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The purpose of this paper is to describe the establishment of the Dumfries and Galloway Wellness and Recovery College (The College) within the University of the West of Scotland.

A narrative approach is taken to outline the project and justify its philosophy.

Progress so far is outlined and the vision for the future is explained.

It is believed that stigma and discrimination are pernicious and pervasive and a concerted and deliberately conscious attempt is needed to establish an inclusive, egalitarian and aligned approach whereby practices match values base.

This is justified as being in keeping with a philosophy based on the concepts of recovery, co-production co-delivery and co-receiving. Although not without precedent this development is innovative in being embedded within the university sector and challenging existing paradigms in terms of the positive and inclusive approach to mental health.

The purpose of this paper is to ask how we can think about critical reflection as a pedagogical practice given the “confessional turn”. By the “confessional turn” the author refers to the idea that “subjective, autobiographical and confessional modes of expression” have expanded exponentially across a wide range of social spheres, including education, the legal system, the media and the workplace. Examining these developments, this paper asks what these debates on critical reflection and confession mean for pedagogical practice.

The main approach is a review of key debates in the literature on critical reflection and also in the wider social sciences.

The discussion compares different debates. Thus it shows that for critics, the turn to the “first person” technologies is narcissistic, psychologistic and de‐politicising. On this view, critical reflective practice might be understood as an individualistic and individualising pedagogy in spite of its claims to be critical. The paper discusses how in contrast, others see this move to talk about the subjective and the self as an extension of the feminist project of the personal is political – i.e. that personal stories, feelings and issues have social and political roots and consequences. For them, reflection can be critical, leading to political consciousness‐raising, i.e. a new awareness about social, political and personal processes. It finishes by examining the view that the idea of reflexivity might help us out of the conflict between these debates.

The paper poses a number of questions in relation to critical reflection that can be taken up by practitioners in the field.

The paper brings new literature to bear on the practice of critical reflection and raises important questions relevant to academics and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to identify those factors that key actors in university governance hold as to be important in realizing strategic change within their institutions.

Key decision-makers in 26 European universities were surveyed on their views on which factors bring about strategic change. The results were interpreted using a theoretical framework emphasizing organizational archetypes and their development.

The findings indicated that strategic changes in universities were perceived as highly dependent on leadership, decision-making procedures, communication and evaluation. However, some differences between the universities in the sample can be identified, supporting indicating the relevance of using organizational archetypes as an analytical tools for observing change within the higher education sector.

The study links organizational level developments on strategic management to macro-level change within the European higher education landscape, and provides new insights intoon the debate on convergence and differentiation in organizational fields.

Although the production of a dissertation and the transition to an independent researcher undergird the outcomes of doctoral education, this study aims to emphasize issues of inequality in doctoral study through the use of Bourdieu’s (1977, 1986) concepts of cultural capital and field.

This qualitative study with 15 doctoral students in Engineering and in Philosophy revealed that activities in doctoral study that tend to socialize students possess value, given the conventions of various contexts or social spaces related to academe.

Doctoral students who attain particular accomplishments experience doctoral study in ways that suggest that doctoral study is a system of conventions and norms that imbue particular activities with value, which then impact students’ doctoral education experiences.

Inequality is tied to students’ portfolio of achievements, as the value of these achievements suggests differential socialization experiences, such that different students learn about the norms and practices within doctoral study in different ways.

Collegiality is the modus operandi of universities. Collegiality is central to academic freedom and scientific quality. In this way, collegiality also contributes to the good functioning of universities’ contribution to society and democracy. In this concluding paper of the special issue on collegiality, we summarize the main findings and takeaways from our collective studies. We summarize the main challenges and contestations to collegiality and to universities, but also document lines of resistance, activation, and maintenance. We depict varieties of collegiality and conclude by emphasizing that future research needs to be based on an appreciation of this variation. We argue that it is essential to incorporate such a variation-sensitive perspective into discussions on academic freedom and scientific quality and highlight themes surfaced by the different studies that remain under-explored in extant literature: institutional trust, field-level studies of collegiality, and collegiality and communication. Finally, we offer some remarks on methodological and theoretical implications of this research and conclude by summarizing our research agenda in a list of themes.

The onset of psychosis typically develops during adolescence, a crucial period for beginning the transition from family to independence and developing a stable sense of self. Recovery amongst adolescents experiencing early onset psychosis has not yet been investigated with reference to its influence on self-identity. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact living with early onset psychosis has on self-identity for adolescents in recovery.

A purposive sample of ten adolescents aged between 16 and 18 years from an Early Intervention Service in the Scottish National Health Service were recruited. All had experienced at least one episode of psychosis and were within three years of first contact with the service. Semi-structured interviews were adopted to capture adolescents’ perspectives concerning their experiences of recovery from psychosis and the impact on self-identity. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed.

Qualitative analysis of adolescents’ accounts revealed how recovery from psychosis involves working with individual explanatory frameworks concerning uncertain identities and status ambiguity, a decrease in referent points and unfavourable social comparisons (emphasising loss, grief and self-criticism).

Supporting adolescents experiencing early psychosis involves education, rebuilding relationships with self and others and providing access to psychotherapeutic interventions to aid self-identity development when needed.

The originality of this paper lies in the importance of identity, recovery, human reconnection, advocacy and community reintegration for adolescents experiencing psychosis. Public mental health campaigns to tackle the stigma surrounding psychosis are essential to assisting adolescents in developing their sense of self through their recovery journeys.