The central theme of this year’s conference is “Wondering about Nursing: the bedrock of nursing philosophy”. Initially inspired by Socrates’s quote that “wisdom begins with wonder,” this year’s conference aims to share specific and unique experiences, sentiments and responses that created sudden and qualitative awareness of the world of others and elicit questions, queries and a quest for signification and meaning-making in the context of nursing. Thus illuminating and making visible the uniqueness of nurses’ experiences and actively demonstrating how nurses meaningfully, creatively, and intentionally order otherwise disparate events, aspects and particularities in their experiences to provide convincing explanations and qualitatively powerful meanings for themselves and the people, families, and communities they care for and with. Finally, the conference aims to be sufficiently interactive to allow for dialogical and dialectical examinations of presented experiences, meanings and explanations of unique cases to elaborate further, enrich with other experiences and potentially re-order the constitutive components of events or experiences, thereby transforming wonder into wondering and then into nursing knowledge(s) and nursing practices.
We look forward to exchanging and sharing the creative processes of constructing meaning(s) from nursing experiences and/or introducing meaning-making frameworks and communicating these insights in open and purposeful discussions and debates that persuasively argue points in a collegial and friendly atmosphere. This will form the bedrock of this year’s conference storyline and, hopefully, demonstrate nursing philosophy in action.