Jamie B. Smith is a white, cis, queer, newly middle-class man. He is a nurse, institutional ethnographer and Senior Research Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University, and a researcher at the Institute of Gender in Medicine, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
His research begins from everyday nursing work and traces how policies, professional texts, technologies, staffing arrangements and structural inequalities coordinate what becomes possible in care. His Edinburgh PhD, Ecologies of Care, developed a posthuman institutional ethnography of nursing, bringing institutional ethnography into conversation with critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism.
Jamie combines this ethnographic and philosophical work with mixed methods research on nursing workforces, stress, implementation and health systems. Across these strands, he is interested in how apparently individual experiences — distress, responsibility, failure, adaptation and care — are institutionally organised.
He serves on the editorial board of Nursing Philosophy, where he guest-edited the journal’s camp collection (2026). His work with the Compost Collaborative develops collective, creative and affirmative approaches to nursing philosophy, institutional critique and more-than-human care — see Projects.
Selected works
- Navigating the System of Regulation and Practice in the UK: Towards a Posthuman Institutional Ethnography of Nursing — Journal of Advanced Nursing (2026)
- The Camp of Reason: Spinoza’s Ethics as Affirmative Excess — Nursing Philosophy (2026)
- Staying With the Trouble in Nursing 12.5 Hours at a Time — Nursing Philosophy (2025)
- Mattering: Per/forming nursing philosophy in the Chthulucene — Nursing Philosophy (2023)
- What does person-centred care mean, if you weren’t considered a person anyway — Nursing Philosophy (2022)
- Critical Posthuman Nursing Care — Witness (2022)
Elsewhere
Personal research site · Institutional ethnography · Charité profile · Napier research record