Introduction to the Event and Nursing Special Collection

This special collection of Nursing Philosophy invited papers that addressed the question of nursing today through the event of current nursing theory and practice. The question of the event has been at the center of work in 20th and 21st-century continental philosophy and process thought, unsettling our ready-made conceptualizations and habits of seeing and doing, of knowing and thinking. In the wake of the breakdown of traditional metaphysical principles, the event has become a key for rethinking philosophical problems. To cite just a couple of examples: Charles Sanders Peirce noted, ‘that the world lives, and moves, and has its being, in a logic of events’ (1976, 439, italics in original). Gilles Deleuze was explicit in saying ‘I've tried in all my books to discover the nature of events; it's a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb “to be” and its attributes’ (1995, 141). However, this philosophical effort has not yet been fully registered in the nursing literature. Indeed, one could argue that the event of nursing has for the most part been covered over by a ‘matrix of (un)intelligibility’ (Petrovskaya 2023 resourcing Butler's original concept, 1990), a dogmatic image of thought that actively eliminates the eventfulness at the heart of nursing. Notions of agency, selfhood, causality and substance are central to this image, which seeks to secure for nursing its autonomous identity and its clarified, well-bounded structures of knowledge for practice. While some nursing scholars have done the work of challenging these more conventional modes of intelligibility in this journal, demonstrating the ways they make invisible or paper over the actual contextualities and practices that comprise nursing, there is much more to do. In the papers that follow the authors address how we might express what it means to think, live and act within the event of nursing. Just as ‘evidence-based practice’ attempts to make nursing programmable, predictable and calculable (see e.g., Kirkham et al. 2007; Thorne and Sawatzky 2014), how could expressions of the event of nursing help us to conceive nursing in ways that challenge and move beyond this? At the heart of the event is the new, the present or a now that is in passage. How can we bear witness to this passage, be carried along with it and, at the same time, better attune to and/or counter-actualize its emerging possibilities? How might we learn to think and act otherwise as nurses within the event, incorporating its ruptures, intensities and unanticipated encounters into our practices? Can we imagine and create for ourselves new event-driven nursing ideas, concepts, and even methodologies? To think the event of nursing does not mean its appropriation by the resources of a newly restored ‘reason’, but an encounter with the unthought, the untimely and the outside. The papers in this special collection take on this task and, importantly, pivot around actual nursing experience: sensing something going wrong with a person in hospital care; triaging an unhoused person with a diabetic foot ulcer; sewing up a deceased person's tracheotomy and feeding tube incision upon family request. In Liquid Perception and Event and Nursing (Bender 2026), Miriam Bender traces the event of ‘grand nursing theory’ in American nursing philosophy through the Deleuzian notion of ‘liquid perception’: a mode of extended perception that puts one in touch with what is ordinarily left unperceived in a nurse-patient encounter, that is, wider more fluid frames of experience in communication with a field of intensive forces typically blocked in solid forms of perception. Liquid perception more readily enables the extraction of movement from things moving, and on this basis one might conceive a new affective nursing, more attuned to the happenings and becomings, to the ‘shadowy and secret’ aspects of the event that elude ‘grand nursing’. In Staying with the Trouble in Nursing 12.5 h at a Time (Smit 2026), Jamie Brian Smith argues that the event of nursing is produced in the interstices of institutional care, out of improvised acts and irreducible multiplicities offering a model of a diffractive ethics in process—12 h at a time. Clinical decision support systems (driven by AI and rule-based logics), integrated with electronic prescribing and administration platforms, steer nursing along preformed pathways that flatten the event and attempt to appropriate its alterity. But, by bringing insights from Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and Spinoza together, alongside Deleuze and Guattari, the author shows how the event of nursing is inappropriable and already a complex site of ‘interference patterns’ where different forms of knowing and doing, seeing and saying, collide and interact without cancelling each other out. Staying with this multisensory space in which knowing-seeing-touching-feeling blend and meld, is to hold open the promise of thinking and feeling otherwise about the event of nursing. Indeed, cultivating the space of trouble in nursing is what Brianne Donaldson (2026) might call a ‘habitus of multiplicity’ in her paper Cultivating a Habitus of Multiplicity in Cross Cultural Medicine: From Case Study Conflict to Many-Sided Conditions of Care Through Process and Jain Metaphysics. By bringing Whitehead into conjunction with the Jain tradition in relation to a specific case study, Donaldson proposes to rethink the ‘who’ of standard understandings of autonomy in medical ethics, expand the range of questions/practices that might be considered in healthcare settings, and pluralize models of care through the cultivation of multiplicity that exceeds the universal and particular. Both Whitehead and Jainist metaphysics engage with the idea that the happening or being of reality is plural, dynamic and processual such that the traditional ‘who’ or agent of the event gives way to the becoming of the ‘multiple’ as a widening of the event onto new terms, frameworks and modalities of nursing care. All three papers highlight the unpredictability of the event of nursing, of what happens, but also the ‘who’ that happens or arrives, stressing the need for a reconfiguring of the nurse-patient relation and the systems and institutions of care that enframe it. The promise of continuing to think the event of nursing is that it will point nursing philosophy in new directions and toward new futures.