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The potential transformative role of recovery colleges is well-documented in community mental health settings. The purpose of this paper is to reproduce the principles of the recovery college approach in a forensic setting in Devon.

This paper describes the inaugural two-year development process, from ideas to a functioning service, accessible to patients in both medium secure, low and open settings on the Langdon hospital site, drawing on qualitative accounts from staff and service users involved.

Creating and maintaining an educational space within the forensic environment where people have real choices to learn and work on their recovery is possible and valued by service users and clinicians alike.

Langdon was one of the first forensic hospitals in the UK to introduce a recovery college, and the report of the positive impact and challenges involved may be useful to others setting out on this journey.

What is it about academia anyway? We profess to hate it, spend endless amounts of time complaining about it, and yet we in academia will do practically anything to stay. The pay may be low, job security elusive, and in the end, it's not the glamorous work we envisioned it would be. Yet, it still holds fascination and interest for us. This is an article about American academic fiction. By academic fiction, I mean novels whosemain characters are professors, college students, and those individuals associated with academia. These works reveal many truths about the higher education experience not readily available elsewhere. We learn about ourselves and the university community in which we work.

IT is well known that librarianship or library science and information work or information science as the common educational, professional and scientific discipline is everywhere undergoing great change and development. During its continual and relatively fast development, this discipline has at the same time to solve the increasing tasks connected with the problems of the so‐called information explosion.

This work examines assumptions of positivism and the traditional scientific method.

Insights from quantum mechanics are explored especially as they relate to method, measurement and what is knowable. An argument is made that how social scientists, particularly sociologists, understand the nature of “reality out there” and describe the social world may be challenged by quantum ideas. The benefits of utilized mixed methods, considering quantum insights, cannot be overstated.

It is the proposition of this work that insights from modern physics alter the understanding of the world “out there.” Wheeler suggested that the most profound implication from modern physics is that “there is no out there” (1982; see also Baggott, 1992). Grappling with how modern physics may alter understanding in the social sciences will be difficult; however, that does not mean the task should not be undertaken (see Goswami, 1993). A starting point for the social sciences may be relinquishing an old mechanistic science that depends on the establishment of an objective, empirically based, verifiable reality. Mechanistic science demands “one true reality – a clear-cut reality on which everyone can agree…. Mechanistic science is by definition reductionistic…it has had to try to reduce complexity to oversimplification and process to statis. This creates an illusionary world…that has little or nothing to do with the complexity of the process of the reality of creation as we know, experience, and participate in it” (Goswami, 1993, pp. 64, 66).

Many physicists have popularized quantum ideas for others interested in contemplating the implications of modern physics. Because of the difficulty in conceiving of quantum ideas, the meaning of the quantum in popular culture is far removed from the parent discipline. Thus, the culture has been shaped by the rhetoric and ideas surrounding the basic quantum mathematical formulas. And, over time, as quantum ideas have come to be part of the popular culture, even the link to the popularized literature in physics is lost. Rather, quantum ideas may be viewed as cultural formations that take on a life of their own.

The work allows a critique of positivist method and provides insight on how to frame qualitative methodology in a new way.

The work utilizes popularized ideas in quantum theory: the preeminent theory that describes all matter. Little work in sociology utilizes this perspective in understanding research methods.

Quantum insights have rarely been explored in highlighting limitations in positivism. The current work aims to build on quantum insights and how these may help us better understand the social world around us.