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As the largest source country for international students, China has witnessed a huge wave of returnees over the last five years. Chinese international students, who expect positive benefits from overseas higher education (HE) with regard to their career prospects, are beginning to confront employment difficulties in the Chinese labour market. However, insufficient research exists on Chinese students’ understanding of the relationship between their overseas learning experience and employability enhancement. \ud \ud This research takes Chinese international students (who completed undergraduate studies in China) studying social sciences taught Master’s programmes in the UK as the sample, adopting the Capabilities Approach as its theoretical framework and employing semi-structured interviews and solicited diaries to explore their employability management (EM), specifically regarding their motivations for receiving HE abroad, expectations with regard to employability enhancement via international HE, employability management practices during their overseas journeys, and factors impacting their EM and career plans. \ud \ud This thesis argues that participants choose to receive HE abroad out of both intrinsic and instrumental motivations, with career development standing out in the motivation set. Participants’ expectations regarding employability enhancement, as achieved by receiving HE abroad, are not only for graduate employment outcomes but also for long-term personal development. Regarding overseas journey as living abroad rather than simply studying abroad, participants’ EM practices permeate their overseas daily lives in addition to specific events relating to learning and working. Moreover participants’ EM is not only determined by their own choices, but also the impact of conversion factors, including their previous experiences, important “others” involved in their overseas lives, and their own agency of enlarging internal capabilities and interacting with external contexts. Receiving HE abroad is effective in supporting graduate employability of participants by equipping them with capabilities and functionings which are difficult to achieve without international experience; however, it is as participants’ freedom of career choice is heavily impacted by strong conversion factors such as family background, relationship status, financial status and gender.

In this chapter we discuss our method of ‘diary-photograph: diary-interview’ (which included photo-elicitation diaries and face-to-face interviews) as used in a comparative study to understand how print disability affects students’ access to information. A person with a print disability may have a visual impairment, have dyslexia, or a physical disability that prevents them from being able to access a physical copy of a print publication. Students with a print disability may therefore be disadvantaged within an HE setting. We asked participants with and without a print disability to keep a diary for a week and record experiences accessing information in relation to their studies, and also socially. In addition to sharing details of our method and analysis, we discuss how it worked in practice, and the potential challenges of using the method, These included; variation in quality of diaries, the lack of researcher control, the selectivity of responses, and possible inequities of the format. Overall, it was an effective and inclusive method, delivering a wide range of data from all participants. The data did not focus on the electronic and physical aspects of reading or accessing texts as had been expected. Our participants showed that they experienced barriers in accessing information beyond print accessibility. The participants relayed wider issues relating to accessibility which presented as informational barriers to students both with and without disabilities.