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Transnational routes such as direct-entry have become a more attractive option for Chinese students, due to the pandemic-imposed travel restrictions in China. The rise of Chinese direct-entry students can potentially lead to a significant increase in demand for academic and non-academic support not only after their arrival, but also before their departure from China. By applying Schlossberg's transition theory, this paper seeks to develop a good understanding of the academic and social belonging of Chinese direct-entry students in the UK through re-analysing the portraits (written narratives) of a previous research project. The findings indicate that these students were feeling disconnected from the academic and social communities. The factors affecting their sense of belonging are described using the 4S framework, namely self, strategies, situation and support. The paper ends with recommendations to key university stakeholders on how the partner institutions in China and the UK can help enhance a sense of academic and social belongingness of Chinese direct-entry students.

The urgency of the current climate crisis emphasizes the need for university graduates equipped with relevant knowledge and skills to tackle environmental and social problems such as material consumption, environmental degradation and inequality at all spatial scales. Geographic and spatially sensitive concepts and approaches to sustainability and greening are particularly relevant as best practices and success models are not easily transferable across different contexts. But how can students learn the necessary skills to connect theory with practice? Based on a third-year geography module at a British university that teaches green economy concepts, this paper presents insights from a problem- and project-based group learning exercise designed to help students translate conceptual approaches into practice highlighting the strength of geographic thinking. As part of the exercise, students work in groups to develop a green project that they present in a green dragons' den-style ideas pitch to an expert panel for evaluation. Students are tasked to develop innovative, feasible and applicable proposals that address specific sustainability challenges. Findings from five consecutive years of teaching illustrate the value of project- and problem-based learning to students through the diversity of practical applications, the need for critical thinking and context-dependent assessments and enhanced transferable skills.

Football stadiums have traditionally been named after local sites (e.g. "Goodison Park," Everton FC) or regions ("Ruhrstadion," VfL Bochum). As big business takes increasing precedence in decision making in football at large (e.g. associations and leagues, regarding fixtures, media coverage, kick-off times, player transfers, etc.) and within individual football clubs (e.g. regarding kits and sponsorship), such toponyms are more and more being replaced by company or product names (e.g. "bet365 Stadium," Stoke City). In this paper, we will consider corporate renamings from the German Bundesliga, the English Premier League and the French Ligue 1 and particularly fan reactions to controversial, badly received corporate renamings. As revealed by earlier studies, in our data here we also find the discourse and practices of the fans celebrating local identification with their city or region, often with the stadiums constituting the homestead of a tradition. Where corporate stadium renamings are badly received, this discourse clashes with the discourse of big business and thus a number of tensions are revealed. More specifically, in fans' reactions to controversial corporate stadium renamings, we find a number of recurrent themes -- for example, concerning consequences to fans' identity to the club; in managing (anticipated) humorous retorts from rivals consequent from the stadium renaming; in resisting, but also feeling resigned to, financial pressures in selling the stadium name; etc. -- some of them across our three national contexts and others specific to one national context.