At The Intersection Of Race, Health and History
Professor Kylie Smith’s research on history and nursing’s role in society has been attracting international attention—and acclaim—for years.
She’s recently been focusing more of her efforts to explore racial equity and social justice in her work as the Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing and the Humanities. This role at Emory is truly interdisciplinary, and Smith strives to build collaborations and bridge gaps between the School of Nursing, the Center for Ethics, the Center for Human Health and the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. "I love seeing the way that history and critical theory can have a real impact on nursing education, on the types of practitioners we produce and on the research they undertake.”
This past year, Smith taught a new class that examined the intersection of race, health, and U.S. history, guiding Emory College students in studies of the historical and structural factors that have led to racial disparities within the American health care system. The course’s challenging topics included racism as a public health crisis and gender, reproduction, and eugenics.
“I love being interdisciplinary. It’s really satisfying to see the value of the humanities for nursing, and to know that the work we do in this space will improve our understanding of current health problems,” Smith says. “I love being able to work with nursing students as well as history ones, and I love seeing the way that history and critical theory can have a real impact on nursing education, on the types of practitioners we produce and on the research they undertake.”
While this class was the first of its kind, Smith is no stranger to analyzing the crossover between race, history, and the healthcare system. She teaches multiple courses throughout the university, ranging from the history of race within healthcare to nursing theory and philosophy.
She’s currently working on a new book called Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South. This project looks at the impact of the Civil Rights Act on racist practices in psychiatric hospitals in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, and compares the reactions of these state governments to the mandate to integrate. In doing so, her work will reveal the horrific conditions that existed for African Americans in state asylums and make links between past practices and current disparities in mental health. Kylie Smith
The U.S. National Library of Medicine awarded Smith a $150,000 Grant for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health to complete research for the book. “What an exciting opportunity this grant provides Dr. Smith as well as the School of Nursing to further examine and learn from this important topic and time in history,” says Dean Linda McCauley, PhD, RN, FAAN, FAAOHN.
Smith hopes her work, both as a teacher and researcher leaves a lasting impact. “I really hope that by the time I am ready to shuffle off this mortal coil people will have realized that health disparities and injustice are a direct consequence of racist and discriminatory policies of the past,” she says. “To be able to address them we must really face that history. I want us to stop blaming individuals for problems that are caused by policies and ideologies that we are think are finished, but are really so deeply embedded in the social fabric that they are almost invisible.”
Her previous book Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing was named the 2020 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year for History and Public Policy. The book also won the 2020 Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing. In the book, Smith examines the history of psychiatric nursing, drawing many pop-culture comparisons to the Netflix episodic thriller Ratched, which follows the life of fictional Nurse Ratched before she appears in the classic novel/film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
