Call for Papers Vol 8 (2)
Call for Papers Witness Volume 8 (2) Due July 1 2026
Nursing under late-stage capitalism
“Illness is the only form of life under capitalism.”
- Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv
Intended Focus of this Special Issue
Witness: the Canadian Journal of Critical Nursing Discourse is pleased to announce an upcoming special issue focusing on nursing under late-stage capitalism. Characterized by globalization, the dominance of multinational corporations, widespread commodification and consumerism, and extreme wealth inequality, late-stage capitalism affects health in pervasive, all-consuming ways (Creaven, 2025). The health impacts of these prevailing economic forces are in the purview of nurses, especially those concerned with upstream root causation of illness such as ubiquitous commodification of life-sustaining resources and environmental degradation. These economic forces are not inevitable but reflect political choices - a fact foretold by German pathologist and social reformer Rudolf Virchow, who asserted, “All disease has two causes, one pathological and the other political” (1859). In this special issue, we invite the critical exploration of the political economy of nursing/care broadly given late-stage capitalism and its implications for nursing, care, health outcomes, with an emphasis on implications for nursing writ large.
Potential topics with explicit nursing analysis and relevance may include but are not limited to:
- The ethical implications for nursing under late-stage capitalism
- Interrogating the ethical implications of digital technologies in care environments shaped by late-stage capitalism (including techno-feudalism, environmental impacts of AI, the invisibilized labour/unwaged and under-waged labour to tag data in AI, etc.)
- Examining the political economy of care – corporatization of health services, creeping privatization of health care, challenges to the Canada Health Act
- Identifying and critiquing retrenchment of equity, diversity and inclusion considerations in health care provision to racialized and minoritized populations.
- Connecting climate change, capitalism, and racism (such as prolonged and recurrent displacements of Indigenous communities on their Turtle Island homeland due to wildfires, asthma clusters in impoverished communities related to outsourced industry and waste)
- Imagining robust nursing responses to the consequences of the commodification of housing, food, healthcare, and other basic needs which result in the devastating morbidity and mortality
- Analyzing the role of nurses in carceral settings, thinking through the care implications of through an ethical lens which explores the racialized and economic dynamics of imprisonment in the context of carceral social control in late stage capitalism
- Considering the implications of dismantling epidemiologically sound responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the context of late stage capitalism (including “calm-mongering” campaigns and their relationship to the agenda of capital
- Imagining nursing education under different political, social, and economic rubrics
- How capitalist political economies divide us - and who benefits
- Other
NB: Feel free to reach out to the editor regarding other potential topics witness@yorku.ca
Note: As always, Witness maintains an ‘open’ section when a special focused call exists
References
Creaven, S. (2025). Global Political Economy and New World Disorder: Neoliberalism, Neoimperialism, and the Internationalization of Injustice. New York: Rutledge
Virchow, R.L.K. (1859). Die Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begründung auf physiologische und pathologische Gewebelehre.
Adler-Bolton, B., & Vierkant, A. (2025). Health communism. Verso Books.
Sartre, J. P. (1987). Dear Comrades! Make Illness a Weapon. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 18(1), 3-5.
NB: Complete Submissions must be received no later than July 1 2026.
