 Hello and welcome. My name is Amina Yakin. I'm chair of the senator for the study of Pakistan and this is a special interview that we are doing with our student who is a finalist here at SOAS. Her name is Miliha Shoaib. She is BA third year finalist student in English and World Philosophies. Miliha is also the editor of SOAS Spirit and she has won prestigious Fogue business competition this year to enter the competition Miliha sent in an article and two story pictures and the prize includes a year of mentorship from one of the Fogue business editors. It includes a paid internship that she'll be doing later on in the summer. The article that she entered is also being reworked and published and I will be talking to her in the interview about that. I have had the opportunity to get to know Miliha as a student on the module that I teach on imagining Pakistan, culture, politics and gender and it's been a great experience to get to know her and to find out about her. And I'd like to start our conversation by asking Miliha to tell us a little bit about what makes her tick and what just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background. Yeah, thank you for that full introduction now. So it's funny actually being on the other side of this, I interviewed you for the SOAS Spirit at the start of the year for the Festival of Ideas and now to be interviewed by you, it feels like there's a sense of symmetry there. So what gets me ticking? So I was born and raised in Glasgow, but my family is from Pakistan. And I grew up in quite a predominantly white part of Glasgow and I remember feeling kind of a sense of disillusionment growing up. So that was one of the key reasons why I moved to London, specifically to SOAS as well. And throughout all three years of my degree and even sort of towards the end of school, I was really interested in developing my knowledge in the area of cultural studies and sort of understanding the colonial processes behind everyday practices. So that's what I've been sort of doing all three years in my degree. And it's bled into my journalism as well. I'm really passionate about uplifting marginalised communities and using the platforms and the access that I do have to make a positive change. So there are lots of really interesting things that you have shared with us there, Malia, and I'm going to pick up the context of journalism, because you work as the editor of the SOAS Spirit. And I a question I'd like to ask you is one is what is one of the most challenging things that you've had to do as the editor during your time so far? So the spirit has been the best experience of my SOAS sort of education. It's just been a great opportunity. But I think along with having these amazing opportunities comes a degree of responsibility to paraphrase Spider-Managas. But yeah, one of those responsibilities was being quite heavily involved in the recent scandal or reporting the recent scandal that occurred on the 11th of March, where a SOAS director Adam Habib said a racial slur in a meeting. Yeah, it was it was a very controversial topic that students were very upset about and rightly so. So the spirit decided we had so we plan to publish tonight. We had planned to publish a new issue on the Monday. So we had those couple of days to write up this piece. And I co wrote it with the SOAS spirit co editor, Louisa Johnson, and with our SOAS news editor, Francis Howe, and we begun the research process. And we sort of found it quite difficult to navigate all the potential criticisms we might be facing. We wanted to present the information in as unbiased away as possible, so that we weren't, you know, so we could firstly get solid responses from Adam when we interviewed him. We didn't want to come at an attack angle and create an unproductive environment. And also we wanted to be able to best support the students and we didn't want to be unnecessarily trivializing the topic by creating it into our front cover story. So yeah, it was difficult to navigate, but we learned a lot along the way. We've since upgraded our writers guidelines to include how to deal with sensitive subjects. So that was something that I had personally never dealt with before. I've learned a lot from it. And it was, yeah, it was tricky, but I'm definitely glad to have had the experience. Thanks for sharing that, Miliha. And just if I can add that Adam's use of the slur was in response to a question with regards to the N word from a student coming to him. So so just that we have the full context there. And then it kind of escalated into a very difficult situation that the institution is dealing with right now and responding to in many ways. And I hope that it will really address all concerns. And it's and it's that that have been part of the institutional history past the event as well before the event. So it's really important to hear about your work and how you managed and negotiated those different challenges, because it's, yeah, the responsibility of doing something like that. And then having to represent a neutral stance that gets across both sides of the story is actually what a journalist is required to do, right? And to but we find that that's in the in the kind of media world that we live in nowadays. I mean, I'm not talking about the spirit here, but the broader media world is that it becomes quite complex and quite tricky, because you are working with different kinds of I suppose systems and hierarchies and a particular kind of politics as well and media ownership, of course, one of the things I was quite interested with to talk to you about with regards to your award with the Vogue Business Competition was you mentioned to me that after you received the award, there was a lot of attention paid with regard with the context of diversity. And I was really interested to hear about that. And I'd like you to talk to us a little bit more about that in with, you know, with reference to how it came up. And then what you think about diversity within the media industry that you yourself, you know, hope to join and contribute to in the future. And what your representation felt like in with regards to that. Yeah, it's a complicated subject. I think it's definitely the right time for these conversations about diversity to be coming about. But essentially, how this sort of press attention, which I'm quite amused by came about is I posted on social media and some of my old teachers from my the school that I went to had seen it and they wanted to release some sort of press statement. So I agreed that it was a great opportunity. And from there, it just kind of spiraled. So it was picked up by the Glasgow Herald and I was on the front cover. I bought like eight copies of it. And then from there, it was on Glasgow live. And then I was also able to go on BBC Radio Scotland to talk about diversity and journalism. So it's been a really exciting opportunity. But one of the things I am slightly uncomfortable about is the idea of me being the face of diversity and journalism. I think I do occupy quite a privileged position. I was privately educated. I've been to university in London where there are so many opportunities. Even just things like the way that I speak, I'm quite able to code switch and interact with people from maybe a different class, maybe a different race. Sometimes I feel like almost the acceptable version of a diversity candidate. But what I've come to realise is that either I am this diversity hire in which case I'm going to use the platform that have to make a positive change and uplift other people who don't have the same access as me, or I'm not a diversity hire in which case, great. And I'll use the option to the same way. Okay. And this is a relationship with Vogue that will begin with your internship and is based on this work that you've written, the articles and the stories. Could you tell us a little bit about those? Yeah. So the article that I wrote for Vogue Business is about sort of on a similar chain of thought. It's about why luxury beauty companies, things like Dior, Chanel, YSL, why they don't cater for a wider range of skin tones in the same way that a lot of mid-level or even drug store brands like NARS or Mac or Fenty have been praised to do. So yeah, that's what I wrote about for the main article. The two pitches, one was about sustainable packaging and the other was about AI in the fashion industry and how it can make it more sustainable. So yeah, those were the three article ideas. But I guess one of the things I really valued about the whole process with rewriting and reworking this article is that I'm able to work with the editorial director, Sarah Shannon. And she is, she's given me the opportunity to go about and interview more people for the article that I initially wrote, work with the data sort of side of things over at the Vogue Business team. So yeah, it's going to be a little while before it comes out, but I think it'll be worth it. So yeah. That's wonderful. Well, we wish you lots of luck with that. And I hope we look forward also to reading the piece in when it comes out. And I suppose a question I have, I'm thinking about the work that you've done, for example, in on the module on imagining Pakistan, your own relationship to Pakistan, the fashion industry that is such a big part of Pakistan's business industry as well. You know, what are your thoughts, especially with regards to this catering to skin tones? And what do you think about how colour or colourism as referred to is something that you think about with reference to being a Pakistani to working in this field. Do you have any thoughts you would like to share with us on that or? Yeah, absolutely. I think colourism is so, so prevalent in Pakistan and throughout South Asia. I think everyone knows about Fair and Lovely, which is just a shame that we all know about that. But growing up being in... Well, those of us who don't know, could you just say what it is? Fair and Lovely is essentially a skin bleaching cream that is marketed as a standard beauty product. And it recently came under fire, well, not so recently a couple of years ago, I think this whole conversation has been opened up for the past few years. Yeah, it's been criticised for upholding these very colourist ideas about what a Pakistani should look like or what kind of skin tone is acceptable. So even though, you know, within one ethnicity, there are still hierarchies and it is a sad reality in Pakistan. And I think for me being I'm fairly pale skinned these days at least, it was interesting because on So Ask Me Out, which is an anonymous page that So Ask Students post on, someone had actually posted a screenshot of my press shot and said, it's such a shame, you know, this has been edited. This is a dark skinned South Asian woman and someone's edited and sort of claiming that it was whitewashed, which I mean, luckily that wasn't the case. I received all the photos before they were posted and I think it was just the lighting and I'm not that dark to begin with, but it definitely did open up a conversation with some of my friends and even just internally about colourism and who is the acceptable face of diversity, particularly like related to what I've just talked about with journalism and any field where you're in the public eye. OK, yeah, fairness is definitely a high standard of beauty, isn't it, in Pakistan and also when you look at the range of products and available in drug stores when you go out there to shop for anything, certainly skin-lightening creams take up quite a lot of shelf space with regards to what's available to buy and then the endorsement of products like Ferret Lovely by media celebrities and fashion industry. People has been something that's been raised, I think, and it's been obviously dealt with and thought about quite deeply in Pakistan and also outside Pakistan, but it's also that class question that you raise that it's something that really determines your class position as well to be of a certain skin tone and colour. And again, we see it reproduced and reiterated in the media, in television and across the range of representations. Again, it's really exciting to hear about your thoughts on this and to also hear that you did some reflections and you had to think about your own positionality in relation to this. And I think that that's also a really important part of being a journalist. And I suppose you've been put in that position right from the start in terms of having to navigate your identity, your diversity and your representativeness, you know, and I hope that you are able and get to the point that you wish to with that as you go forward. And that there is less ghettoization of people with regards to that. And we wish you lots of luck and lots of success going forward. And thank you very much for making yourself available today for this interview. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and we hope to welcome you back too. So as when you are, you know, out there changing the world. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Thank you.