Q: When you think about “building moral community,” what comes to mind? How has your personal journey influenced your approach to building moral communities in healthcare?

When I hear the phrase “building moral community,” I think about proximity. I think about who is allowed to belong, whose suffering is legible, and whose humanity is protected when systems are under strain. Moral community, to me, goes beyond an abstract ideal, it is something that is tangibly tested in moments of crisis, violence, and scarcity. It is built, or broken, at the bedside, in the street, in the detention cell, and in the ICU.
My personal/professional journey has taught me that healthcare does not exist within neutral walls. The Total Institution of healthcare, and nursing, enforces identity mortification in support of biopolitical forces that cause harm. Hospitals are not insulated from the social, racial, political, and carceral forces that shape life outside of them. In juvenile detention, I witnessed how racial inequities are not accidental but structural; how care is rationed, surveillance is normalized, and punishment is often disguised as treatment. Those experiences fundamentally reshaped my ethical lens. They taught me that building moral community requires naming harm honestly, especially when that harm is produced by the very institutions tasked with care.
Working in trauma care further exposed the collision (and collusion) between nursing, law enforcement, and power. I saw how clinical spaces can become extensions of policing, how Black and Brown bodies are often treated first as threats before they are recognized as people. These moments forced me to wrestle with nursing’s ethical commitments: Are we bearing witness, or are we complicit? Are we advocates, or are we instruments of control? Building moral community, in this context, means refusing ethical neutrality. It means understanding that silence is not passive, it is a position.
My work as a protest nurse after the murder of George Floyd made these tensions impossible to ignore. On the streets, care was stripped down to its most essential form: presence, solidarity, and protection. There were no institutional protocols to hide behind, no hierarchy to defer to. What emerged instead was a different kind of moral community: one rooted in collective responsibility, mutual aid, and the radical insistence that people deserve care precisely when the state has failed them. That experience reaffirmed for me that ethics is not confined to institutional approval, it lives wherever and however nurses show up.
My time as a COVID-19 ICU nurse and leader shattered any remaining illusions.
Taken together, these experiences have shaped my approach to building moral communities in healthcare as something expansive, uncomfortable, and deeply relational. It requires moving beyond the physical and metaphysical walls of the hospital and recognizing our ethical obligations to communities long before they arrive as patients, and long after they are discharged. It demands that nurses engage critically with power, challenge carceral logics, and reclaim care as a moral and political act.
Ultimately, building moral community is about refusing fragmentation of people, of ethics, of responsibility. It is about standing in the streets and at the bedside with the same moral clarity. It is about remembering that nursing’s deepest ethical commitment is not to institutions, but to humanity.

Q: What relationships have been important to you in building a moral community to support your practice as an educator, ethicist, faculty member, and leader?

The relationships that have mattered most in building a moral community around my practice are the ones rooted in shared risk, shared truth-telling, and shared refusal to look away. These are not always formal or professionally sanctioned relationships. Many of them exist at the margins of institutions, and some exist in direct tension with them.
First, the relationships with the people I have cared for (especially those who are incarcerated, criminalized, or rendered invisible by healthcare systems) have been foundational. Youth in juvenile detention, trauma patients entangled with the legal system, families navigating loss and surveillance have all been my most honest ethical teachers. These people forced me to confront the limits of institutional ethics and reminded me that moral community begins by believing people when they name harm. These relationships taught me that care is not something I do to others, but something that is co-created.
Equally important have been relationships with other nurses, students, and clinicians who are willing to speak openly, who don’t preserve their own comfort and power in spaces where hard is happening. A lot of these nurses are institutionally erased, punished, removed from boards, or otherwise emotionally beat down. These were the nurses who questioned policies, who grieved openly, who stayed after shifts to debrief not just clinically but ethically. In those spaces, relationship became a form of resistance.
My relationships with protest medics, street nurses, and community-based caregivers fundamentally expanded my understanding of what nursing can be. On the streets after George Floyd’s murder, moral community was built through mutual reliance – watching each other’s backs, sharing supplies, treating strangers as kin, learning from street medics with no formal training, etc. There was no hierarchy of expertise, only a shared commitment to protect life and dignity in the face of state violence. Those relationships taught me that moral community does not require permission, it requires courage and accountability to one another.
I have also been shaped by relationships with scholars, organizers, and mentors who insist on critical, abolitionist, and justice-oriented approaches to healthcare ethics. These relationships gave language to what I had long felt but could not always articulate. They helped me situate my experiences within broader histories of racialized care, carceral medicine, and resistance.
Finally, my relationship with myself has been an essential (and maybe the most difficult) part of building moral community. Learning to listen to my own moral dissonance, to honor grief and anger as ethical signals rather than weaknesses, has allowed me to stay mostly present in this work.
These relationships are challenging, but also life giving and sustain my practice by reminding me that ethics is lived collectively, that care is relational, and that no one builds moral community alone.

Q: What will your presentation at the conference focus on, and why is this topic important right now?

My presentation will be on nursing ethics beyond institutional walls, arguing that ethical responsibility is not confined to hospitals, policies, or professional neutrality. Drawing from my work I examine how nurses are positioned at the intersection of care, power, and structural violence, and how we might radically imagine a future for nursing practice beyond physical and metaphorical institutional walls. This topic is urgent because healthcare increasingly collides with policing, surveillance, and abandonment, while nurses are asked to absorb moral injury without spaces for truth or resistance. I call for building moral community as collective ethical practice.

Q: If you could give one piece of advice to a new healthcare professional about ethics and building a moral community, what would it be?

Institutions can make you feel very alone when engaging in ethical practice. Seek out people and communities who are willing to name harm honestly, question power, and care for one another, because moral community is what sustains you when institutions fall short. Ethics is not about following rules, it is about staying human, in relationship, and refusing to let compassion be stripped away by systems.