Jessica Dillard-Wright

Jessica Dillard-Wright is the recipient of the 2020 Margaret Gould Tyson and Judith G. Whitaker memorial awards. She is a 4th year PhD candidate at Augusta University College of Nursing where she serves as director for the College of Nursing Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and teaching faculty in the prelicensure Clinical Nurse Leader MSN program. Jessica received her Bachelor of Science in Science, Technology, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, her Master of Arts in Womxn’s History from Sarah Lawrence College, her Master of Nursing Science, Clinical Nurse Leader from Medical College of Georgia, and her Master of Science in Community-Based Nurse-Midwifery from Frontier Nursing University. She is a Jonas Nurse Leader Scholar alumna from cohort V. Her doctoral studies combine her love for feminist thought, philosophy of science, and history with her passion for nursing.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Jessica worked in emergency, trauma critical care, and trauma case management at Augusta University, the region’s only level one trauma center. This afforded her 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 Jessica’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. Jessica’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 womxn-identified community. Her scholarship has been published in Nursing Philosophy and Advances in Nursing Science.

Outside her doctoral studies and faculty roles, Jessica is involved in many different endeavors and actions. Jessica is an active member of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group. She is one of the organizers of RadicalNurses.com, 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. Jessica is also an occasional contributor to Nursology.net and an active member of the American Association of History of Nursing Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

As she completes her doctoral studies, Jessica aspires to continue pursuing the emancipatory scholarship that inspires her, seeking out interdisciplinary collaboration, counterhegemonic ways of knowing, and advancing health equity. Jessica 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.