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Professional learning has been highlighted as critical to improvement in educational practice for Autistic learners. Empirical evidence about what is effective for professional learning in education suggests it is a “bottom-up” process of intellectual, practical and emotional engagement and application of new knowledge to specific contexts. The purpose of this study was to gather information about postgraduate professional learning that sought to combine lived experience with reflection on practice in a critical pedagogy approach for practitioners working with Autistic learners in post-16 education.

Participants in the study represented all further education (FE) colleges in Wales and included experienced teachers and leaders, most of whom have a role focused on inclusion and learning support within their setting. Two phases of data collection were carried out, namely, a baseline survey (n = 36) and follow-up interviews (n = 15) at the end of the year of study. Interviews explored personal experiences of learning, knowledge and beliefs about practice and change in this respect and professionals’ priorities for the development of practice.

Findings present information gathered from the interviews and indicate that the course did not provide practitioners with new knowledge about autism but supported the development of more nuanced understandings of autism and more professional confidence about practice. However, familiarisation with lived experience and critical reflection on practice were described as supporting the questioning of basic assumptions and greater appreciation of the nature of difference for Autistic learners.

Study findings reframe what should be considered the focus of support practices for Autistic learners in FE.

This chapter reviews the conceptual developments in neighbour studies, charting the shift and bringing together older work on the ‘distance-closeness’ dynamic of neighbour relations with newer ‘equality of neighbours’ approaches. It seeks to empirically extend the sociology of neighbours through an analysis of the experiential narratives of neighbours living in contexts of urban multiculture in the United Kingdom. Drawing on two previous studies of urban multicultural social life and a small street study of neighbours in London, this chapter explores the everyday ‘publicness’ of the neighbour and examines the ways in which recent work on social infrastructure can be productively applied to neighbour relations. This chapter concludes that where cultural and social difference is a very ordinary – although not necessarily easy – experience, neighbour relations offer the potential to work as radical sites of pragmatic multiculturalism.

While there is a growing interest in expatriate academics, their specific role as teachers with daily contact to local students seems to have been largely ignored when examining their adjustment and work outcomes. Based on the job demands-resources model the authors predict that good teacher-student relations, as a supportive job resource, will have a positive effect on expatriate academics’ job satisfaction. This effect, however, will be even stronger for individuals experiencing high job demands and challenges in terms of intercultural job adjustment. In other words, expatriate academics that have difficulties adjusting will benefit more from the social support that can originate from good relations to their students. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors surveyed expatriate academics adjusting to a university position in China by use of 124 responses from foreign university employees.

The authors found that teacher-student relations had a positive association with job satisfaction and that positive teacher-student relations increased job satisfaction more for individuals being slow to adjust.

This is one of the few papers to explore the impact that students can have on expatriate academics and treat this relationship as a potential resource for universities to capitalize upon in socializing their new foreign academic staff members.

The paper examines recent debates on “Empire” and offers a feminist perspective. It asks: what are the gender dynamics of the new imperialism and its rival, Islamism? Drawing on world-system theory and feminist studies of international relations, this paper examines hegemonic masculinities in empire, war, and resistance; the cooptation of women's rights for neoliberal and expansionist purposes; the world-system's transition from U.S. hegemonic power to an alternative yet to be determined; and the role of global feminism in challenging Empire and shaping an alternative world.