Allyship is regarded as an important role in the academic setting to support the inclusion of people with Lived Experience (LE) of mental health and addiction challenges. Understanding the context within which the allies in academia work requires further scrutiny to ensure power sharing. Mental health academics have created a body of published literature on LE in academia, presenting both the successes and barriers to authentic allyship. This narrative provides a dialogue between a person in an LE role in a university setting and a nursing academic regarding their experiences of allyship. These reflections present the potential challenges the LE role and their academic ally can face in establishing and sustaining these roles. The structures within the university setting that impact on the success or not of the role of ally are also considered. This narrative further contributes to the contested role of allies and offers a closer analysis of allyship and the power dynamics in play. We conclude by offering the notion of coalition as an alternative to allyship and an alternative approach to the success of the LE roles in academic institutions.

Traversing the doctorate from start to completion can be stressful, with some students never reaching completion. This autoethnographic study explored how one researcher completed a Doctor of Philosophy and maintained their subjective wellbeing through ‘self-introspection’, using the analogy of the three little pigs. Data was generated through autoethnographic accounts. A four-step iterative process frames data analysis. There were four key findings. Self-talk with internal dialogue was a strategy used to move thinking to a more optimistic state of mind. Relational connectivity was effective in deliberately shifting negative affect states. Organisational skills enabled dealing with cognitive complexity. The use of a Researcher Journal guided self-regulation and self-control in self-reflection, contributing to the positive maintenance of one researcher’s subjective wellbeing. This autoethnographic account highlights ways of working that could be beneficial to help other researchers balance their subjective wellbeing while successfully completing the doctoral journey.

For some whānau Māori, colonisation has resulted in the disconnection from their home marae, whenua, hapū and iwi. This paper takes a collective authoethnograhical approach to describing and exploring a recent journey of reconnection and discovery embarked on by one whānau. The journey is framed by the construction of a waka hourua, a double hulled canoe, to represent the two parts of the hapū; those who retained their home base connection and those who were disconnected through generations of colonisation, racism and geographical distance.

This study explores the transformative experiences of five students in the Master of Applied Indigenous Knowledge programme at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Employing an Indigenous autoethnographic approach, this paper delves into the students' personal and professional growth, each from different backgrounds and professions. The research highlights integrating Indigenous knowledge into various professional contexts, emphasising cultural identity, personal growth, community engagement, and resilience. The programme, blending academic rigour with indigenous insights, underscores how education can empower individuals to contribute to their communities. The narratives of these students, reflecting their journey through cultural reclamation and professional development, contribute significantly to understanding Indigenous knowledge systems and their application in contemporary settings.

Environmental ethnography is discussed here from involvement with a local government authority in Aotearoa New Zealand focused on soil, water and land management. Climate change and environmental degradation are making such local government work more difficult and expensive. As costs trend upwards and new rules are applied, community challenges to local authorities increase. Environmental ethnography identifies constraints on the organisational ability to meet infrastructural needs to produce environmental solutions locally. Some constraints are internal (organisational), some are local (community beliefs and attitudes), but the most significant constraints are external to local agencies. In ethnographic terms, working with local and national environmental authorities is a process of learning from staff, scientists, and administrators. Māori and Pākehā communities’ efforts to manage their local destinies provide insights into pressures on local government organisations. Landowners’ expectations and politicised discourses of climate denial or deferral also constrain day-to-day local authority work. Three intersections of local authority organisations' actions and local communities’ responses emerge from reflecting on this ethnographic learning, each shaping what local authorities can achieve. First, the social is not another set of insights; rather, the social is in the science. Second, in Aotearoa New Zealand the familiar nature-society binary is usefully disturbed by mātauranga Māori understandings of people and the environment. Third, changing modern productivist attitudes towards the environment is more than local—it is national and global—yet people’s responses are also intensely local. Environmental ethnography helps illuminate such tensions that create organisational and community dilemmas for local government authorities.

The extended periods that some asylum seekers experience in immigration detention potentially compromise their mental health and physical well-being. This compromise is associated with the prevailing culture and conditions within some immigration detention facilities in Western countries, such as Australia, Canada and Germany. This review aims to synthesise the findings of studies that report on the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers while they have been held in immigration detention. A meta-ethnographic approach guided the synthesis following the eMERGe meta-ethnography reporting guidance structure. Three common storyline metaphors were identified from the synthesis of findings of seven qualitative studies: (1) treating like criminals, jail-like, prison-like, and treated like animals; (2) killing your mind and torturing your mind; and (3) feelings of hopelessness, worry, despair and fear. The findings of this review suggest that the culture and the practices of immigration detention that impact refugees and asylum seekers who are detained for sometimes extended periods need to be transformed. The time that people are held in detention and the context for that detention needs urgent review. While immigration detention is legislated and enacted differently in the countries where the included studies were located, Government policies should consider alternative approaches such as community detention. Regular monitoring of immigration detention practices by external bodies should be mandated, and ongoing staff training for workers in detention facilities should be instituted to ensure that refugees and asylum seekers are treated fairly and with dignity when detained.