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Paper short abstract

Recovery Colleges are educational models structured around co-production between mental health professionals and experts by lived experience. Through ethnographic research, this paper asks what idea of health is enacted through RC activities and how its lexicon shapes participants' experiences.

Paper long abstract

Recovery Colleges emerged in England around 2009 as an educational model in mental health grounded in personal recovery and structured around co-production between mental health professionals and experts by lived experience. Since then, Recovery Colleges have travelled internationally, including to Italy, where they are often presented as pragmatic infrastructures for participation, empowerment, and cultural change within services and organizations.

This paper draws on ongoing ethnographic research and active participation as a volunteer in a Recovery College in Northern Italy. Using participant observation and ethnographic interviews with participants (peer experts, family members and professionals), I ask what idea of “health” is enacted through Recovery College activities and what kinds of experience become legible—and authoritative—within this setting. My intention is to follow how experiential knowledge is assembled across mundane organisational practices, especially focusing on the informal “back-office” work that makes the courses possible. I focus on the lexicons that circulate behind and during the Recover College courses, drawn by WHO-oriented materials, recovery language, and biopsychosocial notions of illness—and on how they shape the translation of lived experience into teachable content. I examine the tensions that arise when experiential accounts are invited as “evidence” while simultaneously encouraged to fit tidy narratives that are compatible with institutional metrics. The paper contributes to debates on how experiential knowledge is negotiated, co-opted, and resisted within polarised mental health fields—and what is at stake when “recovery” becomes both a promise of change and a regulatory grammar.