership: ethical governance, inclusive engagement, strategic foresight, and collaborative work culture. Ethical integrity and accountability build stakeholder trust; inclusive engagement strengthens community ownership; strategic foresight supports continuity under uncertainty; and collaboration fosters team cohesion and adaptive resilience. Together, these practices enhance social value through empowerment and ownership while improving service governance through continuity, monitoring and accountability. Practical implications The study underscores the need to institutionalize responsible leadership practices such as transparency mechanisms, participatory planning, continuity strategies and cross-sector collaboration within Uganda's health and sanitation governance frameworks. Originality/value This is one of the first empirical applications of RLT in the Ugandan context, the study demonstrates that sustainability performance depends not on individual authority or technical capacity but on relational ethics, inclusiveness and mutual accountability.

This article rethinks childhood in children’s literature through a posthuman lens by examining Ursula K. Le Guin’s Catwings series as a pedagogy of becoming rather than a narrative of developmental completion. Challenging liberal humanist models that frame childhood as a preparatory, “not-yet” stage oriented toward rational adulthood, the article argues that the Catwings tetralogy resists didacticism, anthropocentrism, and linear maturation. Drawing on posthuman theory, particularly relational ontology, processual-emergent subjectivity, and becoming-with, the analysis shows how Le Guin’s winged cats enact subjectivity through embodied movement, interspecies care, vulnerability, and environmental entanglement. Rather than functioning as allegories for human moral instruction, the nonhuman protagonists participate in multispecies worlds where ethics emerge situationally and knowledge arises through encounters. By foregrounding relational ethics over mastery and openness over moral closure, the Catwings series reconfigures childhood as a site of posthuman becoming, offering a model of posthuman education without top-down instruction. The series thus demonstrates how children’s literature can cultivate posthuman sensibilities prior to the consolidation of anthropocentric habits of thought.

Traditional scientific research has produced valuable knowledge, yet its linear, top-down logic often fails to address the complexity of local communities. This results in a gap between knowledge and action, where interventions lack legitimacy and impact. Participatory Action Research (PAR) has emerged as an alternative, bringing residents, professionals, and researchers together in iterative cycles of action and reflection. The promise of PAR lies not only in its methods but in the attitudes and relationships that underpin it. This community case study explores how reciprocity, understood as mutual exchange, trust, and shared responsibility, can be cultivated in PAR. The study focuses on 3 Days Inside, an experiment in the city of Appingedam (Northeast of the Netherlands), a shrinking region marked by demographic decline, earthquakes from gas extraction, and declining trust in institutions. Here, proximity and reciprocity are prerequisites for meaningful participation. Researchers immersed for 3 days, working alongside residents in everyday settings. Participating activities included neighborhood walks, shared meals, and practical collaboration in community spaces. Data were collected on needs and opportunities to improve the healthy living environment through participatory observation, go-along interviews, shadowing, and systematic reflection, with logbooks structured around first-, second-, and third-person perspectives. The case showed PAR is a dynamic process that demands reflexivity, flexibility, and ethical sensitivity. Researchers had to let go of control, acknowledge own positioning and assumptions, and prioritize relationships over outcomes. Gestures of presence and participation proved more powerful than formal conversations. Yet, tensions emerged between relational and transactional practices, between systemic logics and lived realities, and between pursuing research goals and fostering reciprocity. Three days inside highlights that meaningful participation depends less on predefined methods and more on the researcher's attitude-openness, reflexivity, and willingness to share control. The case contributes to broader debates on participation by showing that social impact arises not only from knowledge but from the way knowledge is co-created with residents. For researchers, professionals, and policymakers, the findings underline that genuine participation requires long-term presence, trust-building, and relational ethics. Future research should examine the applicability of this approach in other contexts to strengthen its practical utility.

ABSTRACT Eco-translation has opened up translation studies to multiple forms of communication that take place in the more-than-human world, challenging the barriers that persist between humanities and life sciences. The article discusses issues of translation, representation, and ethics in relation to the communication systems of cetaceans (dolphins, whales, and porpoises). It explores “language”, “translation”, and “(un)translatability” in the context of whales, then focuses on why the colonial and patriarchal-capitalist heritage is relevant to the bioacoustics research carried out on whale vocalisations. It then turns to the thorny question of who has the right to translate/represent the whales and to issues of translation rights of the more-than-human, concluding with thoughts on the necessity for multidisciplinary and multilingual research teams in marine bioacoustics.