 So welcome everybody. Yuka, do you want to introduce the session or should I just go ahead? I'm happy to start straight away. Yeah, I was going to let you start, but just a word of welcome everybody. I'm the undergraduate admissions student Yuka Kobayashi and I'm joined by a team of people from the Politics and International Studies Department. It's with a great pleasure that I introduced our current head of department, Felix Behrenskater, who is the authority of working on identity and interesting theoretical things on IR. So I'm now going to first hand over to you, Felix, to introduce all of us. Okay, thanks, I'll see you all later. Thank you Yuka. Can we move to the next slide please? So as Yuka noted, welcome everybody. I'm Felix Behrenskater. I'm the head of department of Politics and International Studies. And usually we would prefer to welcome you all in SOAS in the heart of London, but now I have to address you from my little London flat and I'm addressing you in probably a lot of different places in the world, which also has an advantage in many ways. So there we are online and I'm trying to be very brief because I have a fabulous range of colleagues that will give you an impression of what it's like to study at SOAS. I know some of you are offer holders already. Some of you may be interested in applying and studying with us. So I hope we can accommodate both groups. We have about 25 minutes now until half past the hour where we try to give you a taster of the things we do at SOAS and then we are there to answer questions from you. And that usually is quite good to have time to answer and discuss your questions. However, it might well be that there's not enough time and in those cases, feel free to email any one of us. Our emails can be found on the website. Okay, so here's the brief outline of what we're going to do. So after my welcome, my colleague Mira Savaratnam will give you a mini lecture about Global Britain. And then we have a panel of a couple of colleagues that specialize in different parts, in different subject areas, in different regions. And they briefly kind of give you a flavor of what they teach and what their research and what you could expect if you would come here. And we also have a student with us who can give you a perspective from her position as having been on the other side on the receiving side of our teaching. And then we open up the Q&A. Great. Can we have the next slide, please? So, so us as those of you who have applied and who have done your research, I mean, as you know, we are a small but very unique institution. We specialize in the study of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. And really our degree programs in the politics department are dealing of course with core disciplinary themes and topics, but we do so from a perspective that is grounded in the research that we do namely primarily focusing on the regions outside the so-called West. So we teach with a global focus but from a non-European or non-Western perspective. And as you can see, usually our campus is quite colorful and that is not only outside when the trees are colorful but we are also inside. We are an extremely diverse community of scholars and of students. Over 50% of our student population usually is international. We are the heart of London which is, you know, as you, as I hope you know a very colorful and multicultural city. And of course, so so us needs to be seen as being and our teaching and what we do must be seen as being yes at the heart of London but also being situated with research across the world. Next slide please. So there are of course many universities in London and indeed in the UK or around the world where you can study politics and international relations. So you might ask, you know, why, what is special about SOAS if you have offers for multiple places or if you're thinking about applying to multiple places? Well, as I already mentioned, so on the one hand, we do have a global focus. So even if you study politics and not just international relations but politics at SOAS, we do not teach British politics. So if you look at a program that teaches you about the political system in the United Kingdom you probably wouldn't be as happy at SOAS because what we do, we look at politics from a global perspective, from a non-Western perspective. What does politics look like in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East, in particular countries, in particular sub-regions. But also how do you compare politics, the performance of politics, the systems, the kind of aspirations, the struggles. And so we do this, but not simply from a regional perspective, but we connect them and we truly have this global focus. Now, importantly, we're not just a university and a department that gives you regional expertise, but we have, you know, all of our colleagues, all of our staff are trained and do research in the discipline of politics and international relations, broadly speaking. But we do this with the regional expertise. We do this with strong language skills from the regions and we do this with a distinctive critical approach that questions, you know, orthodox common sense understandings of how we see the world, including how we understand politics and where it takes place. And we do this, as I mentioned earlier, with a distinctive engagement in the realities of the global south. And so we look at international politics from the global south in many ways, if you want to. But, and this is maybe also important to mention, all the themes that we address are global challenges, are big themes that you also study in other universities. So we do pay as much attention to the so-called mainstream as we do to a critical approach and maybe a non-mainstream post-colonial angle. Before I hand over to my colleagues, I just want to say that as head of department, I've been at SOS for over 10 years. I love the place. It is a very inspirational place, even if now for almost a year, we couldn't quite enter the building and enjoy it. But it really is the case that our staff body is extremely diverse. It is, you will find that the languages, our backgrounds, our expertise is very multicultural. And so are our students. And so I think this is really what makes this department also quite special and quite distinct from other political science departments in London or across the UK. And with that, I'm happy to hand over to my colleague Mira. Hi everyone. Nice to see you. I'm just going to share with you my slides. So although Felix said we are not talking about Britain as such, of course, studying at SOS does give you a way of understanding Britain that is quite distinctive and which understands it in relationship to the global self. And so what I wanted to do today was talk to you about the question, what is global Britain? Now, obviously we know that the idea of global Britain has formed the centerpiece of British foreign policy for the last few years, particularly since Brexit. The idea is that coming out of Europe, Britain is going to re-establish itself as a global presence, work more with its Commonwealth partners and various people in the government have been trying to say what that means to them. So let's first have a look at what Boris Johnson says. He says, this is the moment for us to think of our past and go up a gear again. Now I'm not doing the impression because that would be a bit too difficult. But to recapture the spirit of those seafaring ancestors immortalized above us, whose exploits not brought not just riches, but something even more important than that. And that was a global perspective. What is Boris talking about? He's of course talking about the British Empire and the British Empire, which was very strongly based on naval power and trading around the world. And this positive enjoyment of empire and of its legacies characterizes a lot of the political discourse around global Britain. To give you an example of Ian Duncan Smith who was speaking as Brexit was being kind of finalized. I said, I just wish I was 21 again, frankly, because my goodness, what prospects lie ahead of us for young people now to be out there buccaneering, trading, dominating the world again? Again, the idea of global Britain very much there being shaped by empire. And that's all fine and good. But we have to ask the question. We have to ask the question, how does the world understand global Britain, right? If this is what the British state is saying, this is what the British state is aspiring to, we have to ask the question, what does the world understand by that legacy? Does it, for example, remember a great trading power, buccaneering and dominating the world? Well, if we look at what countries actually say about Britain and about that time, it actually looks a little different. Let's start with China by any stretch of the imagination, a significant power in the century ahead, maybe the most significant country in terms of its economic rise and the political influence that it's now showing. For China, the era of the British empire is known as the century of humiliation, right? It suffers under Britain's invasions and also under Japan's invasions. And China associates this period with humiliation and misery. And of course, if we look at the history of war, if we look at the history of unequal treaties that China experienced, that makes sense. The British state has not fully understood the Chinese perspective on this, it's fair to say. So in 2010, when David Cameron showed up in China around Remembrance Day with his delegation all wearing poppies, for China, this was a very insulting affair because it reminded them of the opium wars when Britain enforced the sale of opium in China. It's not that the British state has necessarily learned from this either. When Gavin Williamson was the defense secretary, he talked about sending a gunboat to enforce Britain's trading ambitions in the Pacific and China promptly canceled the trade talks. So we can see already that the world had very different recollections of what Britain's global period was like and what it entailed. Just to give a few more examples, one image of Britain that comes through during this time is as a pioneer of democracy. But many who experienced British colonialism argue that it actually undermined democracy and self-determination in those spaces. So in India, this is very much part of the public discourse and recently Kenyan survivors of the Mauma Rebellion were awarded damages by the High Court in Britain for having been tortured during that fight for independence. Again, the story looks very different. What about questions about global culture? One of the things that Britain has done is positioned itself as a cosmopolitan power as in many years ago, cool Britannia, being able to synthesize cultures from across the world. But people around the world are understanding this very differently. Ethiopia, for example, is demanding the return of artifacts looted in the 19th century by British soldiers, including some very, very important royal artifacts which also have religious significance. The Masai people have also been to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to look at how things which were taken from them under conditions of imperial violence are being treated and displayed and owned, but not by then. And so there is a real tussle now about the kind of place the world is and the kind of role of Britain can play in it. What about the role of global peacemaker? I mean, for much of the late 20th century, Britain would have seen itself as a humanitarian power, enforcing liberal ideals, helping in Bosnia, helping in Sierra Leone. And yet, in many parts of the world, Britain is understood as being part of the war problem, if you like, notably in the Middle East where it's been exporting a lot of arms to Saudi Arabia for many years. But the tide appears to be turning. So even Biden's administration now is starting to look twice at the imperial role. Let's say that Britain and the US have been playing particularly in the Saudi Arabian War in Yemen and the struggle amongst different groups there. And it's actually asking Britain to pull back from selling arms to war zones where there are obvious human rights abuses. So Britain's got a long road ahead of it. And the real question that we can ask in Britain and with thinking about alongside the global South and countries that have been formally colonized by Britain is can Britain reconcile its past and its future? Can it reconcile the very positive vision that members of the government have of that past and the rather more mixed picture that you see when you look around the world and understand history from their perspectives? One pathway which we've been exploring at SOAS is through the idea of decolonizing knowledge, decolonizing the curriculum. This is a photo of the Duchess of Sussex from a couple of years ago when I got to present the ideas about decolonizing education to her. I wasn't clever enough to get in the photo unfortunately, but she did listen with intent. And of course that event made the news. I also had the opportunity to write about it in the Sunday Times. And what we'll do after this event is I'll send you some coverage. The Sunday Times column, the radio show I did on BBC Radio 4 and a podcast we did with Chatham House. And the argument that I'm making there and that's kind of my take on it is that Britain can't go forward in this world without understanding its past, without really reckoning with its past. And its diplomatic partners have a very clear understanding of that. In order to get there, we need a reckoning with empire. We need a reckoning with how it's embedded into the world order today. And we need some way of understanding ourselves that isn't going to just kind of try and trade on past imperial glories. So I'll leave you with these thoughts. Hopefully we can have a nice discussion in the Q&A. But that gives you a flavor of how thinking through the perspectives of countries outside Britain can give you much more insight into the nature of world order. Okay, thank you. Okay, I think it's time for the next one. Did that work, screen sharing? Yeah, good. Okay, I'll pass it over to my colleagues. Thanks very much, Mira. It's always fascinating here about your perspectives on IR. And with that, we're going to move on to a panel discussion where we're going to have snippets and tasters from various colleagues who study politics of regions and also thematically looking at issues like political economy and to really see how what you study is just within the context is so as, how it's different and how it's so exciting. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Matt Eagleton-Piers who's going to share with you our new degree on PPE. So can everybody see my screen? Can you see my screen? Yep. Okay. Yep, okay. I'm trying to do a screen share, I got it. Okay, so... Lower right-hand corner. Is that all right? Okay, so off to you, Matt. Okay. Okay, if you just keep hitting the button, you go and then it'll begin to pop up, yeah. Yeah, and stop there. Oh. Sorry. Sorry. You pull it back. I'll just introduce myself while you're getting up and reading. So, hi everyone. My name is Matt. I'm a senior lecturer in the politics department and I'm the convener for a brand new degree which is being launched at SOAS which brings together three departments and it is for a BSc in politics, philosophy and economics. Some of you may have seen it, some of you may have not seen it and I just wanna give you a quick dive into why I think you should consider PPE at SOAS and there are three reasons here that I'm going to just elaborate upon just with the three seconds I have. And the first is that dovetailing with what Felix was introducing is that this new degree offers an interdisciplinary study of the world across the three years that you'd be conducting it. Now, there's a lot of talk about interdisciplinary work and activity. It's actually quite difficult to make it all tick and hum together but once as a student, you begin to appreciate things from this perspective. It is so worthwhile and so valuable. So I always think that in order to understand the modern world, we need insights from different subjects, okay? So PPE equips you with this knowledge, topics and methods but is put into an adaptable and flexible approach in terms of its design. So along with my colleagues in politics, why do we need political analysis? Well, the study of ideas and institutions and practices and contested debates on the nature of freedom and power and democracy. That is the stuff that all of you in some capacity will be interested in and is all vital for how we understand the world. But politics has also been historically quite closely associated with philosophy. So politics and philosophy together, you would be addressing some of the big questions such as can we define something called free will or what is the nature of reality or how have different regions and countries in the world, particularly in the non-west, how have they approached the study of philosophy? So I think that can combine with politics is great but we have a bonus because in addition to that, we are all inhabiting the capitalist system and we are all having to navigate around that and therefore we need the tools and techniques of economics to better grasp that. And I think when you bring these together, then that is what makes for a really kind of special holistic degree. Now secondly, building on this is that what Felix and Mira is making it clear is that so offers a truly global approach. So without the attention to the relationship between the non-western and the western regions, your understanding is definitely going to be not as good. So you do see other PPE degrees in the UK and elsewhere and I look at them and they honestly, they really struggle to offer a credible understanding of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. So just to give you an example, at SOAS there are more China experts than any other institution in the UK. Now that means an awful lot given the status of China in the world, okay? So we have that, we have the interdisciplinary, we have the global approach. There's also a third reason which I think is important for why you can consider PPE at SOAS and that concerns the nature of some of the skill sets that you're developing. And often what you'll be doing will have a lot of applied knowledge which will be relevant for many different types of professional careers, okay? So generally speaking, employers and organizations, they like PPE graduates and SOAS PPE is offering you a whole set of skill sets which are useful for private sector, public sector, voluntary sector, whatever you're kind of interested in going into. You go if I can just advance now to the next slide. So with that in mind, and I don't have space to explore everything with you, I'm happy to chat briefly if we have it today or if you wanna come back to me more than happy to respond to any queries you have. But I thought it would be good just in a nutshell just to give you a sense about if you arrived at SOAS and you're gonna do PPE, the degree, what do you do in the first year? What do you do in terms of your first courses? And I've outlined there just the year one structure in terms of two courses that you do from politics, two courses you do from economics, and then you'd have your choice of a course in philosophy. And as you move through the degree similar to other degrees similar to what we offer elsewhere in politics is that you gain, you have greater freedom to structure your choices as you move through the degree and you want to develop various specialisms, language, regional specialisms, and so on and so forth. So I think it's a very exciting structure in terms of giving you this awareness and comprehension of these things. And if you do decide to do PPE at SOAS then you will be seeing my face first time, first up for the course on introduction to political economy which is an entree into how to understand the politics of capitalism includes many central issues that you can see there on the screen and we answer to big questions such as why are some people richer than others? Where did capitalism come from? What is money? I mean, these are all kind of very interesting and intriguing types of questions and that'll be part of the mix as you get into PPE as a degree. So if you haven't decided yet on what to do at SOAS then I'm just urging you to consider for a moment PPE as a possibility. Now, Yuka. Thanks very much Matt. That was Matt Eagleton Pierce talking about the PPE degree. Matt is the leading expert on political economy. I find his work really insightful because I work on China and looking at things like the trade dispute between US and China. It's really interesting to look at it from this kind of bilateral perspective but it's also important that you understand the dynamics behind these two different systems and understanding this from political economy and actually having this PPE degree is a great asset to have to understand all these issues around us. And from that, I'm going to move over and hand over to my colleague Tolga who has some interesting things to tell you about the politics degree. He himself is working on fascinating things about the disputes in Syria. So I'm gonna hand over to you Tolga. So over to you. Thank you Yuka. Hello everyone. My name is Tolga Sun Maslimer. I'm also a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies. So first I will briefly talk about the modules that my colleagues and I teach in our department. And then I will also very briefly talk about my own research which is also very much focused on the region of the Middle East. So one of our first year core modules is introduction to political analysis. And in this module, you will learn how to think critically but also from an analytical perspective about the political issues, political phenomena or political events that you're interested in and that you're passionate about. When doing this, you will learn how to pursue a particular research question that you're interested in, how to answer that research question, how to present evidence in favor of that answer and so on and so forth. And if you actually wanna put these skills into action in our third year, you will have the opportunity to work on a final year project where you will have the opportunity to work on your undergraduate dissertations. Now, besides that, I also teach modules that specifically focus on particular themes that are very relevant to understand the politics of the Middle East. So I teach a module on political violence which focuses on various themes related to political violence but in terms of its causes but also its consequences. And then in the department in our program, we also have modules that are specifically about politics of the Middle East, international relations of the Middle East which focuses on relations between different states of the region, their foreign policies, especially some of the major players in the region and how their foreign policies affect relations between various states. And we also teach a module that specifically focuses on the domestic politics of different countries in the Middle East. Now, you might be wondering, right? How will these modules help you, right? What will they help you with? Well, I believe they will actually help you to answer and to think about some of the most critical questions that we currently sort of think about, right? In this world that is heavily affected by the ongoing pandemic, right? So you will be able to think about, right? What is gonna be the effect of COVID-19 on conflicts in the Middle East, right? Is it gonna make conflict more likely or is it gonna make conflicts perhaps less likely, right? You must be familiar with these different levels of infection rates, fatality rates but also vaccination rates across different countries, right? So what are the political factors, right? That underlie these differences, right? How does politics play into these differences, especially when it comes to these public health responses to COVID? And finally, right, you will also have an opportunity to think about other sort of possible consequences of this pandemic, especially, right? When it comes to the issues of migration, right? Because of the mutations, you must be familiar that many countries are imposing certain restrictions on travel. So right, how is this post-COVID world gonna look like when it comes to global migration? So all these modules will help you to think about possible answers to these questions. Now, let me also quickly talk about my own research. Can we see the next slide? Yeah, so in my own research, as Yuka already told you, I very much focus on the region of the Middle East. And as you see on the right side of this slide, this is just some data from a armed conflict location and event data project, which shows you all the instances of conflict and violence in the Middle East in the past year, including armed conflict but also cases of protests and riots and violence against civilians. So it's a region, indeed, which has seen and continues to see a lot of violent conflicts. So I'm interested in the causes and consequences of these conflicts, how we can actually solve or prevent future conflicts occurring in the region. And one of the major consequences of these conflicts is large numbers of people because of civil war have to leave their homes, right? So how do we respond to the migration crisis, right? Engulfing the region, but also the rest of the world. So in order, can we go to the next slide? So I studied these questions in the context of the Syrian civil war. As you may well know, there's an ongoing civil war in Syria for the past 10 years and about half of the country's population had to leave and more than half of these refugees ended up in Turkey. So I did extensive face-to-face interviews with Syrian refugees in Turkey. And some of my findings are the ongoing civil war has affected their political attitude significantly and it has turned them both against the regime but also the opposition. However, despite that, the refugees that I interviewed very much want Syria to remain united. But at the same time, they really harbor strong grievances against the perpetrators of violence in the war. I also had the opportunity to publish some of my findings in academic journals. Can we go to the next slide? Some of these publications are in outlets that are more designed for and catering to readers from the policy world such as the foreign affairs. But I also published several pieces in academic journals including the Review of Middle East Studies, Political Geography and Journal of Peace Research. I'm gonna stop here and I will be more than happy to share more of my research and answer any other questions you have about the modules that we teach during the Q&A. Thank you. Thanks very much, Tolgo. Now I'm going to hand over to Carlo who has interesting things to share with you about his work and his teaching on Southeast Asia, you're over to Carlo. Wonderful, it's great to be here today. I teach classes in political theory, in particular, I'm teaching a class this term on post-colonial theory as well as classes on Southeast Asian politics as has been said previously. So as is a wonderful place to study politics and international relations, it's also a great place to study political theory. We have a political theory track which is, again, looks at political theory globally and allows you to explore many themes in political theory that are often left to masters and PhD programs in other places. So as an undergraduate, you're gonna be able to explore a very wide array of topics in political theory, especially looking at theory that takes place outside of Europe and North America. What I wanna do today is to talk to you a little bit about coronavirus pandemic in Southeast Asia and to give you a sense of some of the questions we may ask in the comparative politics classes on Southeast Asia if you advance the slide. So very quickly, the pandemic in Southeast Asia to some degree, not entirely, but to some degree has looked very different from what we've experienced here in the UK, in Europe and in North America. And one of the reasons for this is because there are some countries with exceptionally low case rates and death rates. So if you look at the three countries in particular Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore, all of them have extremely low numbers of coronavirus cases. And so we wanna try to figure out exactly why this is the case. We can look at differences in healthcare systems. One presumption might be that all these countries have strong healthcare systems, but this is not the case. This is an index which looks at, if you look at the second line of the chart, it's an index, I'm using an index which looks at rates overall healthcare system, sorry, rates healthcare systems overall. I think the highest number on this rating was 93. So Singapore is almost at the top and Thailand and Vietnam are somewhat lower but certainly not the worst and not the worst in the region. However, one commonality that we see across the three countries, it has to do with similarities in political system. So all of these countries are either authoritarian systems in which one party or one individual dominates the political system or what we might call autocratic political systems in which power is concentrated in an arbitrary manner. And so one explanation or one question that we might arrive at is, is it possible that authoritarian states respond to epidemics better than systems that are more open and more democratic? Certainly in Southeast Asia, this might appear to be the case since the two existing democracies, Indonesia and the Philippines are have very bad, a very bad track record dealing with their epidemics. However, these are also among the weakest healthcare systems in the region. So from the comparative politics perspective, if we wanted to look at the pandemic in Southeast Asia, these are some of the questions we would want to ask. The three countries here have a history of dealing with pandemics before. So maybe it's about the experience of these governments in previous pandemics. Nonetheless, it provides us with a very good overview of the kind of topics and questions we'd ask in comparative politics when we look at Southeast Asia. That's all I have for now. Thanks very much, Carlo. Now we're going to shift and go and see the other side, how it's like to study and to be learning about politics and IR from the student perspective. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Isabel. Isabel, can you hear us? So we're going to hear from our student ambassador, Isabel, about how it's like to be studying politics and IR. So over to you, Isabel. Isabel, are you there? Can we see Isabel? Okay, can you unmute Isabel? Can you hear me now? Yes, Isabel. Okay, great. Hello. So, hello. I'm Isabel Perrello-Chano and I'm studying international relations with Arbeck at SOAS. I'm a first year student and I also live in student accommodation if you want to ask about that as well. And I chose SOAS because the standard Eurocentric approach in the education system doesn't apply to SOAS and it is learning about the global history and sociology and it's a decolonized education approach and it really encourages you to build your own perspective of the world with evidence and insights into other countries' political and social system over time. And studying online is not exactly what I imagined. However, I'm grateful for all these resources I can access because you can really access resources online, the readings you need to do on the SOAS library and you receive a lot of support from your professors and for IR, there are about three readings a week per module and being able to access resources online really helps with note-taking and looking back on it and just finding exactly what you're looking for. And in seminars, we discuss about the lecture and the readings to better understand them and you can also talk separately to your tutors by scheduling office hours and that's how you can receive more support if you need so. But yeah, do you have any questions about anything? Thanks very much, Isabel. It was great to hear from the student perspective. So now we have a Q&A so we're going to go over to any questions we might have on the floor. So I'm gonna stop sharing the screen now so we can all look at your questions or Kim, do you have any questions you can feed us at the moment that was? Yeah, I can. I can go through some of the questions that have already been raised and we've been answering some questions as we go through. So the first one is what kind of jobs that a politics and international relations graduate can qualify for? I think that's a really good question. It's really wide in terms of the opportunity. So just to give you an example, what kind of references am I writing for my students? And I teach on China and East Asia so many of my students look at international relations in East Asia and so a lot of my students go into government and policy related jobs. So whether or not it's a researcher for parliament or any kind of Whitehall positions, fast track, that seems to be a lot of the common places that a lot of our students end up in. Another strand tends to go into consultancy and the business world and using these kinds of regional expertise and also thematic and disciplinary expertise in those areas. And some actually go into journalism. And so in that sense, there's a lot of variations that you can do depending on what you would like to do. And I think it's a very good degree to understand a lot of the dynamics of what's happening in the world via domestically, internationally and combined with now because there's a lot of demand for languages and regions, especially since we're having this lockdown but we're actually realizing even more that cross boundary relations is really important and to do that smoothly, you really need expertise on how regions work and what kind of languages they are to understand even like in the pandemic, the WHO is going there to realize what's been happening as the origins. But if you speak Chinese, you would have known a little bit more about that. And you can combine these things when you're in SOAS. And I think that's from me, but is there anything else that my colleagues would want to pitch in for this? Or if not, maybe we could go to the next question, Kim. Okay, the next question is, how is politics and IR course assessed? Okay, does Tolga, do you want to come in as convener about that? Sorry, what is the question again? So how are politics and international relations course assessed? How are they assessed? Well, yeah, so most modules we have sort of a number of assessments, either the number of the assessments vary between two and four usually. And most of these assessments are in the form of essays. And the essays have different weights and they are usually weighted more or less equally so that every assessment has more or less the same weight. And this is mostly, and my colleagues can correct me, are modules that are for the first year. But for modules that are for later years, we also have assessments in the form of exams. If I could just add to this, I think this is a really good question, but it also, I think, links up with the bigger questions of what are the modules actually looking like? Because we have different types of modules. So we have those where you have really large classes, especially in the first year, where you have big lectures and then you have dedicated small tutorial groups. And those are usually the big foundational themes where you introduce to the broad debates. And then as you progress into year two and especially in year three, you can choose modules that become a bit more specialized. And in these specialized modules, the numbers are then becoming also a bit smaller. And then the assessments also change somewhat. In the beginning, of course, you have to learn how to write an academic essay so they're more progressive. We don't, in the beginning, we give you a lot more feedback in the sense of helping you to read and write in academia. But towards the end, especially in the third year, we have smaller classes where we have seminars rather than big lectures, where we have critical engagement with the literature in a more focused manner. And then you also can write longer essays. And we also have, in most courses, also a combination between essays and exams. But also we should say that we are not just focusing on having you write essays and asking you to do an exam in the end. But we're also trying to be a bit more creative in the sort of assessments that we're using. And this is actually one of the things we're currently discussing quite a bit and how we change our assessments to give you a broader scope of methods that you can use different ways of showing what you've learned. Because not everybody is good at essay writing. And so we do actually take a more creative approach to assessment as well. Okay, and then the next question we have is how much focus will the courses put on COVID? How different will they be to say 2019? I think that's a good question. Do you want to take that Felix? I mean, you have a general view of where things are going. But I think if we hear from Felix and then I can trip in later, thank you. Yes, I think anyone could answer this in a way, as you heard from Matt, PPE is going to look at the intersection between politics, economics and philosophy on all kinds of themes. So we gave you some insight onto kind of how COVID structures, politics and questions that we study. But to be honest, COVID is one of the things that we're all grappling with right now and we're not quite sure yet how exactly will it shape politics and international relations. And it is one of the things that we're living through and we're doing research now and we're trying to grapple with it. So of course it will be integrated in what we study, but it's not like we immediately become all experts on the politics of COVID. I mean, this is something that will evolve. This is something that we're trying to grapple with together with the students. So in a way, the fact that we're living through this moment right now will also help us you as well as us to make sense of it and see how our theoretical, our empirical knowledge is interlinking with this moment that we're all experiencing. I think the key point is that what the COVID moment shows, and this is what you will have at source, is that it looks different from different parts of the world, right? And so it doesn't matter whether we talk about political violence, whether we talk about the legacies of imperialism, whether we talk about security questions, whether we talk about, in my case, questions of identity, depending on where you approach these, from which perspective, from which regions, the answers look different. And this is the same with something like global health and that sort of crisis and how it intersects with questions of identity in politics and violence. And so yes, COVID, the COVID pandemic will inform our thinking and our teaching, but we're not suddenly just focusing only on that. Right, and then another question that we have is, let me just go back through. How does SOAS support students in developing skills and opportunities experienced to help them find employment post-university? I'm wondering, maybe, Mary, do you want to respond to that? Sure, so I would say that there's two ways in which we do that. One is obviously through our degree programs, we try to develop skills which are generally transferable in fields of employment, so skills of analysis, skills of presentation, both written and oral, skills of organizing, material and so on. So these are the general skills that you would get through a degree. I think we're developing more skills-based assessments and I would expect to see these in different modules across the degree. And then finally, you've got opportunities through the career service to help build your CV and to look for posts which interest you. You do careers testing, so you can actually do a combined personality and skills test to find out what kinds of careers you'd be most suited to. We, of course, forward on opportunities that come our way through our global network, so sometimes we will have students who are working in embassies and so on and they'll be looking for an intern and we will forward those opportunities onto our students. And then, of course, we offer different kinds of careers events through the year to specifically look at careers. I think one of the big advantages that SOAS has is particularly its global reputation. So if you're looking at the field, particularly of international affairs, if you're looking at diplomacy, if you're looking at development, the NGO world, journalism, these are areas in which SOAS is a very well-known entity. There will be, obviously, in some sectors where SOAS is less well-known, but it is a very good degree from a recognised institution that can take you into a lot of different directions and our students go off and do all kinds of amazing things. Okay, we probably just have time for a couple more questions, but we do have all the questions recorded in the chat and I can get them circulated and make sure they're all answered and then send them out to everybody who attended this session today. I think there's a quick question on how big the lectures tend to be and I think we've already addressed this in that we have lots of different modules. Some are core modules and then some are modules that you can choose as your optional choices. So these will differ in sizes, but even if the lecture sizes are large, we do break you down into smaller tutorial groups and so you have a lot of opportunity to interact and debate and raise your opinions and your ideas. And then I think we've got another question which was how they assess which we've already been through and then one more question which was about studying languages, which you are able to take language modules throughout all of our programs so you'll be able to take them even if you've applied to an IR standalone program, there's definitely opportunities to do that. We'll answer the accommodation ones throughout the, by the emails. I'll just see if there's one more that we can pick out in terms of- Maybe there's one that Isabel as from a student perspective can engage in. That would be great. I think most of them are related to jobs and to what you can do afterwards. Okay, what is student accommodation like? There you go, Isabel. You could probably answer that one. Hello. So you can choose from different student accommodations. The one I'm staying in is the Windy and it's a 20 minute walk from Soas. It's in King's Cross and I would say it's very affordable for the area it's in because it is very central and this is Soas focused accommodation. I mean, not so much this year because they needed more students so they expanded it but usually it's just Soas students. So you get to really befriend people you are setting with and it really helps at least for me especially with COVID. I got more time to bond with the people here. So next year when I'll be in university I will find it much easier to talk to my colleagues and so and but in general just living in student accommodation I would say that it really helps to become more of a community with the general students and just your colleagues and so. Okay, great. Well, thank you everybody for attending the session today and thank you to all of our presenters. Unfortunately, we're going to have to end the session there but I will get all of the questions collated sent round to everybody and then we'll send them all in an email to you as well as a link to this session so you can watch it back and just once again, thank you everybody for attending today. Great, thanks Kim. Thanks everyone and we'll hope to see you at one point on campus because rest assured we are going back. We're not going to stay just online, so. Thank you everyone.