In the 2020 US election, we can choose a just future

Intergenerational risk and resilience pathways from discrimination and acculturative stress to infant mental health

Preconception and prenatal stress impact fetal and infant development, and women of color are disproportionately exposed to sociocultural stressors like discrimination and acculturative stress. However, few studies examine links between mothers' exposure to these stressors and offspring mental health, or possible mitigating factors. Using linear regression, we tested associations between prenatally assessed maternal acculturative stress and discrimination on infant negative emotionality among 113 Latinx/Hispanic, Asian American, Black, and Multiethnic mothers and their children. Additionally, we tested interactions between stressors and potential pre- and postnatal resilience-promoting factors: community cohesion, social support, communalism, and parenting self-efficacy. Discrimination and acculturative stress were related to more infant negative emotionality at approximately 12 months old (M = 12.6, SD = .75). In contrast, maternal report of parenting self-efficacy when infants were 6 months old was related to lower levels of infant negative emotionality. Further, higher levels of parenting self-efficacy mitigated the relation between acculturative stress and negative emotionality. Preconception and prenatal exposure to sociocultural stress may be a risk factor for poor offspring mental health. Maternal and child health researchers, policymakers, and practitioners should prioritize further understanding these relations, reducing exposure to sociocultural stressors, and promoting resilience.

Nursing for the Chthulucene: Abolition, affirmation, antifascism

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over-reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future.

Patterns of Knowing and Being in the COVIDicene: An Epistemological and Ontological Reckoning for Posthumans

The crucible of the COVIDicene distills critical issues for nursing knowledge as we navigate our dystopian present while unpacking our oppressive past and reimagining a radical future. Using Barbara Carper's patterns of knowing as a jumping-off point, the authors instigate provocations around traditional disciplinary theorizing for how to value, ground, develop, and position knowledge as nurses. The pandemic has presented nurses with opportunities to shift toward creating a more inclusive and just epistemology. Moving forward, we propose an unfettering of the patterns of knowing, centering emancipatory knowing, ultimately resulting in liberating the patterns from siloization, cocreating justice for praxis.

Pregnant in the United States in the COVID-19 pandemic: A collision of crises we cannot ignore

NO abstract intended, Introduction is listed here The COVID-19 pandemic and call for social justice is occurring when the United States, unlike its peer countries, has already experienced a steady 20-year rise in maternal morbidity and mortality with pregnant women today facing a 50 percent higher risk of mortality than their mothers. 1 Most vulnerable are women of color, black and American Indian/Alaska Native women, who have experienced longstanding disparities in access to and quality of healthcare and may begin pregnancy with hypertension, diabetes, and obesity, complications known to be more common in women enduring segregation. 2–4 Initially, the race-related health disparities and resultant disproportionately higher rates of COVID-19 cases and mortality in indigenous communities and black, latinx, or other communities of color were mistakenly considered innate racial differences. More recently, these higher rates have been attributed to underlying social, structural, and environmental determinants of health including resource inequities, inadequate housing, and occupational and environmental hazards that result in greater exposure to and less protection from COVID-19. 5,6 Augmented by the added physiologic stress of pregnancy, these comorbidities and disparities compound the risk of pregnancy-associated cardiomyopathy, thromboembolism, and hemorrhage, often resulting in lasting physical and mental health consequences.