Writing Difference: Deficit Discourse and Epistemic Responsibility in Nursing Scholarship

Every act of scholarly writing is also an act of representation.The language of nursing scholarship is not neutral.It shapes how people and communities are understood, where responsibility for inequity is located, and which responses come to appear necessary or legitimate.Nursing's commitments to equity, advocacy and social justice must therefore extend beyond individual acts of care to the ways nursing knowledge is produced, represented and disseminated (Jackson, Power, et al. 2026).As nurses and scholars of nursing, it is important we respond not only to inequity in practice, but that we also critically examine the assumptions, structures and forms of knowledge that may perpetuate injustice (Younas and Kvist 2025).If nursing scholarship aspires to advance social justice, it must also examine how academic writing participates in constructing the realities it seeks to change.