"We'd really love to but we're really busy": Silence, precarity and resistance as structural barriers to anti-racism in nursing education.

AIM: To identify structural barriers to the uptake and practice of anti-racism in nursing education, specifically in the Canadian context. DESIGN: A deconstructive, critical, qualitative inquiry informed by critical race theory, critical whiteness, feminism and post-colonialism. METHODS: This study employed an anonymous online open-ended questionnaire and online focus groups with Canadian nurse educators from April to June 2021. The data were analysed through a contextualist thematic analysis that accounts for data as essential experience and also a product of discourse. RESULTS: Structural barriers identified are organized into themes of: the academic environment; position and power; racism; program delivery; and Whiteness. Pervasive silence, especially white silence, can be interpreted in related contexts of precarity, self-interest and institutional violence. Overarching processes of precarity and resistance exert power over the environment of nursing education which act to destabilize, disrupt and discourage anti-racist efforts and education. CONCLUSION: The sustainability of anti-racism should be a primary focus. This entails attending to structures in nursing and higher education that make nursing education precarious work, especially for educators racialized as Other in the white supremacist racial binary of White: non-White. Explicit and ongoing attention to conditions that silence is necessary for any progress to be made. Strategies of applying anti-racism need to be as complex as the barriers. IMPLICATIONS: Many schools of nursing are engaged in attempts to include anti-racism as learning and environment. The structural barriers that interfere with effective integration of anti-racism as a lens for nursing education must be named and addressed so educators and schools can be successful. The implication of trying to incorporate anti-racism without addressing the barriers is a very superficial or pocketed application of anti-racism, and a continuation of the status quo that reproduces Whiteness and excludes and harms people racialized otherwise. IMPACT: The study addressed both strategies and barriers to anti-racism in nursing education. This article addressed structural barriers in anti-racism in Canadian nursing education. The main findings are that processes of precarity specific to nursing education in institutions of higher learning, and resistance through Whiteness, decision-making hierarchy and regulatory structures interfere with the application of anti-racism. This research impacts nurse educators in all nursing schools and leaders in higher education. It also impacts all current and future nursing students as the recipients of the education we provide. REPORTING METHOD: The paper adheres to COREQ checklist. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: No patient or public contribution.

Towards abandoning the master's tools: The politics of a universal nursing identity.

Healthcare environments continue to prove discriminatory and marginalizing towards patients and healthcare workers themselves, which contributes to inequitable health outcomes across lines of socially constructed difference. This content and discourse analysis of nursing identity scholarship asks whether there is a connection between nursing identity and oppressive behaviour by examining the construction of nursing identity and the foundational discourses, sometimes in absentia, that support such a construction. Bourdieu's concepts of social fields and Audre Lorde's concept of the master's house are applied as a framework towards understanding the constructs of power and status in healthcare. The analysis identifies a gap in nursing identity literature where social constructs of difference are not considered. In the reviewed literature, nursing identity has been co-opted by the professionalization project in effort to stabilize a conceptualization of nursing's contribution to healthcare towards gaining professional and societal status. This leads to a monolithic, apolitical representation of nursing identity that erases difference, denies historical influence, universalizes nursing work and further marginalizes marginalized identities. The oppressive and hegemonic nature of a universal nursing identity may contribute to a lack of disciplinary reflexivity about the ongoing influences of foundational discursive constructs of gender, epistemology, power and professional status.

White dominance in nursing education: A target for anti-racist efforts.

Literature on racism, anti-racism, whiteness, nursing education and nurse educators was reviewed and analysed for the development of race consciousness and application of anti-racist pedagogy. The literature describes an oppressive educational climate for non-white identifying people, a curriculum that does not attend to the social construction of difference, and a nursing culture that is not consciously situated in a broader sociopolitical context. A particular focus on studies of nurse educators demonstrates a stark need for personal and professional development towards effectively delivering anti-racist pedagogy and a deconstruction of white normativity and dominance amongst white faculty. The protection and reproduction of white privilege is identified through the scholarship itself through a lack of racial analysis, an externalization of the root of oppression and non-specific study measures and outcomes. The persistence and pervasiveness of white dominance in nursing and the lack of anti-racist competence in white educators, particularly, merits a shift in anti-racist efforts away from short-term skill acquisition initiatives towards the deconstruction of socialized white supremacy and enactments of white privilege in nurse educators themselves.