 Good morning. Welcome to the School of Arts Undergraduate Open Day webinar. My name is Crispin Brownford and I'm joined here by two of my colleagues from the School of Arts at Seyes this morning, Angela N. P. and Polly Savage. And we want to talk a bit about the School of Arts at Seyes, the particular Seyes approaches to studying the arts and the degrees that our department convenes. And we want to just have a bit of a discussion about, you know, why the arts matter, why studying the arts. And so before we start off to consider some of the important questions, changes and interests of studying the arts at Seyes and more generally, I just want to introduce myself and my colleagues. As I said, my name is Crispin Brownford. I'm a lecturer in South Asian Arts at Seyes. I'm also the Director of Learning and Teaching on my particular interests in India, in South Asia, and I'm one of multiple regional specialists across the department working on aspects of Asia and Africa. Angela, you're muted, Angela. Turn that off. Angela N. P. a professor of ethnomusicology. So I'm in the music unit. My regional specialism is Southern and Eastern Africa. I have particular interests in public sector ethnomusicology. What we refer to in our unit has music and development. And it's an area where we particularly exploring issues around music and environment, music and migration and refugees. We have a department of about five people and all of them have very special regional specialisms. Okay. Thanks, Crispin. So I'm Polly Savage. I'm a lecturer in the history of art of Africa. And I'm also the convener for the BA Creative Arts Programme, which we'll talk about a bit more in a moment. But my specialism is the contemporary art of Africa, really from the Cold War period onwards. And I'm particularly interested in processes of liberation and decolonisation. And I focus in particular on loose-phone Africa, so Portuguese-speaking Africa. Great. Now, school of arts, and indeed star school widely, is striking in Britain, because we're specialists in Asia and Africa, where everyone at SARS is looking at the world from an Asian and African perspective. And indeed, the majority of the world's population are living in these regions. So we're taking a decent approach to the study of the arts. We may be studying the history of art, music, the creative arts and industries, from within London, but we're taking a global perspective to this. And often the view we're taking on these subjects is from from Mombasa, from Hanoi, from Seoul, from Le, from China. We're looking at a variety of issues, global issues, global issues in the arts, of music, the creative arts, the creative industries, as well as issues related to museums and heritage and development as they relate to the tangible and the intangible arts. Many of these issues come up daily in newspapers and in the media more broadly. Questions that we're engaged with in our undergraduate degrees and our graduates take forward into employment later on. I want to talk about some of these issues and consider amongst ourselves, you know, why we think the arts matter, whether we're looking at the historic parts of the past, where we're looking at the sort of the accumulation of tangible heritage in Asia and Africa that we've now studied as art historians, the great monuments of Asia and Africa, the built environments, the urban landscapes, as well as tangible objects that may move around, whether it be Chinese ceramics or Indian paintings, or bronze casting from West Africa or calligraphy from the Middle East. Some of these materials are historic and we are a great centre for the study of these historic materials. But we're also looking at contemporary issues, contemporary issues for the production and use of art, music and other creative arts. But also we're looking at contemporary issues of how world heritage can be studied, displayed, collected, curated. So we span the historic, but also the contemporary in our studies, and we are engaged with broader issues and questions about it, as well as detailed analysis of objects. Some of our students are also creative students in this sense of either creative presentations, or indeed for our music students, as Angelo well knows, they come to sell us in order not only to study music, but actually to learn to perform in new aspects of musical performance. So, Angelo, perhaps I could start with you. Why do you think the arts matter? What matters to you? Why should students be engaged with tangible and intangible heritage, music and development? Well, there are so many, many reasons. I think looking at the world as it is today, we see a world that is quite segregated. We see a world where certain voices are heard and others are marginalised. And I think the arts helps to bring humanity or human element into this conversation. Learning music from elsewhere in the world helps us to understand people who may not be very well known. Through creative practice, we learn about people, we learn about their social and political context, we learn about gender issues, we learn about how they represent themselves, and all of these through performance, through symbolic practice, which opens our eyes to a whole range of other things. The music in our music unit, that definitely is kind of one of our kind of a specialist areas. And that is through creating a kind of creative empathy, if you like, we learn about a people and their context. So it's not just the not just the performance, but it's the whole context of who people are, how they represent themselves in the world and what their interests and needs are. And often these are issues that are marginalised or silenced by politics, by gender and by a range of other things. So I think the arts are a very, very important way of lifting up and looking under, if you like, to see really who people are and how they represent themselves and how they have experienced their histories. What makes them flourish? What are their aspirations? We see with the Black Lives Matter movement more recently, how presenting themselves creatively in a very powerful way helps us to really understand people's struggles and their aspirations and to try and rectify inequalities in the world. Fascinating. It's an exciting period too for studying the arts. Roy, why do you think the arts matter? Why do they matter to you? Why do they matter in the way you approach things? And how can we engage students in these important, vital and urgent business? Yeah, I mean, it's such an important question at the moment, isn't it? And I'm sure for everyone who's tuning in, it's a question that you're thinking as you're choosing your degrees, you're thinking, you know, what's the best path to take and what's going to be the most kind of useful path to take and what's going to open up your mind, your world, you know, this is what universities should do. And I would say that, you know, studying the arts, it really opens up other universes. I think this is why it's so important. It opens up other ways of thinking. So it creates a space where, you know, difficult questions can be asked. It creates a space for critical thinking and that's why sometimes it makes people uncomfortable because, you know, those questions that don't get asked anywhere else can be explored through the arts. John Ruskin says art shows us what it is to be human. And I think that's such a such a wonderful quote that really for me summarizes why, why the arts are so important because it's our history of art is not just about art, it's about history, it's about politics, it's about philosophy. It's about what makes us a society, what makes us a world. So, you know, if you think about objects, you know, in a sense, we're not just talking about objects. We take, for example, the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston or the requests to return the objects that have been looted from Benin by the British Emperor. You know, these actions, they really matter in fundamental ways, not just because of the objects, but because these objects stand for something really much larger. Because they offer kind of evidence for events and relationships in the past that require rethinking. You know, they kind of connect us to histories that need to be confronted. And so that's why, you know, they really do matter. It's not just about kind of looking at looking at pictures. It's really about kind of how we understand ourselves in relation to the past and how we might imagine our futures. So they really do matter. They do indeed. And I mean, you know, both of you have drawn attention to the importance of thinking, you know, beyond the object beyond the performance to the larger social political environmental context in which objects performances are created used consumed and indeed circulated. What do you raise the important issue of restitution of the ways in which objects from one region have circulated to other regions and now appear, whether in publications or on the internet, or indeed placed in new contexts such as museums. And so a larger issue about about the arts is not just the study of the arts to, you know, understand why paintings were produced and used by certain peoples in China in the 11th and 12th centuries and or culture or mobile India in the 17th century or indeed in in Southern Africa today, but also about the ways in which those objects have been consumed circulated migrated to other regions and how this rate is indeed important social and indeed political issues about people's nations communities identities today. I think of the sort of aspects that that are so as students are engaged with often provocatively and argumentatively about, you know, how has, how have our disciplines been constructed, you know, what is the role of colonialism and Western imperialism in not only dominating certain areas of the world, politically, but also the ways in which that colonialism imperialism has had an impact on the ways in which academic disciplines themselves constructed and disseminated the way in which art history, as an example, was developed over the course of the 19th century, you know, in a colonial expansionist periods. And so the perspectives one might take to sort of important question of what is art, how can art be understood are often from, you know, implicitly from a Western perspective. And it's these kind of issues that that we can challenge it says to say, maybe we need to look at some of these questions about, you know, what is art, why are objects circulating around the world, how artworks presented in different ways in galleries and museums in international Biennales, how who gets to present these and how are these objects presented, how are peoples and societies represented and displayed to other worlds, who gets to decide. And so these are all important political issues. And I think that's the sort of exciting thing in a way that we're looking at people, people on the ground, people doing things in the past, and indeed the present. And we're engaging with important issues of people's actions, people's lives, but through the study of objects of performances of spaces. I think this is a really is very particular important moment in history for these kinds of conversations. And one of the things I'll add to what you were saying, Crispin, is the importance of really critiquing the idea that proper knowledge is knowledge which is written and spoken. There are many, many places in the world where really important things can only be expressed through song, through ritual, through the body. And one of the things that we really look at in our school of arts and in our music program is how do we listen in culturally appropriate ways. How do we change our listening practice so that we can give credibility to different ways that people communicate their interests and their needs in the world. So one of the areas for instance is looking at peace building international peace building, which often is is controlled by certain protocols that have been devised and formulated by a Western judicial system. But in a place like South Sudan where I work, when people want to say something that is truthful and quite hard hitting and important, they sing songs to each other. So the West doesn't understand the credibility of that those songs as real knowledge as real proper information. So what we try to do it so as is to flip the way we understand these things and say music matters in a range of different ways and often in highly political and highly relevant authoritative ways. So we need to start listening differently in the world today. And I think too in in many parts of Asia, knowledge, religious knowledge often, you know the centrality of the transmission of tradition of traditions of religious knowledge and indeed artistic knowledge is carried on through through practice through performance. Yeah, that knowledge is transmitted orally, whether orally through the spoken word or as you say orally by listening to that. The emphasis we might place in or has been placed in in European culture on the importance of a written world with written word isn't as important when when objects performance is listening recitation matters so much in which knowledge and ideas and and heritage is transmitted in these regions. You know, from your perspective, you know, where do you see the role of the arts in particularly in your in your own areas of research. Well, I mean, I think, you know, if we if we think about the arts as a way of it's obviously it's a form of communication isn't it it's a form of creating a connection. And, you know, if we look historically at, you know, the way that this, you know, different forms of art different forms of art being used to create those connections. And I think, you know, it offers us the possibility to really look at the world in new ways and to open up, you know, much more global perspectives and I think that's what's so special about what we do it so us is that, you know, in other institutions you know history of arts is really the history of Europe and the history of North America, you know, primarily. And once you start looking at this from a global perspective, then it really opens up the possibility to understand the world in new ways and to think about what connects us as people. So to think about other ways of thinking but also to think about what what unites us and what brings us together so that's an incredibly powerful thing and it's quite transformative I mean I came to so as a student and it completely changed it completely changed the way I thought about the world completely changed the way I understood the world because of that, you know. I think so as is, is a special it's an unusual place, you know, where we're studying disciplines that you can study elsewhere in Britain or in the world, but you know we're taking a different perspective on these things. You know the degrees that we offer in the school of arts, you know we offer a degree in in BA history of art, it is history of art, you can study history of art in many other places. History of Art who study at SAS is a disciplinary foundation in in history of art learning about how to study objects, perhaps looking at the media and technologies of art, but also looking at questions of how has history of art as a discipline been adopted, particularly for Asia and Africa. Our examples may be Asian and African, but the perspectives on art are global are more much more broader. Even when our examples are Indian or African or East Asian, when we're examining questions of what is art or other border of how can the history of art be studied how can it be pursued as a discipline. Our examples may be in Asia and Africa, but they're questions that all our historians are engaged for. We also have a degree run jointly with UCL on me and neighbor here in the center of London, part of London with some of the rich museum collections which include material from Asia and Africa, as well as of course Europe. And some students wish to combine the study of Asian and African art with a European perspective. We also offer a degree of which Polly Savage is a current convener, a BA in creative arts and cultural industries. We also offer joint degrees in history of art and another subject such as social anthropology or history, and indeed music with these subjects. Music can be studied as a joint degree with other subjects and also music within the creative arts and cultural industries. There's a whole course there and maybe Angela and Polly, you can each in turn talk a bit more about your particular interests, Angela music and Polly to talk a bit about creative arts and industries, and we can then Polly and I as the students can then expand a bit more about what's special about the so as approach to music, history of art, the creative arts and cultural industries to give you all a sense of why science is really a special place to come and why it's such an exciting place to be an undergraduate study. So, Angela, first of all, the BA music. Thanks, Christmas. The BA music is, I think, very, very unique for music programs in the, in the UK. Very often, most often a music program in the UK would entail quite a heavy load of Western classical music, and perhaps one or two subjects that have to do with music from other parts of the world. What we are offering is music courses that have to do exclusively from Asia and Africa in the Middle East. And here you can you, you, you do it alongside another specialism so many of our students who register for the BA music will take a language, so a very popular combination will be BA music in Korean or in Chinese. But as Crispin was saying, some of our students do social anthropology, and then many of them will do music with another arts specialism. And that is quite unique as I understand it. The music courses that are offered within that degree are absolutely is so exciting and we have a wide range. In your first year you will be doing a subject called sounds and cultures, all the first years do that. And we take you through our regions, the musical regions that we offered so as you do section on on say West Africa, some music from East Africa, even some from North Africa. We had some fantastic musicians come in this year to talk about music from Morocco and Algeria. And you don't just learn about it, but they bring in the instruments you learn to play the rhythms. You might even be asked to stand up and dance a bit so that you really feel the music, but then also of course music from South Asia from China, and from other parts of the world. You proceed then to do area specialisms so there too, if you're interested in music in Cuba, music in sacred music from South Asia. At the moment I'm teaching a course on music of the Indian Ocean, you have an option for a wide range of options for those those area specialisms. And then we have more broader theoretical subjects. We look at global pop and the decolonizing of global pop so when we talk about global pop we don't talk about it, only in the European or Western sense but we look at kpop. And it's, it's, it's referenced to, or it's relevance to global music industry will look at South Sudan South Sudanese hip hop. And again it's connection to the hip hop, the global hip hop scene. We do music and gender, we also do skills based courses so if you want to do some sound recording if you want to do podcast, or radio production, you learn some of those skills. So there's a wide range and then all alongside that you do select courses from your, your second specialism so from anthropology or from from the arts. So that's basic years, a wide range of options, and very much an experience of discovering the world of music. Okay. Well, what's special about you know I'll be a creative arts and cultural industries. Yeah, so this this be a program is incredibly excited about it it's a it's a relatively new program. And it's really the first one in the country that allows you to study all all the arts of Asia and Africa. So, if you're interested in history of art but you're also interested in music or you're also interested in film, and you don't want to choose just one and it's a wonderful option because it allows you to combine all of these disciplines. So there's a good range of choice within this within this degree structure. So in your first year you will study history of art your study of kind of introductions to history of art, but also to film, thinking about you know the films major in Africa, and also to music some of the some of the modules that Angela's describing. You will also have access to those, including that the possibility or the option of doing practice based music training if you want to do that. So in the second year you then get to to specialize a little bit more. And really one of the things that's special about this degree is that it allows you to combine the theory and history of you know the arts and initiative quite global context with quite practice based skills so it gives you training in curatorial practice for example in museology, as well as in music and things like podcast production or, you know filmmaking, all of these things you can, you can study within the context of this degree. And so really that gives you a wonderfully rounded degree structure, if you like because it prepares you for, you know, the career path that you will, you will choose afterwards. It also gives you this incredibly kind of engaging intellectual background so it's a very exciting degree. I wish it had been around when I was looking for a degree. Chris, can I just jump in there I left out a very very important side about both the music degree but also the creative arts degree and that is performance. I think we offer a very, very wide range of of instrumental study from Gamaland to Kora to West African drums to a whole range of different East Asian and South Asian instruments, and that is a very, very dynamic part of the School of Arts. We have concerts we have guest lecturers we have master classes. We have a very active performance to group aspects to the program. I think we've raised the School of Arts a bit noisier than some other wonderful way with with some of our students, you know, performing what they're learning. When it comes to the degrees in history of art, I mean history of art is a part of the creative arts and cultural industries degree as Polly says but you can also study it on its own. The other part is, you know, it's a very broad ranging subjects, you know, it's not simply about, you know, as we've already sort of suggested it just about studying objects in in their isolation. It's about thinking about the production of objects the way in which they used by people. It's about engaging with the sort of the politics of objects and their circulation. And so in the first year it starts, it's, it offers a thorough grounding in the history of art more broadly as a discipline by looking at the connected histories of of Asia and Africa through the study of objects. How can we understand the production of useful objects across Asia and Africa. We might want to study the history of Asia and Africa, but do it through the study of objects through the study of material and visual culture. We might want to look at the objects themselves. And in another aspect of the first year course there is a module on media and technologies of art, looking at how if we think about the types of materials and media from which objects what impact does that have on the way in which they used with which they're circulated, whether it's thinking about the history of printing technology, which predates the use of printing in Asia, the use of printing as a technology for the production of manuscripts predates the printing technology in the West by numerous centuries. That's an example of the way in which taking another approach to media and technology is we see that from an Asian or African perspective, you know, there are differences to when was printing first developed, for example. We might also want to look, and in another module that in the first year. There's a module on the spaces of art to thinking about the places in which art has been produced in whether that's in a religious space, a temple, a mosque, or the role of the arts in quarterly or palace environments in the Middle East or Asia. We might want to then look at the ways in which these objects are used and consumed and seen in a religious or or quarterly or domestic context in Asia and Africa. And then think about what happens to an object if you think about an object in terms of its biography in terms of its movement from one environment to another. What's the role of the museum, whether a colonial museum, or the modern art market in the construction of meaning for objects. This is again where, you know, the politics of the arts comes in. We might also want to engage with not just the spaces of art in terms of objects circulating within them, but those spaces themselves, be they buildings or cities or landscapes, the way in which looking at architecture, the architecture of museums, the architecture of religious buildings in Asia and Africa has become central elements in the contemporary heritage industry in these regions. The role of heritage institutions in deciding what is worth saving, preserving, conserving, and what is of importance or of lesser significance. These are all important political issues that affect people's lives and how they see themselves and how they are seen by others. In the later parts of the degree at science in history of art, you can go on if you were particularly engaged as many of our students are by the arts of Africa, you can go on to study the arts of this vast and diverse region in more detail, like historic arts or more modern and contemporary arts or the arts of the peoples of the diasporas from these regions. So you can study, go on and study in more detail, aspects of African arts or Japanese art or Chinese ceramics or Indian painting or Southeast Asian Buddhist art, for example, you know, for many of these subjects there isn't anywhere else in the world to study these things. Another aspect more broadly in the later years of our degree is thinking about the arts more broadly, thinking about the cultural industries, thinking about the role of museums and in the collection and display of objects in these new environments. In the second year in our history of art degree and indeed for the creative arts and cultural industries students. They study the sort of the history of museums, the histories of collecting, how have certain objects moved from one environment to another. This also is an aspect of thinking about as Angela indicated at the beginning, thinking about the decolonization of knowledge, thinking about the ways in which our knowledge of the arts has been constructed from certain perspectives and how these are vitally important issues today in how we can decolonize that knowledge and and face up particularly perhaps from London as a formal imperial capital to facing up to the fact that so much Asian and African art now lies in in Britain, British museums. How did it get here. How did it arrive. How is it understood. How is it being displayed. It's not all the critical issues for the study of the arts, but also critical issues for the study by by our students, so it's tremendously exciting. I mean London is a terrific place to study Asia and Africa, because it's a global city. It's a global artistic center. It's an obviously vital place. And indeed, so as itself thinking about museums and displays and contemporary arts, so as has its own gallery, Brunner gallery, where exhibitions of Asian and African arts and photography, and other visual media, regularly displayed in here that bring people from across Britain to London to so as to the gallery, and also from elsewhere in Europe. It's we're very close to the British Museum, which is just around the corner, which is a tremendous asset for for the art historians amongst us. But as it means we can just be in a classroom talking about, for example, myself talking about some works of Indian sculpture, and I can show people pictures on it, but then I can show them a film of these objects being consumed and used in a religious context in India, but then I can go around to the British Museum and look at the objects themselves in all their three dimensional magnificence, that it's such a magnificent resource to have close by. So as really is a sort of a global hub with its spokes reaching out across the world to Asia and Africa. I hope that's given you some sense of really why the School of Arts and why studying history of art, the creative arts and cultural industries and music and so as is really special. Another thing I'd mentioned about so as of course, is that it is a specialist center for the study of Asia and Africa, and the study of Asia and Africa often includes, you know, other aspects of culture, including for example languages. Many Asian and African languages can be studied at SARS that cannot be studied anywhere else in Europe. We offer degrees in Chinese and Arabic and Japanese these are languages that may be able to study it at other universities in Britain. We also offer degrees in the study of languages that you can study elsewhere in Europe, including African languages, including Swahili, for example, as well as other Asian languages, including Vietnamese and Indonesian and Persian and Hebrew, Now what I also emphasize here if you're interested in languages is that you can study our degrees as a joint degree with the language. You can study music and Korean, as Angela said, but if you're not sure about the language, and you're not sure or perhaps are not confident that you want to have a whole half of your degree in a language. You can still, and so as encourages this, we want our students to learn a bit of the languages in Asia and Europe, that even if you're studying the BA in history of art, there is still the option to do some modules in a language. And if you get on with it, if you love it, you can take it further. So, so as is a tremendously exciting place and indeed many of our graduates go on into really exciting locations, not just in Britain, but elsewhere in Europe, and indeed globally, and indeed so as both studies the world, but also our students come across the globe. And so, so as itself is a very international center with a tremendously diverse student body in one of the world's great global cosmopolitan cities. Angela Polly, you know, where do our graduates go on what do they take from so as comes into the world into the occupations that go up to do elsewhere. Angela. Well, first of all, to say, and picking up on the idea of London being a global city, our students come from all over the world. So it's, it's, it's particularly fascinating to see what they get from so as and how they take those skills back to their home areas and how they develop careers there. And as a very wide range of careers so amongst our students. So, and the other thing is that they take their profession, they take their networks with them. So the, the relationships that they develop with us often become really important professional networks that they take into their lives beyond so as, and it's so exciting to watch that. So, amongst the careers that our undergraduates have developed, many of them have gone on to become very well known performers so performance is one of the big aspects of that we're watching a number of them at quite at the moment, one developing a very very exciting career for herself in France she's from there, becoming quite a global name. We watch them going back into the Middle East and developing a name for themselves there having developed a skill in playing wood. So performance composition and production at various levels developing their skills in sound production at so as and then going home and building that some of them use product their production skills in in theater in film in television. And what they're taking with them is not just the skill, but the knowledge of different musical forms and different sound and aesthetic practices into creating much more sensitive production productions at the end of the day. Many of our students go into teaching or into community music making, which is working with choirs, community choirs, or working with music in hospitals in in care homes in some of them even in palliative care so taking their musical skills into community environments. Again, where their knowledge of a multicultural music making becomes extremely important. Some of our undergraduates go on to study music therapy, which requires another degree on top of a music degree. But what we're seeing and I'm keeping close tabs on this is that they're helping to develop the whole field of music therapy, which was based very much on a very important framework of what sound means, they're bringing in a much more multicultural, global understanding of the meaning of sound, and opening up the field of music therapy in all kinds of ways. So we're seeing the development of what is called community music therapy, which is not only the medicalized idea of music, music helping to with people with autism or certain kinds of disabilities, but music helping with whole communities that maybe have been damaged by war, or by gang, gang involvement, or some kind of trauma. And so the music and health issues quite a big trajectory for some of our students. Many of our undergraduate students go on to do master's degrees they might be interested in academia. And what we do do a lot of in our undergraduate degree is teach research methods is encourage our students to go out and do research. These are students who are interested in writing and in developing more of an academic career for themselves. Some go into charities into NGOs or into international development field that's very, very exciting. And again, working with refugees working with migrants, bringing their musical knowledge so that a field that is very technocratic is very numbers orientated can be a kind of reconstructed through a much more human element of using music as a way to find out who people are and what their aspirations are. We have a number of students who are very interested in broadcasting and in media. And so we do run it as Polly was suggesting we have courses in podcasting. We have one wonderful course on presenting world music for radio. So some broadcasting radio and television is a very exciting area to go into. And again, a multicultural musical understanding really adds something to to that to their ability to develop radio for a much wider public. And then one other area that is where we see a lot of our students going into is into sound archiving. This is our interest in heritage. The British Library is very close to so as almost the entire sound archive at the British Library is populated by ex so as well so as graduates. And these are people who are interested in histories of musical collection and using old musical collections as a way to repatriate taking them back to the communities to whom they belong. So they are developing ways to sort of reactivate the archive so that they are not just recordings in the library, but they're recordings about people stories their histories, and that also leads into an interest in music journalism. So for instance, one of our main music magazines out there called song lines. The main editor is a so as graduate, and many of the people who write for the magazine come from so as. It's just a sample. But as I started out by saying is as as kind of diverse our student body is is representing the kind of diversity of their career interests and capabilities. So come and join us and develop your career through us. Pauli, just briefly just some examples of where so as graduates have gone on to and then, and then we'll have some time for questions that you can either post in the chat or just speak up so probably just briefly a few examples of graduate outcomes. What are the sort of skills that are so as students take out into the world. In their occupations later occupations. Yeah, of course. I mean, often size students or size graduates find that they're really quite in demand because you know there's really been a kind of boom and an interest in a sort of much more global approach to the arts. So particularly in contemporary art but also in terms of museology. So really kind of critical moment for museums and for the arts. And there's really a demand to take a much more global approach. And so, whilst many degree programs don't produce students with that kind of global approach of course so I see it's producing these students and what they find when they're in the market is that really they have, you know, an excellent kind of range of choices available to them just because you know there's so few people trained, you know these specific skills and knowledges. So our students I mean, they will be trained so a student who takes the creative arts and cultural industries degree for example, will be trained in this very broad range of skills that Angelo's outlined some of but also skills in in curating and museology and skills in filmmaking and analyzing and creating film as well. So that really opens up a vast sort of array of options for our students. Those are history of art students tend to go into curatorial positions so there's been, you know, many of our alumni are in, you know, institutions around the world in curatorial positions in museological positions. But also students, you know, go into, into other aspects of the art so they might, many of them go on to have further academic careers they come back for the doctoral programs and go on to have academic careers. Some of them go into publishing into NGOs again, perhaps into journalism and, and these kind of things. So yeah, I mean it really does open up an incredibly wide kind of range of career paths. And curating curating seems the obvious one but there's there's many more beyond that as well and there's many aspects of curating so some students might come on for example to arts education so working within galleries and museums in education mode so working with schools and community groups. They might go into conservation they might go into perhaps press and marketing which can be actually a really interesting path to take. So yeah there are many, many different options and we're very proud of our alumni that go on to do all sorts of exciting things. Yeah, very much indeed. I think the three of us have talked an awful lot. And really wish we want to hear from you. If you have any questions. Please post them in the chat or just turn your microphone on turn your camera on and ask us anything directly anything to do with any of the issues we've raised today or any questions you might have of our degrees or or so specifically. I might also just point out, my colleague has reminded us that this session is being recorded just to mention that as well. And just to just to interrupt Chris bin as well sorry. If you would like to ask a question, you can raise your hand and then I can unmute you as well so please do that if you'd like to ask a question out loud, or you can use the q amp a chat box as well. And I've also put our email address is up here so if there's anything you want to know or want to raise with any one or all of us afterwards or if you just want some more information about anything to do with a degree. The degrees on offer in the school of us so please get in touch with delighted to hear from people and always happy to answer your questions point in the direction of further information. So chrisman there's a there's a question here from a new about whether the performance aspect of the music is mandatory. In your first year, it is in the first year what we do is we offer you. We take five weeks segments of different instruments we just take you through our world of music by offering a section on gamelan a section on Korra a section on tabla from South Asia, and and a section on Iranian music. That is the only performance course that you do do as a compulsory course in the music, but from from second year onwards, you can opt to take performance or to take something else you're not it's not obligatory. It may be worth adding that if you wanted to study music so you wanted to study ethnic ethnomusicology and history and theory of music but you didn't want to do the practice based element then you could go through the creative and then that's possible to do that and then the performance option is optional. Thank you. Sorry, there were some other questions coming in. Hannah you have a question for combined East Asian studies, how much history and art will be in the course. I mean in terms of joint degrees it's it's half and half. So you do 50% East Asian studies and 50% history of art, the history of art if you do a joint degree with you have particular regional interests, such as East Asian studies. The initial history of art in the first year will be the history of art or a nation Africa more broadly rather than specifically East Asia, but as you go through the degree there are more chances to do specialist sort of emphasise certain regions to a certain extent, but you'll come out with a sort of a broad history degree, even with some regional specialist. So I hope that gives you some sense. A lot of the things about the degree structure and what these are available on the website, so can you probably sort of gets something there. I have a question for the be a creative arts when you have to have a portfolio background. I think the answer there is the be a creative arts and cultural industries, when we're not teaching the fine art when we're not doing it that we're studying the arts in terms of the produced object but also the environments and they're produced and consumed. So if you're interested in fine arts and creative practice. We're not the right institution for you with the exception of performance in music. So you don't need an art background, many of our students don't have an art background if they have studied art at school fine art. That's often great because it means they bring a sensibility of making and producing to the ways in which they interpret. Our students only discover history of art as a discipline, having studied the humanities more broadly, whether sort of English or languages or or history prior to this, and then just realize that there are other ways of exploring language literature culture art history by thinking about the subjects in terms of in terms of objects. It's worth adding to that Crispin that what you know of course you're actually right that this degree program is not practice based and it's not you know we don't have studio so it's not you know studio practice based degree. But at the same time there is the possibility within this degree to have quite creative assessments so there is an option within that so for example, some modules will ask you to produce a podcast, rather than a essay. So if a student at the moment who's looking to present for his final thesis part of it will be a graphic novel for example so you know there there are certainly, you know options within these degree programs, specifically within creative arts and cultural industries to do more and you know alternative forms of assessment. And we're very keen on alternative forms of assessment, recognising that there are many different ways of presenting one's knowledge and understanding of these things. You know, we've talked about oral and oral transmission of knowledge, which we're doing now in a way, but also in the way in which we evaluate students work and we encourage elements of that creativity in written and spoken and visual form. There's a question in the chat box. How does it work the year abroad, in case of four year degrees. Is anyone could either of you answer that. Particularly for well if you're studying a degree, which includes a language. This often includes a year abroad in the third year so the third out of four years. So if you're studying history of art with Korean, the third year will be in Korea, studying Korean being immersed in Korean culture and language. Some students opt for that four year degree we're doing the language, some opt for an alternative to three year degree, which may include a language that doesn't have the year abroad. In terms of the art history part of it, are there elements of another question has just come in. Are there elements of art thought as part of the language course. If you're studying Japanese alone, then you may be able to do options in East Asian art within that degree. But if you're studying Japanese as a degree that's hosted by another department, not not from the school of arts so from from the school of arts you can go out as it were within science to another department to do either half your degree or just modules of your degree in a language, but that's always combined with what we're doing in our department. So what I'd say in terms of the language is that there are different levels of language as part of a degree you can do a bit or a lot. So that's something that's slightly from a side and that is we have quite a few Japanese language students who join our music ensembles because we have a number of Japanese ensembles, including an Okinawa group. These are ensembles that meet up on the weekends and and are very active. They often do performances outside. So it's just something to add to understanding of language of Japanese language and culture is actually learning to perform an instrument and performing with others. So in terms of the year abroad Marina asking about this. I'd also say that at the moment the year abroad for so as students is focused on on the language. It's, it's for students doing a whole degree or half their degree which includes a specific language so that you those students go to that host country to study. Countries that you can go to in the third year abroad to study language include Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam. I think Indonesia now, India, India. In the Middle East, you can do Arabic, Turkish and Farsi Persian abroad and they might be Zanzibar for Swahili and indeed now to go to. You can study Swahili in, I think in Zanzibar or I forget this is new. So, so great exciting options to study abroad if you're doing the language. Any other questions about anything, you know, many of the questions about languages are best directed perhaps to the languages and cultures team that perhaps doing open day presentations straight after us to level or later today. But we can certainly answer any questions with art history and music and the creative arts and cultural industries now. I'm delighted so many people came this. I'm thrilled that so many people wants to come along to this presentation. So thank you so much for coming. If you do have any more questions now, or if you just think of it later there's something to do get in time. I think perhaps at two minutes to 11, we should all go and put the kettle on and make a cup of tea. Thank you so much to you all for coming. I hope you're excited by the possibility of studying at SOAS as much as we're excited to be working and teaching at SOAS. It's a really special place with a lot of special people. That means ultimately the students, the students of what make it such an exciting, vibrant, brilliant place to be. So I look forward to welcoming you to stuff for us in the future. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.