 Hi, so I'm Dr Gina Heathcote and I'm going to be running the webinar today which is about our MA gender studies program here at SOAS. Welcome everyone, it's great to talk to you even if electronically. So throughout the recording if you want to ask me a question please do just type something in and I'll try and incorporate a response as I go forward. As I said my name is Dr Gina Heathcote and I am a reader in gender studies and law at SOAS and I work both in the gender studies department and the school of law. What I'm going to talk about today is primarily the MA in gender studies and the centre for gender studies more broadly so you'll get a little bit of a sense of how things work here at the nature of the degree, the kinds of options that you have once you're on campus and of course as I said if you have any specific questions then just type away and I will do my best to incorporate a response into the recording. So just moving on to the next slide. So centre for gender studies is a relatively small part of SOAS. We're situated within the school of interdisciplinary studies and the centre itself has four permanent staff members, myself Professor Nadia Lalali who's the current centre chair, Dr Awina O'Keech who if you're coming on the MA in gender studies would be your programme convener once you arrive at SOAS and Dr Aleosha Tudor who runs the MA in gender and sexuality. So although we're quite small in terms of permanent staff we also have a network of colleagues across all of SOAS and one of the things I think we're most proud of as an interdisciplinary centre is having members of the centre and you can check them on the website who are based in all the different departments at SOAS. The benefit of this is that we know our students are often also taking modules with many of those members through some of the optional units that you might do so you can think about what discipline or region that you might like to specialise in thinking about particularly say looking at different issues around gender in Africa, gender in Southeast Asia, gender in South Asia and tell it your degree to that but also know that you have staff members in those parts of SOAS that also can support your work and in addition to that we often call on our colleagues who are members of the centre and I think as in in excess of 30 across SOAS as I said in all different departments to help us support dissertation writing sometimes to give like guest lecturers certainly to be involved in events and really kind of create a much broader range of interdisciplinary studies that you can encounter through the centre for gender studies. Most of your core modules and the key gender studies modules however will be taught by the four of us who are based in the centre. In addition to that we have a department officer for gender studies Vianne Hilley who actually is a former SOAS student and now is our department officer based in room 4408 and she really helps everything particularly at the start of term, find your ways or your enrolment, any other kind of concerns about your studies and you can contact her through the email address on the slide genderstudies at soas.ac.uk you might get some emails from her across the summer. So what is it about the centre for gender studies at SOAS that we link kind of makes it such an appealing place? Well in addition to the postgraduate 12 programs that obviously you've probably been looking at and familiar with we have a lively and very popular postgraduate research degree so a PhD in gender studies and many of our master students go on to stay with us and work with us as a research student either working with one of four of us in the centre or taking up you know work that they've done with centre members as I said across a different disciplines at ten different schools at SOAS and working with colleagues either on region or with a disciplinary focus development studies economics law for example linguistics and so on to that of religions and once you come to SOAS you'll find that our research students are pretty heavily involved in the work that taught students are doing they join you on your core modules so certainly our first year research students join you and you'll get to know them that way they're very much a part of the events program which I'm going to talk about in a moment and some of them will be your tutors so they'll be running small group intense weekly sessions to help guide you through the material that you're encountering in lectures. In addition so the combination of having our research students involved in the centre in a kind of very active way as well as all these members across SOAS one of the things we're really proud of is the kind of the active research community and if you want an example of that I'm going to talk a moment in a moment about the queer Asia conference which is coming up next week as a fantastic example of former SOAS students one of them being one of our master students and that the other org core organizer PhD student here at SOAS who are now in their fourth year of running the queer Asia conference and it's a huge conference brings together research and arts community in a fantastic and vibrant manner and of course because of this research community an active kind of events program that we have this is constant interaction between students and staff and I would certainly say I learned as much from all of you as you've got to learn from me and embedded in all this I think what's important perhaps talked to you about is how we approach gender so when we think of gender at the centre of gender studies we think of it in an interdisciplinary manner so not only do we think about that in terms of giving access to how gender and sexuality might be taught in different disciplines at SOAS we also think about what it means to do interdisciplinary work for example drawing on my own strength which is in law and say you took a law module was quite a few for example gender sexuality in law theories and methodologies that you could take as a gender studies student even though it's a law module what we would encourage you to do is to think about concepts that flow across disciplines and where there might be different kinds of approaches in the disciplines and how you work within that space between them so it's not just about having access to different disciplines but what does it mean to think in an interdisciplinary way what does it mean to talk about gender as an interdisciplinary tool one of the things that you'll be encountering while you're at SOAS in addition we are very much influenced by black British feminisms and critical race feminisms in the US and think about and theorise what it means to think about gender as intersectional you might have read lots of debates about intersectionality online this can be a little bit of a buzzword but when we're talking about intersectionality here what we're primarily focusing on is thinking about how gender and gender as a power relation so not as a description of your specific gender but gender as a power relation that organises institutions, law, cultural, social factors is in fact embedded in other power relations so that might be race, disability, sexuality, class so we want to think about gender not as prioritised or as a means to focus only on women although some of the work that you do will focus on women but come back to what it means to think about gender as a power relationship necessarily intersecting with other forms of power relations and because we are at SOAS and thinking through the history of SOAS itself I mean it was a colonial institution and how we address that and think about the kind of spaces of privilege that it becomes we are quite committed to decolonising the curriculum I don't know how much you've read about this it's part of a larger SOAS initiative there's some fantastic stuff written by colleagues SOAS colleagues particularly about this aspect of SOAS curriculum across all disciplines and we're also committed to thinking about gender and sexuality as one of the power relationships alongside particularly gender of race as always entwined and engaged and therefore queer and trans approaches are very much part of the things that you can encounter and explore in relation to gender and I hope it goes without saying that perhaps it's worth saying explicitly that amongst this and through this we do try to encourage students to think about non-western approaches not as an other or as an alternative but as having discrete feminist histories histories of understanding gender and sexuality that we can learn from and their own knowledge histories as well rather than or there's something else here but actually thinking about what that means in history my area which is international law incredibly important work going on that thinks about how particularly gender law reform in international institutions draws on non-western feminisms but often then recreates them through western voices and how do we unpick that and tell those alternative histories that already exist right so I want to go through the program structure now as I said there are three different programs and the one I'm going to speak to today is actually MA and gender studies if you have a question please do just type something in and ask me so I'm sure you've seen this on the web but I think it really helps to listen to someone go through how it works okay so on the MA and gender studies you're required to take on 180 credits or to kind of earn 180 credits of that part of it is a 60,000 so 60 credits are just given over to your dissertation and then 120 are earned through talk credits both core and optional subjects that happen on campus so your dissertation I'm going to go through in a minute but it's due in September so we think about that class when you arrive at studies the first thing that you'll already be enrolled on is gender theory in the study of Asia Africa and the Middle East this is a module taught by Dr. O'Keech it's a core module as I said both our first year research students and gender student study students on the various MA's all take this course together so once a week you come together we find students really enjoy going for coffee afterwards to make some kind of sense of that but you'll also have a tutorial where you think through in greater detail particularly your readings it's quite a demanding course there's a lot of work to cover it is gender theory so it is about thinking about different theoretical approaches to gender it incorporates particular weeks on decolonising gender thinking about intersectionality prioritising and thinking about the relationship between gender and race it's a very important part of the search degree so that's compulsory lasts all year so the credits you also do a half module so just one term module that's a core module for dissertation methods in gender studies so this is a weekly seminar where you are taken through all the different components of the dissertation writing process you're given the opportunity to talk about the research present the research that you want to undertake and then as a form of assessment plan you write a dissertation proposal which will give a feedback from a number of academics in the centre and this allows you to prepare your dissertation proposal with guidance from staff and then you take the proposal to your supervisor who you work with to really develop it and write the thing in addition to the two core courses one and a half unit and one full unit lasting two terms you have a range of optional units that you can take so at least 30 credits if you can see the slides you'll see it says at least 30 credits from other gender modules so when you look on the website you'll see there's a list one and a list two so list one other gender modules so these are the core gender modules either run by ours or run in other departments but put gender at the centre of the teaching so at least 30 credits you must take the equivalent of one more full course possibly two half courses from list one you have an additional 45 credits and they can be from list one which is these core gender modules that put gender and or sexuality at the centre of the module or from list two and list two is series of interdisciplinary so from other disciplines at so as other schools where gender and sexuality and the kind of thinking that we encourage using gender and sexuality as analytical tools are part of the course but might not be the core of the course but that we think those courses speak to gender studies in a useful way so that's the distinction between the first 30 credits that you have as optional they must be from gender modules but which is list one whereas the additional 45 credits might be from list one or it might be from list two now as these are the additional degrees that we offer I'm not going to go through them now except to just mention the Middle East pathway so if you want to take the Middle East pathway what you need to do is and you've probably done already is enrol in the MA in gender studies and when you come to enrol in your modules you must take gender in the Middle East and gender and sexuality in the Middle East do half units so it changes the number of optional modules you have because that will be your first 30 credits rather than being optional that will be core and if you take that pathway you can have the name degree of the MA in gender studies Middle East pathway the other degrees I'm not going to go through I'll have an MA in gender and sexuality MA in gender studies and law what I'm going to go through now is just the dissertation process so it's a 10 000 word dissertation as I said before your supervisor will be allocated from CGS staff but in some cases because of the specialist nature of the dissertation we do allocate you a supervisor from the larger members list and I think this works very very well for our students you design your topic it's driven by your passion and of course the guidance from us is given in the dissertation agenda studies module you know one of your core modules we do ask that your topics relate to your studies at SOAS and therefore engage the SOAS regions including the diaspora communities so it could be that you're looking at gender in the UK but through the lens of diaspora communities in the in the UK for example once you've finished your gender proposal your dissertation proposal for the dissertation in gender studies module we encourage you to meet with your supervisor in both term two and term three during term time and that kind of sets you so that you can use the summer for writing you are expected to be on campus through our term three working on your dissertation which is then due in September so there are three key events that I want to talk to you about now so first of all one of the great things about gender studies certainly for me as a staff member is a huge number of gender and sexuality events that happen at SOAS the first one that you need to know about and perhaps you need to think about in advance is that Thursday evenings we run a seminar series happens every fortnight and we expect our master students to join us there's a reason you know work wise or something that you might not be able to always join us you need to talk to your program convener but it's a really important part of the course where we invite specialists in various fields particularly pertaining to the various SOAS regions and get them to talk about cutting edge research we also kind of develop more of a dialogue with the different different parts of SOAS the different disciplines through this we have a big conference plan for March so we'll be in the middle of your degree on gender X and that's the title of the conference my colleague Rahul Rao who's one of our center members and Aliyah Shachuda who's one of our permanent staff members are hosting a two-day event on gender X looking at understandings of gender identity and sexuality in the SOAS region a fantastic conference can't wait for it to happen and if you're super super eager and would really like to know more about the work that we do as I said before queer Asia conference starts next week 26th of June encourage you to come along well I haven't had any questions but hopefully that's given you some insight to the stuff that we do here at SOAS I think Center for Gender Studies is a vibrant research hub and every year we develop a close relationship working relationship with our students and really love seeing them kind of come out really enhanced in terms of their knowledge and world-leading I think in terms of their knowledge on gender studies thanks for your time