Allie Slemon’s research while affiliated with University of Victoria and other places

Stereotypes in mass media depict harmful and inaccurate portrayals of nurses and nursing work. As memes are understood to be units of culture, they may be examined as artifacts, deepening understandings of contemporary culture. This critical qualitative analysis of nursing memes from two popular social media platforms seeks to identify current cultural narratives and social meanings of nursing reproduced within the public domain. Memes were selected from popular hashtags and nursing meme accounts with more than 2500 followers. Memes were included if they followed traditional meme format and content‐centered discourses of gender, race, and other aspects of power and oppression within nursing and healthcare systems. Our analysis employed a qualitative descriptive design within an overarching critical social theoretical framework. We identified that nursing memes reproduced stigmatizing and discriminatory narratives of patients and perpetuated harmful notions of “who” nurses are and “what” nurses do, while also drawing attention to systemic challenges facing the profession. Memes therefore serve as a valuable artifact for communicating contemporary cultural narratives about nursing and nursing work. Generating and distributing memes to raise awareness of systemic pressures may serve as a valuable social strategy toward advocating for systemic shifts in nursing and healthcare to address persistent challenges.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a qualitative methodology frequently taken up by researchers to explore complex questions of how discursive power drives inequities. Across approaches to CDA, the emphasis of methodological directions has consistently been centred on examining and illuminating dominant discourses in texts. This paper argues that alongside the analysis of dominant discourses, it is crucial to examine absences and silences that are located within and beyond the text. The exploration of absences and silences can support more fulsome analysis of discourse, and is essential for challenging power structures and illuminating discourses of resistance. In this paper, three analytic strategies for attending to absences and silences in CDA are presented: (i) the lens of the theoretical framework; (ii) interrelation between dominant and excluded discourses; and (iii) positionality and local knowledges. Across each analytic strategy, an exemplar from the author’s research is presented to illustrate the practice of engaging with absences and silences in CDA research. Ultimately, this paper contends that the analysis of absences and silences can support researchers in conducting inquiry that enacts resistance to power structures that perpetuate inequities, and envisioning possible paths toward equity and justice.

Aim This research aimed to explore nursing students' experiences and perspectives on discrimination within nursing programs across classroom and clinical contexts, as well as structural discrimination through institutional policies and processes. Design Convergent mixed methods. Methods Survey and individual interviews to capture students' experiences and perspectives on discrimination within nursing programs. Results Quantitative findings suggest that the majority of nursing students (79.2%) self‐reported experiencing discrimination during their nursing program. These experiences stem from racism, homophobia, transphobia, and mental health stigma. While most of these experiences were reported in clinical contexts from nurses, patients, and clinical educators, students also reported experiencing discrimination in classroom and program contexts through nurse educators, peers, and policies. Qualitative findings provided nuanced insights into these discriminatory experiences across contexts and sources. Additionally, findings suggest that the majority of the students perceive stigma and discrimination to be a significant issue within nursing education and recommend priorities for addressing this issue. Conclusions Despite nursing professions' central commitment to addressing discrimination and promoting social justice, stigma and discrimination faced by nursing students within nursing programs remain a significant concern. Implications for Profession Preventing discrimination and promoting social justice within nursing is a central responsibility of the nursing profession. Student‐identified priorities suggest an upstream approach that involves education for nurse educators and staff to redress ongoing discrimination experienced by nursing students. Impact This research contributes to the growing empirical evidence that nursing students experience discrimination within nursing programs across clinical, classroom, and program contexts and highlights student‐identified priorities for addressing discrimination. Patient or Public Contribution No patient or public contribution.

This research was guided by the following question: What does it mean to provide an early learning and child care program that is trauma and-violence-informed? This report summarizes the findings from the focus groups and interviews with a diverse group of early childhood educators and child care managers and with educators and parents of children attending the Little Phoenix child care program in Victoria, British Columbia at the time this research took place.

Objective This scoping review seeks to identify what is known about the role of liaisons who support two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, and asexual (2SLGBTQIA+) people receiving care in health-service settings, and specifically, how the 2SLGBTQIA+ liaison role is defined and characterized. Introduction To mitigate the stigma and discrimination experienced by 2SLGBTQIA+ people in health-service settings, a 2SLBGTQIA+ liaison position was initiated at a Canadian hospital. A comprehensive understanding of the 2SLGBTQIA+ liaison role is integral to the implementation of 2SLGBTQIA+ liaison positions in health-service settings globally. However, a thorough understanding of the role remains unclear. Inclusion criteria This scoping review will consider literature that discusses the role of liaisons supporting 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals in health-service settings. No limitations will be placed on publication date, age, geography, liaison position title, or the professional, disciplinary, or educational background of the liaison. Methods This review will follow the JBI methodology for scoping reviews. Databases to be searched will include MEDLINE (Ovid), CINAHL (EBSCOhost), APA PsycINFO (EBSCOhost), LGBTQ+ Source (EBSCOhost), Scopus, Web of Science, as well as ProQuest Dissertations and Theses for gray literature. Two independent reviewers will screen titles, abstracts, and full-text articles; discrepancies will be resolved by consensus or through a third reviewer. Data will be extracted using an extraction tool developed by the research team. Findings will be presented in tabular/diagram format along with a narrative summary to highlight key themes related to the review question. Review registration number Open Science Framework: osf.io/rkx6j

Social justice is consistently upheld as a central value within the nursing profession, yet there are persistent inconsistencies in how this construct is conceptualized, further compounded by a lack of empirical inquiry into how nurses enact social justice in everyday practice. In the current context in which structural inequities are perpetuated throughout the health care system, and the emergency department in particular, it is crucial to understand how nurses understand and enact social justice as a disciplinary commitment. This research examines how nurses' talk and institutional texts discursively construct social justice within the institutional context of the emergency department, and how such discourses shape the enactment of social justice within nursing practice. Guided by Iris Marion Young's theorizing of distributive and systemic social justice paradigms, this Foucauldian discourse analysis draws on emergency department nurses' talk ( N = 25 interviews) and institutional documents ( N = 27) as key texts that visibilize dominant and excluded discourses of social justice within the institutional context of the emergency department, and implications for how social justice is enacted through nursing practices. This analysis identified one overarching discursive pattern, in which social justice was discursively constructed through a hegemonic distributive paradigm, yet also resisted through nurses' conceptualization and enactment of a systemic social justice paradigm that facilitated their recognition and remediation of inequities. This central discursive pattern is explored through three exemplars of nurses' enactment of social justice as resistance: triage, harm reduction, and care planning. Findings from this analysis demonstrate that while a hegemonic distributive paradigm has dominated conceptualizations of social justice within nursing, a re‐construction of social justice through a systemic paradigm may guide nurses in enacting practices that remediate inequities in health and health care.

Discourse analysis is a commonly used research methodology in the social and human sciences. In this paper, we highlight two different approaches to discourse analysis and discuss critical elements of each approach. As researchers new to discourse analysis, two Masters of Nursing students reflect on the process of making careful choices when deciding on using an approach developed by Fairclough or Foucault. The decision making must consider the substantive focus, methodological knowledge, and positionality and interest of the researcher. We illustrate key components of the two different discourse analysis approaches, the decision making involved in selecting a particular approach, and the shortcomings and limitations that each approach holds in relation to a particular research focus.

While prior literature has established that nursing students experience racism, mental health stigma, and ableism within their programs, there is a dearth of knowledge of how students experience discrimination more broadly, across intersecting identities. This analysis draws on Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory to conduct an intersectional analysis of cross-sectional survey data of nursing students’ experiences of discrimination. Results illustrate that discrimination operates in complex ways across students’ social locations, as experiences of intersecting impacts of racism, homophobia/transphobia, mental health stigma, religious discrimination, ableism, and other forms of discrimination. Such experiences further unfold across clinical, classroom, and policy contexts.

Social justice is widely advanced as a central nursing value, and yet conceptual understandings of social justice remain inconsistent and vague. Further, despite persistently articulated commitments to upholding social justice, the profession of nursing has been implicated in perpetuating inequities in health and health care. In this context, it is essential to establish both conceptual clarity and tangible guidance for nurses in enacting practices to advance social justice—particularly through regulatory, education and accreditation documents that shape the nursing profession. This Foucauldian discourse analysis examines how social justice is discursively positioned within nursing professional documents in Canada, and illustrates that social justice was largely discursively excluded from these texts. Where social justice discourses were invoked, we identified that four central discursive patterns obscured and de‐centred this nursing value: (i) Vague language undermined professional commitments to social justice; (ii) Constructions of knowledge and awareness de‐emphasized practice; (iii) Individualism discourses minimized institutional/professional responsibility; and (iv) Aspirational language obscured present action. Extending from this analysis, we contend that the nursing profession must re‐examine how social justice is understood and articulated, and call for a re‐conceptualization of social justice grounded in nursing practice toward remediating inequities in health and health care.