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On the limits of empathy
Every week during November 2020, the indomitable Mary Freer has put together an amazing online program as part of the Compassion Revolution. It was a privilege to be in conversation with Katerina Bryant (writer and PhD student whose first book, Hysteria: A Memoir of Illness, Strength and Women’s Stories Throughout History (NewSouth) is out now;…
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An interview with nurse and multi-disciplinary researcher Dr Ruth De Souza
I had a chat with Ben Rodin from The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Journal . I said a few things. You can read more “All bodies are not treated the same and we’re not affected by the virus in the same way… how we do healthcare actually matters… There’s some arguments that the failure to…
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How inclusive is craftivism?
I was invited by Hayley Singer convenor of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Network at the University of Melbourne to be a respondent to one of their seminars, exploring the COVID 19 Global Quilt Project co-instigated by artists, activists, and academics Kate Just and Tal Fitzpatrick. The @covid19quilt project started in April 2020 and the Instagram account invites people to…
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What does meaningful participation look like in Citizen Science?
On October 7th 2020 I was invited to be a keynote in The Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA) CitSciOzOnline Early-Mid Career Researcher (EMCR) 1/2 day symposium. The aim of the symposium was to unite citizen science-aligned researchers in Australia to interrogate and explore research and practice in citizen science across the country. It featured keynotes,…
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Virtually Racist: Anti-racist work in the time of Zoom.
“In our continued presence, blackfullas are the uncomfortable truth that this nation must reconcile itself with. We are the most courageous when it comes to conversations about race having copped the full brunt of its violence but also because we have nothing else left to lose – literally.” Chelsea Bond Courage and racial literacy are…
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What do the Citizen’s Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) mean for diasporic Indians?
Folks at Southern Crossings, a collective who aim to create space within the “Australian national imaginary and mediascape” for South Asian voices, invited Indian Australian writers to respond to the Citizen’s Amendment Act (CAA) passed on December 12, 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in India as diasporic Indians in the context of…
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Cultural safety in the arts
Robyn Higgins and I wrote a chapter about cultural safety in the arts in an exciting new book about community engaged arts practice The Relationship is the Project edited by Jade Lillie with Kate Larsen, Cara Kirkwood and Jax Jacki Brown. It is exciting to be in such a fabulous line up with folks like…
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The potential and pitfalls of AI.
I wrote a piece for the Australian College of Nursing’s (ACN) quarterly publication. Cite as: DeSouza, R. (Summer 2019/20 edition). The potential and pitfalls of AI. The Hive (Australian College of Nursing), 28(10-11). The biggest opportunity that Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents is not the elimination of errors or the streamlining of workload, but paradoxically the…
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Cultural safety: On healing the health system through partnership
Cultural safety in health is the radical idea that people who use health services should be treated with competence, care and respect, so that their dignity and sovereignty are maintained, and not compromised by the system of health care. Both an ethical framework for negotiating relationship and an outcome of care, cultural safety rests on…
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We need more than diversity in nursing.
I wrote a piece for the Spring 2018 edition (Issue 23) of the Hive (the Australian College of Nursing’s quarterly publication). Cite as:DeSouza, R. (2018). Is it enough? :Why we need more than diversity in nursing. The Hive (23, 14-15). You can also download a pdf of the article for your own personal use. Diversity is…
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Five myths about cultural safety
The new Codes of Conduct for Nurses and Midwives in Australia have made the news. The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) have set expectations around culturally safe practice in the health system for nurses and midwives who comprise the largest workforce in healthcare.The incorporation of cultural safety into nursing in Australia has support…
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How do we teach ethics? Intersectionality, care failure and moral courage
As a clinician and educator, I have long been interested in how to prepare nurses for professional practice. Schon uses a metaphor of terrain made up of high, hard ground overlooking a swamp which Street (1991) has extended to nursing practice. While some clinical problems can be resolved through theory and technique (on hard ground),…
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Review: Nurses’ views on the impact of mass media on the public perception of nursing and nurse–service user interactions
This is a review of paper published in the Journal of Research in Nursing about Nurses’ views on the impact of mass media on the public perception of nursing and nurse–service user interactions by Louise P Hoyle, Richard G Kyle and Catherine Mahoney. Cite as: De Souza, R. (2017). Review: Nurses’ views on the impact of mass media…
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Ruth De Souza on Wearable Technology
I am speaking at the WT | Wearable Technologies conference in Sydney next month. I spoke to Wearable Technologies Australia (WTA) about the future of the wearable tech industry and some of the challenges the industry is facing. Check out the full program here. Here’s a link to the interview we did and I’ve also…
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I Smell You
]De Souza, R. (2017). I Smell You, Life Matters, Radio National, Australia. Thursday 14 September 2017. The wonderful Masako Fukui from Life Matters interviewed me for this story about olfactory assimilation. I am a committed foodie, ‘somebody with a strong interest in learning about and eating good food who is not directly employed in the food…
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Women’s health across cultures
Social and economic disadvantage are important contributors to poor maternal and perinatal outcomes in high-income countries such as Australia. For example Australian research shows women from refugee backgrounds have higher rates of stillbirth, fetal death in utero and perinatal mortality compared with Australian born women. However, the recent publication of findings from a retrospective (looking back) population…
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The impact of walk-in centres and GP co-operatives on emergency department presentations
It’s always such a buzz to get published, especially when it’s work done with a former student. You can read the article here: Crawford, J., Cooper, S., Cant, R., & DeSouza, R. (2017). The impact of walk-in centres and GP co-operatives on emergency department presentations: A systematic review of the literature. International Emergency Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ienj.2017.04.002. Highlights…
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What can The Handmaid’s Tale teach us about intersectionality in institutional life?
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale focuses on women living in a theocratic totalitarian regime in a newly created dystopian, pronatalist society called Gilead. The regime attributes declining fertility to women’s rights, same sex relationships and an environment damaged beyond repair, which it solves with the creation of a society predicated on women stratified into their…
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Six questions for culture in the age of consumer health technologies: Public lecture
I am visiting the University of Auckland as an international speaker for the Research Café on Migration & Inequality being organised by the Faculty of Science and School of Population Health. The Research Café is a project of the Engaged Social Science Research Initiative and funded by the Vice-Chancellor’s Strategic Development Fund. I’ll also be…
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Mouthing off about oral health
I have had several tooth adventures. The time I rather enthusiastically pushed my middle sister on her bicycle and she fell over the handlebars breaking a tooth (or was that the time I helped her break her collar-bone?). My own dental fluorosis (a developmental disturbance of enamel that results from ingesting high amounts of fluoride during…