From group mentoring to collective liberation: The imperative to decolonize nursing academia

Background: Four Black early-career faculty members, one Black doctoral student, and a Black senior faculty member, (herein referred to as scholars), previously engaged in cross-cultural mentoring with a White senior researcher to bolster their scholarship.

Purpose: In the years following the 2020 racial reckoning, the scholars were motivated to reconvene by the realization that traditional scholarship activities of academia ignore historical educational oppression and fail to account for the contemporary effects of racism and discrimination rooted in American colonialism.

Methods: Collaborative autoethnography, a decolonizing qualitative approach to research, was used to explicate our journeys in academia. The tenets of Freire's critical pedagogy (conscientização, scholarship, praxis) framed our collective experiences.

Discussion: We describe resisting academic structures of power, discrimination, and disadvantage through reformation, crafting a vision statement, and utilizing positions of influence.

Conclusion: To decolonize nursing academia, we implore the scholarly community to pursue liberation and contest structures that center Whiteness and marginalize collectivism and collaboration.