Thomas Foth is an associate professor at the School of Nursing in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa. As a registered nurse, he has worked in different areas of the profession and taught at a nursing school in Germany before he came to Canada.
Dr. Foth’s fields of interest include history of nursing, critical theory, philosophy of science, queer and crip theories, postcolonial and decolonial theories and practices, as well as critical accounting. He sees theoretical considerations as part of praxis that aims to change the status quo of nursing and our society in general. Nurses can play an important part in changing the unequal and unjust conditions of neoliberal societies that systematically produce superfluous people and need a “history of the present” to understand and criticize the role nurses and other healthcare providers have played in the settler colonial history of this country and how this history impacts nursing practice today. Another focus of Dr. Foth’s research is the analysis of systematic de-democratization processes implemented in nursing care. Keywords include management technologies like LEAN management, EBN, BP, or the definition of what counts as legitimate knowledge in nursing. Dr. Foth analyzes how the implementation of accounting technologies have led to a hybridization of nursing knowledge that makes it difficult to see where nursing knowledge ends, and accounting knowledge begins. Thus, Dr. Foth’s research program aligns with the idea of abolition democracy and a healthcare system that is based on cooperation and mutual aid. This research program is committed to radical change and critizes the new humanitarianism in nursing that addresses inequities and injustices through philanthropy and humanitarian interventions without changing the societal conditions that implemented these injustices in the first place.
Dr. Foth is a regular lecturer at the Osnabrück University and will be a visiting professor at the Université Dauphine, Paris, France in summer 2022.