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Fiction has the potential to dispel myths and helps improve public understanding and knowledge of the experiences of under-represented groups. Representing the diversity of the population allows individuals to feel included, connected with and understood by society. Whether women and girls with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are adequately and accurately represented in fictional media is currently unknown. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Internet and library searches were conducted to identify female characters with ASD in works of fiction. Examples of such works were selected for further discussion based on their accessibility, perceived historical and cultural significance and additional characteristics that made the work particularly meaningful.

The search highlighted a number of female characters with ASD across a range of media, including books, television, film, theatre and video games. Many were written by authors who had a diagnosis of the condition themselves, or other personal experience. Pieces largely portrayed characters with traits that are highly recognised within the academic literature. However, some also appeared to endorse outdated myths and stereotypes. Existing works appear to preferentially portray high functioning autistic women, with limited representation of those whom also have intellectual disability.

This is the first exploration of the depiction of ASD in females within fiction. There is a need for more works of fiction responsibly depicting females with ASD, as this can help reduce stigma, develop public awareness and recognition and increase representation.

Focusing on Johannes L. Sadie, a South African economist hired to investigate the economic options of Southern Rhodesia at the time of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), this chapter examines the historical, ideological, pedagogical, and international influences of the intersection between economic discourse and racial ideology. Using the example of the Sadie recommendations, this chapter examines how the changing political context informed the state’s approach to the economy. A reading of the context in which Sadie was hired to justify Rhodesia’s UDI and provide legitimacy to its economic policies sheds light onto the Ian Smith regime’s approach to an alternative post-imperial (but not post-settler) state and economy, but it also speaks of the ways in which economic discourse can be deployed for political purposes by authoritarian regimes.

In this chapter I employ a hybrid critical framework that draws on feminist media studies, feminist critiques of post-feminism, theories of intersectionality, and genre theory to consider a range of domestic violence stories on screen. The chapter begins with a summary of prototypical patterns of narrative and character in contemporary Hollywood films about abuse and subsequently explores two recent media representations that, while conforming to certain of these patterns, also introduce alternative perspectives: the 2017/2019 Home Box Office miniseries Big Little Lies and French director Xavier Legrand's 2018 film Custody (Jusqu’à la garde). I argue that both of these media texts draw on familiar genres that engage audiences not simply to generate sympathy for the abused woman-turned-heroine, but to challenge persistent myths about domestic violence such as that abusers are monsters who never show love towards their partners; that abused women are weak, passive, and the victims of their own bad judgment; that the effects and repercussions of abuse end with the departure of the abuser; that, ultimately, the problem of abuse must be “solved” by the individual; that the “solution” is as simple as leaving; and that there is little as a community or a society that we can do. I conclude that, in different ways and to different degrees, each of these media texts succeeds in making small but significant interventions into the predictable formulas of mainstream Hollywood domestic violence films through narratives that foreground the complexities, contradictions, and dilemmas of abuse.

Today, the global education market is one of the faster growing sectors, and it has attracted several new actors or what we call educational brokers who are now responsible for shaping national agendas. The newer actors in education are vastly different for the former players in that whereas previous actors engrossed national educational systems through the provision of technical assistance to meet international standards, best practices, and benchmarks, these newer players are for-profit entities that emphasize austerity, leanness, human resource maximization, performance targets, and competition. Therefore, in this new educational landscape, national governments are seen as “clients” who receive “expert” advice from “external consultants” that have an assortment of experiences across different sectors. Education governance is no longer a statist endowed but one that incubates in laborites of best practices resonates with existing case studies and results driven based on Big Date collected. We argue that educational brokers are responsible for the emergence of a hybrid form of education governance that use business and market techniques to reform strategies within the education sector. We conclude by suggesting that collectively educational brokers are using what we call “educational sub-prime mechanisms” – higher interest rates, reduced quality collateral, and less advantageous terms to counterweight higher credit risk – to manage educational portfolios and newer forms of educational risk.

OWING to the comparatively early date in the year of the Library Association Conference, this number of THE LIBRARY WORLD is published so that it may be in the hands of our readers before it begins. The official programme is not in the hands of members at the time we write, but the circumstances are such this year that delay has been inevitable. We have dwelt already on the good fortune we enjoy in going to the beautiful West‐Country Spa. At this time of year it is at its best, and, if the weather is more genial than this weather‐chequered year gives us reason to expect, the Conference should be memorable on that account alone. The Conference has always been the focus of library friendships, and this idea, now that the Association is so large, should be developed. To be a member is to be one of a freemasonry of librarians, pledged to help and forward the work of one another. It is not in the conference rooms alone, where we listen, not always completely awake, to papers not always eloquent or cleverly read, that we gain most, although no one would discount these; it is in the hotels and boarding houses and restaurants, over dinner tables and in the easy chairs of the lounges, that we draw out really useful business information. In short, shop is the subject‐matter of conference conversation, and only misanthropic curmudgeons think otherwise.

Michael E. Brown's book, The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences, demonstrates that prominent attempts to account for the social dimension of human affairs rely on an unstated notion of a “course of activity,” that is diametrically opposed to the conceptualization of sociality that is presumably intended to realize it. I want to focus on the idea of a “course of activity” in order to locate his work in and clarify its importance to the development of dialectical reason from Heraclitus through Hegel and beyond. Of special importance is the bearing of his research on the critique of contemporary theories of agency and sociality, and, since considerable attention has been paid, in this regard, to the arts and humanities, some of what I will say about this refers to art and its avant-garde moments—-particularly in my work on Dada and Brown's account of two avant-garde theatrical performances. 

This chapter examines what is entailed by separating agency from individuality and what it means for the idea of a “course of activity,” (going on) and its relation to the concept of sociality. This also bears on questions of ontology, as Brown's course of activity is generative and nonrepeatable. The course of activity and nonrepeatability are linked to both avant-garde practice and theoretical notions that reframe our temporal understandings. These include the avant-garde of dada and surrealism, and the reformulations of bourgeois time of Jean Duvignaud, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The question raised here is that of a teleological understanding—how we link the present course of activity with future events.

All seventeen had graciously agreed to my proposal to gather for a small conference to seek consensus. A generous grant from the Pierian Press Foundation would cover all of our expenses for a long weekend at a resort hotel; the only condition of the grant was that we offer our results to Reference Services Review for first publication. Over the past five years each of the seventeen had in turn accepted my challenge to answer the following question:

WHETHER the political pendulum is to swing in the direction of the Right or not in the coming year we do not know. Local electors are not the only key to national ones whatever politicians may argue. That there will be a move towards that direction is probable as our people tire of the monotonies of any government. Any change will not affect libraries greatly at present as the world problems are too pressing to allow any practical discussion of domestic ones. Our only fear is that “economy” may become a cry, which means, of course, the lopping of things which are educational, cultural and otherwise not money‐making and it is only too probable that public libraries and indeed other libraries might suffer from the modern equivalent of the Geddes axe which some are hopefully expecting. On the other hand the strength of the organizations which control wages from below is such that the disastrous “cuts” of the first Geddes experiment are not likely to be repeated. And on wages the whole of our financial tructure rests. Moreover libraries have now assumed the right to exist in adequate condition and to displace them may not be so easy as it was thirty years ago; but, nevertheless on vigilance our safety still depends. The conditions are not likely at present to be propitious to any real advance. The much‐desired new Library Bill is being drafted—and should be—but its hearing does not seem imminent; the chances of building new libraries are bleak, and even repairs are to some librarians a nightmare. Confronting all these conditions is the greatly increased use of libraries which is reflected in every kind of public, university, national and commercial library. This strengthens faith in the future in spite of the immediate prospect.