Nursing possessed: An ethics of nurse haunting

This paper explores how contemporary US healthcare, shaped by neoliberal biopolitics and thanatopolitics, functions as a death-making institution that commodifies care while systematically disposing of certain lives, reflecting an ethics not of care but of capital. Drawing from critical theory, historical analysis, and lived experience, we examine how death is deeply embedded in the structures of power and capitalism. Through the lens of haunting and organized forgetting, we analyze how institutions sanitize death, muting human loss into metrics and decontextualized data points, while erasing the tragedies of systemic violence. We argue that nurses, who are situated in physical and spiritual proximity to death, are uniquely positioned to act as witnesses, truth-tellers, and conjurers of the dead. Rather than comply with the institutional imperative to forget, we advocate for a practice of conjuring; calling forth the ghosts of those lost to violence of medical neglect, structural racism, and economic abandonment as a form of parrhesia: dangerous, necessary truth-telling. We explore how organized forgetting rewrites radical histories into palatable myths, disciplining contemporary activism and muting its transformative potential. We turn to examples like the Marys of ACT UP, whose embodied activism illustrates the power of public grief and haunting to incite justice. Inspired by theorists such as Foucault, Giroux, Derrida, and Ahmed, we locate in mourning a form of resistance, in memory a political act, and in storytelling a path to rehumanization. Ultimately, we argue that to conjure our dead is not only to remember them but to be transformed by them, allowing their voices to shape our ethical responsibilities, professional identities, and collective futures. In being possessed by our dead, we foreclose upon the institutional disavowal of suffering and reclaim a politics rooted in compassionate reckoning and the belief that another world is possible.