Artificial Intelligence, Cancer Nursing, and Sexual Health: Reassembling Care Networks in Digital Care

Aims: To examine how artificial intelligence (AI) reconfigures the conditions under which sexual health is recognized, articulated, and addressed in cancer nursing, thereby providing new conceptual insights into relational care, responsibility, and the organization of care networks.

Design: Discursive paper.

Data Sources: The paper draws on Cyber Nursing, the Fundamentals of Care framework, and actor–network theory, informed by empirical insights from a recent auto-netnographic study.

Methods: A theoretically informed discursive approach was used to develop conceptual analysis and synthesis across nursing theory and sociomaterial perspectives.

Results: AI is conceptualized as a nonhuman actor that participates in care networks by facilitating the articulation and visibility of sensitive concerns such as sexual health and by enabling care-like enactments. The analysis introduces the concepts of weakly networked care and reassembling care networks to explain how AI reshapes the sociomaterial conditions through which fundamental care is recognized, articulated, and integrated into nursing practice.

Conclusion: AI can make sexual health more visible and discussable in cancer nursing, but it does not constitute ethical care, as responsibility, relational continuity, and integration remain grounded in nursing practice. Rather than challenging the Fundamentals of Care framework, the concept of reassembling care networks complements its continued development by directing attention towards the changing sociomaterial conditions through which fundamental care is enacted.