Decolonising Nursing and Higher Education: From Diversity Rhetoric to Structural Transformation

British nursing and higher education have adopted the language of decolonisation. But the structures, epistemologies, and power relations that make decolonisation necessary remain largely intact. This book is a sustained scholarly argument for why that gap must be closed and how. Drawing on peer-reviewed research, four decades of clinical and academic experience, and the ELEVATE institutional programme founded at Northumbria University, Decolonising Nursing and Higher Education: From Diversity Rhetoric to Structural Transformation moves through four movements: Positioning, Diagnosis, Intervention, and Transformation. The book examines how the nursing curriculum reproduces colonial epistemology not through its content but through its underlying assumptions about whose knowledge counts. It analyses the sophisticated mechanisms by which universities absorb the demand for decolonisation while protecting existing structures. It provides an honest account of what building transformative work inside a resistant institution actually involves. And it makes the case for race-conscious practice as a professional imperative, not a specialism with direct consequences for patient safety, workforce wellbeing, and public health. This is not a book for those who believe that diversifying a reading list is the same as decolonising a curriculum. It is for nursing academics, higher education leaders, healthcare educators, and policy makers who understand that structural transformation requires something more demanding and who are ready to do it. Key themes include:

The colonial curriculum and the hidden curriculum of nursing education
Epistemic injustice, colourism, and the racialisation of academic labour
Institutional non-performativity and the diversity industrial complex
The ELEVATE programme as an institutional case study
Race conscious practice as clinical and professional imperative
Systemic transformation beyond individual programmes and institutions