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This chapter introduces the reader to the process that may be involved in supporting those living in Direct Provision (DP) as refugees and asylum seekers. In the first part of this chapter, I will provide a brief history of DP in Ireland, and introduce the role of International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS) in the DP system. An overview of DP, how it is structured and some of the legislation and national policy governing its delivery will also be highlighted. Moving on from this, I will explore my personal experience of DP as an International Protection Applicant in Ireland. This will be followed by a description of how my experience was used in providing peer support in the DP Centre. The process of becoming a peer advocate will be considered, as this involved a range of activities, which helped me to support others, within the setting.

Environments are gendered and environmental issues have impacts on gender. This introduction highlights some current environmental issues from the ecofeminist perspective that characterizes the contributions and summarizes the chapters in the volume that feature the activities of indigenous women in the Columbian Amazon, urban environments in Athens and Rome, workplace environments in Bangladeshi offices, STEM labs in universities in the United States, and homes used for sex work in Punjab. It ends with a suggestion for a queer spiritual ecofeminist approach to environments.

This chapter is focussed on the macro context of higher education and describes the historical developments in higher education and how these developments affect academic jobs and academic work. When we sketch the development of higher education with a few broad strokes of the pen, we see (1) a development from a small-scale elite institution to broad training (and research) institutes; (2) a struggle over control of higher education; and (3) a movement in which higher education is professionalized and increasingly assigned a societal task, with a series of consequences for education, research and impact. These developments contribute to a field of tension in which old traditions of academic behaviour must be reconciled with demands that are placed on higher education by society. This makes talent management, both on an individual and collective level, no easy task.

This research aims at explaining the phenomenon of the “black children” (heihaizi), a very little-known generation who lived with concealment under the one-child policy in China. The one-child policy was officially introduced to nationwide at the end of 1979 by permitting per couple to have one child only, later modified to a second child allowed if the first was a girl in rural China in 1984. It was officially replaced by a nation-wide two-child policy and most existing research focused on the parents’ sufferings and policy changes. The term “black children” has been mainly used to describe their absence from their family hukou registration and education. However, this research aims at expanding the meaning of being “black” to explain the children who were concealed more than at the level of family formal registration, but also physical freedom and emotional bond. What we do not yet know are the details of their lived experiences from a day-to-day base: where did they live? How were they raised up? Who were involved? Who benefited from it and who did not? In this way, this research challenges the existing scholarship on the one-child policy and repositions the “black children” as primary victims, and reveals the family as a key figure in co-producing their diminished status with the support of state power. It is very important to understand these children’s loss of citizenship and human freedom from the inside of the family because they were concealed in so many ways away from public view and interventions. This research focuses on illustrating how their lack of access to continued, stabilized, and reciprocally recognized family interactions framed their very idea of self-worth and identity.