Dr. Jamie B. Smith

Expertise

Jamie  B. Smith, PhD, MSc, MA, PgDip, BSc(Hons) RN

I am a researcher and institutional ethnographer working at the intersection of nursing philosophy, health workforce research, and gender in medicine. My research examines how organisations function in practice — how policies shape what nurses can and cannot do, and how structural inequalities, including those of gender, race, and class, are reproduced through the everyday workings of healthcare systems. I trained and practised as a registered nurse in NHS nephrology and organ donation, and that clinical experience remains central to how I frame research questions.

Research Areas

• Workforce wellbeing and retention — examining stress, burnout, and staffing conditions as system-level problems, with particular attention to how gendered labour is undervalued in healthcare
• Gender, equity, and intersectionality in healthcare — including structural discrimination, microaggressions, and the gendered dimensions of care work
• Nursing philosophy and critical theory — drawing on critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism to interrogate knowledge production in nursing and medicine
• Algorithmic and technological change — examining the ethical and professional implications of AI and clinical decision tools, including whose bodies generate the evidence base

Methods

• Institutional Ethnography — a mixed and multi-methods framework drawing on critical posthumanist theory, tracing how policies and institutional texts shape nursing practice across sites
• Qualitative methods — diary-elicited interviews, focus groups, collaborative and multimedia approaches
• Quantitative methods — survey instruments, workforce measurement tools, statistical analysis, and algorithmic audits examining how clinical decision tools encode assumptions about bodies and populations
• Cross-cultural and comparative methods — applied across UK, German, Australian, and US healthcare contexts

Current Projects

I am currently contributing to the SHORTER Study (antibiotic stewardship) and the Advance Academia Study (diversity in doctoral education), and lead the PflegeStressPlan project, an in-house study examining nursing workforce stress as a signal of organisational conditions rather than individual deficit. I serve as Guest Editor for special issues of Nursing Inquiry and Nursing Philosophy, and sit on the Editorial Board of Nursing Philosophy. My longer-term research agenda focuses on building sustainable and equitable healthcare systems, and on bridging the structural differences between UK and German healthcare contexts.

Additional information

Peer-Reviewed Publications

1. Smith, J. B., & Stenhouse, R. (2025). Navigating the system of regulation and practice in the UK: Towards a Posthuman Institutional Ethnography of Nursing. Journal of Advanced Nursing.
2. Dillard-Wright, J., & Smith, J. B. (2025). An Ethics of Artificial Intelligence for Nursing. OJIN: Online Journal of Issues in Nursing.
3. Smith, J. B., Klumbyte, G., Sidebottom, K., Dillard-Wright, J., Willis, E., Brown, B. B., & Hopkins-Walsh, J. (2024). We all care, ALL the time. Nursing Inquiry, 31(1), e12572.
4. Dillard-Wright, J., Smith, J. B., Hopkins-Walsh, J., Willis, E., Brown, B. B., & Tedjasukmana, E. C. (2024). Notes on [post]human nursing: What it MIGHT be, what it is not. Nursing Inquiry, 31(1), e12562.
5. Smith, J. B., Willis, E., Hopkins-Walsh, J., Dillard-Wright, J., & Brown, B. B. (2023). The Vitruvian nurse and burnout: New materialist approaches to impossible ideals. Nursing Inquiry, e12538.
6. Smith, J. B., Klumbyte, G., & Britton, L. (2023). From "if-then" to "what if?" Rethinking healthcare algorithmics with posthuman speculative ethics. Nursing Philosophy, 24(3), e12447.
7. Laurin, A. C., Hopkins-Walsh, J., Smith, J. B., Brown, B., Martin, P., & Tedjasukmana, E. C. (2023). Mattering: Per/forming nursing philosophy in the Chthulucene. Nursing Philosophy, 24(3), e12452.
8. Crocker, R., Dawson, M., Smith, J. B., Stepney, E. S., Walker, S., & Willis, E. (2023). A posthuman perspective on nursing: In conversation with Jamie Smith and Eva Willis. Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, 2(2), 78-89.
9. Smith, J. B., Herinek, D., Woodward-Kron, R., & Ewers, M. (2022). Nurse migration in Australia, Germany and the UK. Policy, Politics & Nursing Practice.
10. Smith, J. B., Kean, S., Vauhkonen, A., Elonen, I., Silva, S. C., Pajari, J., & Salminen, L. (2022). An integrative review of the continuing professional development needs for nurse educators. Nurse Education Today, 116, 105695.
11. Smith, J. B., Willis, E. M., & Hopkins-Walsh, J. (2022). What does person-centred care mean, if you weren't considered a person anyway. Nursing Philosophy, 23(3), e12464.
12. Hopkins-Walsh, J., Dillard-Wright, J., Brown, B., Smith, J. B., & Willis, E. (2022). Critical posthuman nursing care: Bodies reborn and the ethical imperative for composting. Witness: The Canadian Journal of Critical Nursing Discourse, 4(1), 16-35.
13. Courson, S., Breen, K., Smith, J. B., Flynn, A., Evans, J., Moffit, R., & McPherson, S. (2022). Impact of COVID-19 on the level of work engagement of nurses at a small, rural hospital. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 53(4), 157-164.
14. Holloway, A., Guthrie, V., Waller, G., Smith, J. B., & Newbury-Birch, D. (2021). A two-arm parallel-group individually randomised prison pilot study of a male remand alcohol intervention for self-efficacy enhancement: The APPRAISE study protocol. BMJ Open, 11(4), e040636.
15. Smith, J. B., & Willis, E. (2020). Interpreting posthumanism with nurse work. Journal of Posthuman Studies, 4(1), 59-75.

Book Chapters

• Smith, J. B., Willis, E., Sheehan, K., & Jones, E. (in press, 2026). The Necropolitics of ECMO. Duke University Press.
• Smith, J. B., Willis, E., Sheehan, K., & Jones, E. (in press, 2024). Technoscientific assemblages of care and intuitive movement: Care as a radical methodology. In R. Braidotti (Ed.), Convergences at the end of disciplines: Thinking across knowledge domains. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Smith, J. B. (2022). Posthuman nursing as a radical pedagogy. In J. Dillard-Wright, J. Hopkins Walsh, & B. Brown (Eds.), Nursing Futurities. Routledge.
• Smith, J. B. (2022). Posthuman nursing. In R. Braidotti (Ed.), More Posthuman Glossary. Bloomsbury Academic.

Links

• Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/citations
• ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0097-6102

Networking

Institute of Gender in Medicine (GiM)
Campus Virchow-Klinikum (CVK)

Health and Human Sciences (CC 1)

Campus Virchow-Klinikum
(CVK)