Dr. Jess Dillard-Wright
Ph.D., MA, RN, CNM
Season 02 - Episode 06
Dr. Jess Dillard-Wright Ph.D., MA, RN, CNM
Jess is a nurse, a midwife and has just defended her/their dissertation at Augusta University. She/they serves as director for the College of Nursing Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and as teaching faculty in the prelicensure Clinical Nurse Leader MSN program at Augusta University. Jess received her/their Bachelor of Science in Science, Technology, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, her/their Master of Arts in Womxn’s History from Sarah Lawrence College, her/their Master of Nursing Science, Clinical Nurse Leader from Medical College of Georgia, and her/their Master of Science in Community-Based Nurse-Midwifery from Frontier Nursing University. She/they are a Jonas Nurse Leader Scholar alumna from cohort V and a 2020-2021 NEF scholar. Her/their doctoral studies combine her/their love for feminist thought, philosophy of science, and history with her/their passion for nursing.
Prior to her/their doctoral studies, Jess worked in emergency, trauma critical care, and trauma case management at Augusta University, the region’s only level one trauma center. This afforded her/them a deep understanding of the healthcare system including the faults and fissures that create and reinforce inequality in health. Lessons learned in the clinical setting animate Jess’s ongoing scholarship, which focuses on the epistemological and ontological dimensions of nursing, exploring how the past shapes our present and how the present influences what we understand about the past. Jess’s dissertation study is titled “Cassandra Radical Feminist Nurses Network: Feminism, Nursing, and a History of the Present,” a little-known but powerful collective of activist nurses that resisted heteropatriarchal norms in nursing, creating space for woman-identified community. Her/their scholarship has been published in Nursing Philosophy and Advances in Nursing Science.
Outside her/their doctoral studies and professional roles, Jess is involved in many different endeavors and actions. Jess is an active member of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group. She/they is one of the organizers of Radical Nurses Collective, a founding member of the Nursology Theory Collective, an organizer with the start-up Nursing Mutual Aid, and a tentacle of an activist-scholar syndicate, the Compost Collaborative. Jess is also a contributor to Nursology.net and an active member of the American Association of History of Nursing Diversity and Inclusion Committee.As she/they completes her/their doctoral studies, Jess aspires to continue pursuing the emancipatory scholarship that inspires her/them, seeking out interdisciplinary collaboration, counterhegemonic ways of knowing, and advancing health equity. Jess sees the incredible power of nursing to transform health and healthcare and is committed to envisioning and then building a more just, equitable future for nursing, healthcare, communities, and the world, through educating future nurses and scholarly work that creates new possibilities, new presents. When she/they is not thinking about nursing, you’ll find Jess hanging out with her/their three kids and wife. Together, they like to go to the beach, play silly games (may we humbly suggest Throw Throw Burrito?), read books, and *try* to bake amazing things.
Nursology.net blog from Compost Collaborative on posthumanism:
https://nursology.net/2020/05/19/posthumxnism-and-the-pandemic/
Dissertation Presentation
"Cassandra Radical Feminist Nurses Network: Feminism, Nursing, and History for the Present:"
Reading to Action Initiative
https://sites.google.com/view/reading-to-action-initiative/home
