Dangerous and Unprofessional Content: Anarchist Dreams for Alternate Nursing Futures

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for the opportunity to review this piece of work. There is much work to do to articulate and imagine the shifts that need to happen to transform nursing into something sustainable and healthy. This paper works to name structural, political, and historical constraints on nursing as an evolving, responsive practice, and offers anarchism as principle and practice to lean into our collective power to make change.

The paper is well constructed, flowing logically from one element to another. It will be dense reading for those unfamiliar with these critiques of nursing, politics, and society, but I gather this is meant to be a more concise than elaborate paper. The authors could consider offering a few more nods to other literature in a (for more on this, read this...) fashion.

I appreciate how the authors have identified that the current hierarchical organization of nursing, and the control it exerts over its boundaries, feels or is framed as inevitable - despite it causing much harm.

I have only a few questions, or places where I got hung up on particular sentence structure.

I wonder if the sentence "For nursing this begins and began..." in the Have we ever been nurses section might be smoothed out a bit to make the chosen quotation nest better, and to make it more readable.

Is it necessary to say 'anarchism anti-hierachical...' when that is already the direct meaning of anarchism?

When you say you'll do a walk through the kneejerk reactions I expected more unpacking of the fears people have. You've walked through the multiple contexts that build up and sustain the structure of nursing, but not the reactions people have to considering a nursing revolution.

Is 'capitalism' in the 3rd paragraph of 'irreconcilable praxes' supposed to be capitalist?

LEAN, leapfrog, etc - do these need a citation or something to offer context to international readers?

I might be misreading this, but is there a word missing from the Parson's quote page 5, second paragraph? Does this quote mean to say that these things flow from government?

On page 7, the Montgomery and Bergman quote is missing a page number, and originally is cited as Bergman et al.  Bergman is also capitalized in some instances and not in others.

Thanks for this contribution to nursing thought, I look forward to seeing this paper published.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your kind words. We sincerely appreciate your remarks. We have added some gestures and nods to other references for further reading as suggested (all edits are highlighted in fuschia for ease of review). We have adjusted language and phrasing to attend to your suggestions, corrected the Parsons’s quote for clarity, and added page number to the Mongomery and bergman quote. It is easy to slide into inside baseball as nurses talking about nursing. To this end, we’ve added some elaboration about ideas like “LEAN” and “Leapfrog” and also gestures to further readings. 

We lost the highlighted changes in the conversion from our draft to the template; to this end, we've included a highlighted version of the manuscript changes here for your reference.

Thanks very much!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments:

"À qui la rue? À NOUS LA RUE!" 

Overall a fantastic paper, an absolute joy to read. While anarchism isn't my specialty, resistance is. It's obviously more a editorial piece than a research piece, but that seems welcome and appropriate for the subject matter. The language is clear, and the broader context of nursing within the Capitalocene speaks to fundamental issues for humanity. This will be a thrilling piece to read for many nursing engaging in resistance today in the USA. My comments and suggestions are minor.

1- Page 1, para 1 you state: "“People would die,” they say, wringing their hands." Who is "they"? Were you told this? If so, perhaps instead of "they say" you can indicate "we are/were told". 

Also for purely aesthetical reasons, this seems like a unique opportunity to use the expression "clutching their pearls" rather than "wringing their hands".

2- Page 2, para 2: I think the word "haint" is African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). If you are not African-American, please avoid using AAVE, especially without context or appreciation of the culture AAVE comes from.

3- Page 6, last para: when referring to Harriet Tubman, if you are not Black authors, I would be weary of making statements like : "Nurse Harriet Tubman and her Underground Railroad lived out anarchism..." without more context or a quote from Tubman herself. Also, the quote from Tubman seems to be missing from the reference list at the end.

4- Page 7, para 2: You capitalized "Bergman": "Making the case for joyful militancy, Bergman et al. explained..." It seems everywhere else their name is not capitalized.

Finally there seems to be quite a bit of self-citation from one of the authors (8 papers). Again, this is just a suggestion. I have no issue with self-citation, especially as the topics of anarchism and nursing are rarely discussed together. Perhaps, though, adding a couple references from the second author, if relevant, could help balance it out. In the same vein, your reference list seems very white. Here are a few papers that might be relevant for you if you wish to add to your list (none are mine):

• Paynter, M., Jefferies, K., Carrier, L. & Goshin, L. (2021). A Feminist Abolitionist Nursing Ethics. Advances in Nursing Science, 45(1), 1-17. 
•  
• Iheduru-Anderson, K. C. (2021). The White/Black hierarchy institutionalizes White supremacy in nursing and nursing leadership in the United States. Journal of Professional Nursing, 37(2), 411-421. 

Iheduru-Anderson KC, Alexander GR. Critical Race Theory: A Framework for the Re-Education of American Nurses. Creative Nursing. 2022;28(3):177-183. doi:10.1891/CN-2022-0021

• And not a nursing paper, but one that speaks to radical imaginations from a Kahnawá:ke (Mohawk) scholar:
• Alfred, T. (2010). What is radical imagination? Indigenous struggles in Canada. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action.

Author Response

Thank you for your remarks. We have made some adjustments based on your feedback. “Haint” appears to have contested/multiple origins, some of them we can lay claim to and others we cannot. In light of that, we’ve substituted words. We have developed some context around the quote from Hartman on Tubman, corrected the capitalization of bergman (pesky autocorrect really wants to capitalize in spite of repeated redirection), added some and removed other citations concordant with your suggestions.

We lost the highlighted changes in the conversion from our draft to the template; to this end, we've included a highlighted version of the manuscript changes here for your reference.

Thanks very much!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx