Emotional Educations: Students’ Views of the History of Belonging and the Lessons That Can Be Learned From the History of Student Mental Health, 2021-2022

This data is drawn from the transcribed focus groups held with five groups of students at four universities across Britain as part of a project to explore the potential utility of histories of student loneliness. Put another way, this project sought to understand the 'so what?' of research into student mental health histories. The students were invited to examine archival material that was authored by students in the 1960s and 1970s that detailed experiences of loneliness and isolation at universities, and were guided by the researcher to explore their resonances in the present. The first part of the workshop involved introducing the history of student mental health and giving students a brief guide to the use of archival material - setting out some brief comments on how to read for context, audience, and potential aims of the text. The second section honed in on students' responses to the material. The aim was to understand how contemporary students might make use of, interact with, and explore student loneliness in the past. The motivation for the study was a desire to understand the potential role of enhanced historical understanding in contemporary discussions about how to improve student wellbeing - asking whether, for example, increased knowledge of past student experiences might de-stigmatise loneliness in the present. The data contained in this set contain the transcribed conversations held in the second part of the workshops. Student participants came from a range of backgrounds, though all were undergraduates and all studied either a humanities or a social science degree. One student was an international exchange student, and another was an American student spending the entirety of their degree in the UK. The topics covered include freshers' weeks; accommodation; resident and non-resident students; going home at weekends; friendships; the permissive society; academic and staff interactions. The resulting academic article, which analysed this data alongside the archival materials, argued that increased historical knowledge was felt by students to offer new ways of understanding their experiences and to diminish the pressure around the 'university experience'. It argued, though, that this needs to be a complement to the other, holistic and more ambitious attempts to grapple with disconnection in the academy.