Collective Memory and Narrative Repair: Bearing Witness to Nurses' Moral Identity, Agency, and Experience Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This dissertation explores how nurses constructed, negotiated, and affirmed their moral identities amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a global event that simultaneously revealed the essential nature of nursing work and the ways in which it is exploited. Anchored in feminist moral epistemology, I conducted a critical narrative analysis of how dominant discourses, political decisions, and media representations shaped nurses' experiences of personhood, vulnerability, and grief within the context of mass death. Drawing on narrative interviews with ten nurses in Ontario, alongside media artifacts they identified as significant to their experiences, I analyze how narratives produced by and about nurses illuminate the conditions under which their moral identities, agency, and experiences are recognized or obscured.

This analysis situates nurses' moral experiences at the intersection of personal and political forces. I engage with the contradictions of being publicly celebrated as heroes while being treated as expendable and replaceable in everyday health care settings. The findings reveal the pandemic as a period of profound disruption to nurses' moral identities. Their stories convey exhaustion, moral distress, and the ongoing struggle to maintain a sense of humanity in the face of systemic dehumanization - where nurses were routinely held accountable for, yet unsupported within, a system in collapse.

Narrative inquiry is approached in this study as both a methodological tool and a form of moral engagement. My own reflexive narratives are woven throughout, tracing the intersections between the participants' stories, media narratives, nursing scholarship, and my moral experiences. By centring storytelling as a means of epistemic resistance, this research is itself an act of narrative repair, reasserting personhood, bearing witness to collective grief, and reclaiming hope, possibility, and radical imagination in the aftermath of the pandemic. I contend that collective memory - shaped by the stories we choose to tell and to remember - serves a critical site for enacting this repair, both within nursing and in society more broadly. These narratives affirm that grief and vulnerability are not failures of resilience, but foundations of our shared humanity.