Student dissatisfaction with assessment and feedback is a significant challenge for most UK Higher Education Institutions according to a key national survey. This paper explores the meaning, challenges and potential opportunities for enhancement in assessment and feedback within the authors' own institution as illustrative of approaches that can be taken elsewhere. Using a qualitative design, a review of assessment and feedback, which included an exploration of students' perceptions, was made in one College of the University. The findings highlighted variations in assessment and feedback practice across the College with dissatisfaction typically being due to misunderstanding or miscommunication between staff and students. Drawing on the review, we assert in this paper that students' dissatisfaction with assessment and feedback is not a 'tame' problem for which a straightforward solution exists. Instead, it is a 'wicked' problem that requires a complex approach with multiple interventions.

Participatory research methodologies have expanded the opportunities for critical, emancipatory and democratic health and social work research. However, their practical application in research with vulnerable participants has historically been challenging due to ethical, practical and theoretical concerns. Individuals who are homeless are typically seen as 'hard-to-reach', transient, 'hidden' and even chaotic participant populations. Unsurprisingly, examples of the use of innovative participatory research techniques with those groups have been relatively scarce.This paper aimed to address this gap by discussing the application of one such technique-the mobile phone diary-in research with multiply disadvantaged homeless adults. Diary methods are situated within the qualitative research on health, illness and social marginality and the enhanced capabilities of the mobile phone diary are highlighted. The author illustrates the application of the mobile phone diary in his participatory research on the everyday life narratives of adults with serious mental illness (SMI) who were homeless. The process of designing the mobile phone diary is detailed. Following this, participant testimonies of their use of the mobile phone diary are presented. They demonstrate the participatory and inclusive nature, as well as the cathartic and empowering potential, of this technique. The methodological contributions and challenges and the theoretical generativity of the mobile phone diary method are discussed. The mobile phone diary is a feasible approach for eliciting evocative, contextualised and nuanced accounts of the lived experience of homelessness, social isolation, coping and recovery.

There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article Karadzhov, D., Yuan, Y. and Bond, L. (2020) Coping amidst an assemblage of disadvantage: a qualitative metasynthesis of first-person accounts of managing severe mental illness while homeless.

Despite the acknowledgement that mental health inequalities are shaped by the interaction of macro-level (structural) and micro-level (individual, agentic) powers, dominant paradigms in mental health research have been ill-equipped to integrate those different levels of influence theoretically and empirically. As a result, an 'explanatory deficit' persists as to the causal mechanisms underpinning the impact of social inequalities on mental well-being, particularly mental health recovery. To redress this gap, critical realism has been put forward as a useful metatheoretical alternative. This paper begins by offering a succinct critique of extant mental health recovery research. Mental health recovery is problematised in relation to its dynamic embeddedness in contextual, including macro-structural, conditions. The core tenets and principles of critical realism are then invoked to address the identified philosophical and theoretical inadequacies. This paper argues that critical realism offers promise for explaining how inequality-generating mechanisms, such as social exclusion, may impede recovery. The analytico-conceptual potential of critical realism has remained largely untapped by the extant mental health scholarship. Critical realism offers a holistic and inclusive set of conceptual tools to re-examine the structure-agency nexus in order to advance mental health recovery and inequalities research, and an equity-based policy agenda.

Despite its seeming breadth and diversity, the bulk of the personal (mental health) recovery literature has remained strangely ‘silent’ about the impact of various socio-structural inequalities on the recovery process. Such an inadequacy of the empirical literature is not without consequences since the systematic omission or downplaying, at best, of the socio-structural conditions of living for persons with lived experience of mental health difficulties may inadvertently reinforce a reductionist view of recovery as an atomised, individualised phenomenon. Motivated by those limitations in extant scholarship, a critical literature review was conducted to identify and critique relevant research to problematise the notion of personal recovery in the context of socio-structural disadvantage such as poverty, homelessness, discrimination and inequalities. The review illuminates the scarcity of empirical research and the paucity of sociologically-informed theorisation regarding how recovery is shaped by the socio-structural conditions of living. Those inadequacies are especially pertinent to homelessness research, whereby empirical investigations of personal recovery have remained few and undertheorised. The gaps in the research and theorising about the relational, contextual and socio-structural embeddedness of recovery are distilled. The critical review concludes that personal recovery has remained underresearched, underproblematised and undertheorised, especially in the context of homelessness and other forms of socio-structural disadvantage. Understanding how exclusionary social arrangements affect individuals’ recovery, and the coping strategies that they deploy to negotiate those, is likely to inform anti-oppressive interventions that could eventually remove the structural constraints to human emancipation and flourishing.