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Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future 'for all.' In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses' commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for 'doing good' than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses' care. In this article, we explore how the focus on 'the human' in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human-centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human-social divide., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Aim: This paper presents HAR as an expression of caring to create social justice within nursing and achieve a workforce that is representative of those being served., Background: The lack of diversity within the health professions has been expressly linked in the literature to health disparities among underrepresented and marginalized groups., Recommendations: Recognizing the value of diversity within healthcare has been the impetus for some health profession programs to use holistic admissions review (HAR) in the assessment and evaluation of applicant suitability. While current HAR recommendations in nursing broaden the lens on which criteria should be used to determine applicant suitability beyond standard academic metrics, existing models do not examine applicants' caring capacity., Conclusion: Given caring is the essence of nursing, the authors offer a guiding framework to supplement the American Association of Colleges of Nursing criteria for HAR and a model by which nursing applicants are evaluated on their capacity to care., (© 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Organizations are complex with cultures that influence excellence, commitment and job satisfaction. In nursing schools, faculty are required to succeed within the performance driven culture of academic scholarship alongside the organizational culture that influences the work environment. The purpose of this article is to describe the process that a School of Nursing engaged in using complexity science and liberating structures to shift a perceived unhealthy organizational culture to a healthier one. Complexity science focuses on patterns of relationships within a system while Liberating Structures provide strategies for people to identify new patterns of working together which can contribute to culture change. Over two years, faculty identified the culture issues, the desired positive outcomes and implemented an action plan using Liberating Structures such as Shift and Share, Discovery and Action Dialogues, TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) and 15% Solutions (Power to Create Change Now). The work included a focus on understanding culture challenges, uncovering positive practices, and creating new ways to respectfully interact with each other while implementing the work of the School. Culture is ubiquitous, takes time to alter and can be difficult to measure any substantive change, however on evaluation after two years, there was guarded optimism that a healthier culture exists with knowledge of how to continue to build on the work done. While problems still arise, the new knowledge, strength of leadership within faculty and having the understanding and confidence to interact respectfully, continues to build new relationship patterns and a healthier culture within the School., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)