• Alex Kendall (Chair), Dean of Law and Social Science, London Southbank University
• Dr Vince Clarke, Principal Lecturer & Programme Leader BSc Paramedic Science, University of Hertfordshire
• Prof Jo Finch, Professor of Social Work, University of East London
• Dr Amanda French, Reader in Education (Higher Education) Birmingham City University
• Dr Lou Lambert, Associate Professor and Director of Post Qualifying/Postgraduate Teacher Education, Birmingham City University

In the inaugural editorial of Practice some 5 years ago I noted that our new journal Practice came into being in strange times. Times when the knowledge, expertise and credibility of practitioners was treated with scepticism in public discourse, the US government had shut down over a dispute about who will finance a proposed wall on its southern border with Mexico to frustrate the mobility of economic migrants, the catastrophic consequences of forced migration are played out at the borders of Europe at scale and on a chillingly routine basis, and the UK is a nation holding its breath as the timing and management of BREXIT were still being negotiated. None of us could not have known at that moment the degree of catastrophe that lay ahead of us. But, I argued, the extremis of what felt like at that time a strange moment simply provided stark illumination of what was ever thus, that practitioners’ everyday realities are complex and contingent. To illustrate this I drew on Stronach et al study of nurse and teacher identity formation as a “constant jockeying of stories, selves and practices as teachers and nurses [as they] tried to come to terms with a welter of recent innovations, the pressures of their respective audit cultures, threats to their preferred professional styles, or otherwise accommodated or resisted political attacks and external impositions.”

Looking back with hindsight in 2023 my assertion that we were in ‘strange times’ seems both naïve and prescient, here we now are – post global pandemic, post Brexit, war in Europe, ever more catastrophic forced displacement of peoples, in the UK political and fiscal instability at a scale not seen for decades – with frontline practitioners in the ‘helping professions’ have faced, and continuing to face, complexities beyond anything we could have begun to imagine five short years ago. Professional identities have been re-imagined, professional knowledge renegotiated over this time – most often forcibly, without resource, recourse to support and driven contingently from the bottom up through the commitment and determination of individuals at significant personal cost.

In the UK this has driven much professional disquiet and large-scale industrial action that is seeking to reclaim not just pay but key territories for professional identity-making around status, contribution, impact and the P/politics of audit and regulation – ongoing action continues to bring public services, universities, schools, hospitals, railways, ambulance services to a standstill in the context of spiralling recruitment crisis.

In this Practice sponsored inter-disciplinary panel we open a discussion about what this signals for practice education. Where, we ask, are the spaces for hope and resilience in these (very) strange times? What does socially just, ethical and inclusive practitioner education look like in this context? And how can cross disciplinary conversations help us in this work? What does it mean to practice responsibly and response-ably in always already strange times?