"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.

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