The Absent Presence of Racism in Mental Health Nursing Education in Scotland

This thesis begins from the premise that racial—indeed, racist—logics are embedded in the routine functioning of social institutions. In healthcare, extensive evidence documents racism as a material and experiential reality for workers and patients, and mental health services are no exception. While evidence of racism in healthcare is well-established, how it is understood and addressed within professional education remains under-examined. The international events of 2020 generated renewed urgency to confront racism in nursing, prompting rapid growth in related scholarship. Yet this literature frequently leaves racism under-theorised. Although calls to action proliferate, limited attention has been paid to what nursing understands racism to be, or how nursing education (re)produces and legitimises particular understandings of race and racism. Addressing this gap, this thesis focuses on pre-registration mental health nursing education in Scotland in order to critically examine nursing education as a key site of professional socialisation. Specifically, it explores how education may challenge or compound racism through the knowledge and values imparted to students. To examine how race and racism are thought, talked about and problematised, a novel analytic approach combines Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ with Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012) ‘Thinking with theory’, both of which treat discourse as constitutive of social problems. Empirically, the study analyses a discursive dataset comprising 25 in-depth interviews with educators and students, alongside regulatory, programme and curricular documents from Scottish universities offering mental health nursing programmes. The findings reveal a contradiction between the explicit absence of race and racism in educational content, summarised by participants as ‘there’s nothing’, and the persistent presence of race within narratives of education and practice. Analysed through Fields and Fields’ (2022) concept of racecraft, the thesis makes a primarily diagnostic contribution by identifying dominant problematisations of race and racism in nursing education. It subjects these to critical analysis, demonstrating how they may, in fact, be sustaining the very racial (racist) logic nursing claims to want to confront.