Within folds of time: Nursing, coloniality and speculative trajectories

Abstract

This essay proposes a reflection on the history of Nursing and the colonial foundations that have shaped its professionalization, highlighting how these legacies have informed, and continue to inform, knowledge, practices, and subjectivities. Its central objective is to understand the impacts of coloniality on the constitution of modern Brazilian Nursing. It argues that recognizing such legacies requires far more than discursive commitments. It demands ethical and political engagement with confronting racial inequalities, reclaiming memory, and defending policies of care and historical reparation. Jorge Larrosa’s essayistic perspective guides this text by understanding the essay as a reflexive exercise on the self, the world and social relations, thereby opening possibilities for imagining alternative paths for professional education and practice. In dialogue with counter-colonial and Global South intellectuals, the text interrogates the history of the profession, problematizes colonialism and coloniality, and offers reflections on ways of reimagining and speculating futures for Nursing.