 Thank you so much for joining us today. I want to go through a couple of slides and talk about what we offer at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies. Basically, we have 12 on-campus master degrees covering international studies, diplomacy, gender and media. We also have 11 online postgraduate degrees for students from over 30 countries and four research degrees. We have some of our graduates working for UN Women in Nigeria, managing risk analysis for Lawyers Insurance in London, diplomatic services around the world, heading government relations for the World Corporate Programme, PREP, one of our graduates press officer for the Red Cross in the Congo. We have a manager for Heineken, we have EDGEOs in Palestine, and we also have many students who work in media and in PR in different parts of the world. For the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, we have four teaching centers of cutting edge degrees on-campus and online in international studies and diplomacy, gender and sexuality, media and communication, journalism, environmental development and policy. The centers are the center for international studies and diplomacy, the center for gender studies, the center for global media and communication, and the center for environmental development and policy. And we also have the research center for sustainable finance. Why study SOAS? What makes SOAS special? I think we have regional expertise in the world, in where the world is changing, makes our students competitive in the marketplace. We have the largest concentration in Europe of academic staff concerned with Africa, Asia and the Middle East. We have a high teaching quality consistently rated the highest level by our students, number one in London. We have the largest provider of graduate programs to the University of London international programs, that's including our online provisions. We have enthusiastic, diverse and dedicated students. The SOAS library is one of only five national research libraries. So what do we do at SIS? We try and look through an interdisciplinary perspective on issues that concern us in the contemporary world related to questions of power, populism, development, climate change, international relations, gender and sexuality, and other issues related to the global south in particular, inequality and sustainability. And I stop here because I need to have my colleagues talk about the specialities of the centers. Hello, my name is Darren Clash, I'm director of the international studies and pharmacy. My colleague didn't make that already gave us an overview of what we do as a whole in the school at SIS. And I think maybe at the beginning briefly summarize some of the things I'm going to get into now. People very often want to know where do our graduates go? So to answer that question, I was running into a deputy ambassador from a content European country who graduated a few years ago at a reception we had here last night for the outgoing United Nations head of human rights, Andrew Gilmour, and that session was full of our alumni who are working all over the world. My big cliche is that you find our graduates everywhere from the World Bank to the West Bank and that's fairly true. So you find business managers, two of our students who did pioneering work on the foundations of women in the United Nations are now working one in the Congo, one in Nigeria. If you look at the online web portal for the Intergovernmental Conference on Climate Change, that portal is run by one of our energy and climate graduates. And of course there are diplomats in their services all over the world engage who come out of their grants. Now in particular in the context of SIS and the ELSOAS and its regional specialities, I think there are four things we would point to within the context of our degrees in particular. The first is I think great academic rigor and overall sometimes I'll describe our degrees as something of a triple espresso or an executive master's degree because it is so intense. There's a great intense academic rigor outside of the Anglo-American paradigm. So we would see the Renaissance as coming out of Islam in the Middle Ages rather than just out of Italy in the early modern period for example. We in our programs are almost obsessed with invisibility. So in one of our degrees you can study the law and economics of corporations where normally you would need to do separate degrees to get to groups with key issues that employers and indeed the public want to assume. We also integrate skills training which is quite common in other parts of academia in for example MBA schools. Obviously they're obsessed with the practice of business but also I think in international sphere the skills set is not included and so we will help train people to engage in media training, apology analysis papers and so on and then integrated with our programs there are a range of study tour options depending on the program and these could be to North America to Ethiopia to United Nations in Geneva and so on these depend on the program. So these I think are elements each one of which is a fairly exceptional and unique selling point and together I think they produce a pretty satisfied student body. What are our degrees? Well our mainstay is on campus and online diplomacy with the world's largest provider of diplomatic education which are 400 students either on campus studying international studies of diplomacy or the online version of global diplomacy and the online version is taught in collaboration with the British foreign ministry's own diplomatic academy which I guess is a good thing that you might say in a few years time that's going to play a massive role in our policy. So these all have regional specialities in the Middle East, Zardatia, Zardatia regions and we also have very high quality programs on integrating energy and climate policy too often these subjects are studied separately and not in an integrated way. So for example the Chinese and the Germans both have an interest in renewable energy as a means of reducing their imports from strategic partners in Russia and the world where the strategic problem that you provide a strategic control that we did was completely normal in fact with analysis for example and yes you can get a taster they're finally interested in meeting in London, we have a range of opportunities in the centre and in the midst of the short sums to afford it and we also have a pretty online Mass Open Courses and some 100,000 students over the last few years have studied our mass online open courses which take a few weeks. We recommend our incoming students take them just as a refresher to get into training but if you want to know what we're about they're also a good way of introducing things. So with that I'll hand back to Dina, I will look at a reply into your individual questions but I should also say do be in touch with me by email and I happily personally have a WhatsApp call or something of the kind with any of you if you're interested. Back to you Dina. Thank you. So we have the next presenter will be from the centre for global media and it will be Dr. Sonath Bhattavya who is going to speak to you in general around what we do in media. Good afternoon everyone. I'm Sonath Bhattavya and thank you for joining us. You've heard where our students go to and the faculties we are. I'll give you a brief overview of the degrees we do as startups but more importantly the question why would you want to study media and so on. One of our main strengths is that unlike other universities in England and in London our focus on the global south is very extensive. It does not mean that we exclude the global north but as Dan said before that we pride as the global south we try and relocate our main arguments around case studies and empirical studies in the global south. We look at the media not in isolation but in the context of global politics. So Trump's rise to power and his use of media would be part of our discussions in classrooms every day. We have a very healthy mix of theory and case studies. Our classes are divided into theory intensive classes and then in the second half of your degree you point out that we encourage you to do that based on your interest or you present different cases you bring in practitioners. Another very important reason to study as ours is the mix of students that you have and the mix of staff that you will encounter. We have students from all over the world that several languages are spoken. People come to different political religious backgrounds that bring all their various experiences into the classroom. Our teaching staff you will probably not encounter as diverse teaching staff anywhere with the kind of regional expertise that we have and so as and you almost always find that somebody or the other is there to cover whatever region of the world you want to talk about. So as part of the Blue's Green Group's colleges, London School of Economics, UCL, they were all part of the same group and of course being in a university have access to the best libraries in London. We offer four degrees, one of them online, MA Global Media and Communication which is taught by Dr. Muckab, spoke to you this program focuses on the dynamic developments in media and communication. It's one of the core modules which we teach. It focuses on Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It's 180 credits. 60 of them are the main dissertation that you would write 10,000 words at the end of the degree and 120 dot credits which you'll have to take. Now these can range from within the center or you will have access to the risk process which school teaches interdisciplinary studies. But also if you want to move into economics, development, politics, you have choices which are the law. International generalisms, I convene that particular degree. We'll see that we call it international journalism instead of journalism. We think of journalism as a very sponsor journalism or practice. Again in this degree there's a very close connection with practice. One of our co-teachers is a practicing journalist at the BBC several years experience. We have visits to various newsrooms in London. We talk about global news in different parts of South Asia, Africa, what forms of journalism are practiced, citizen journalism, new things which are happening. So you'll find a very healthy with this. Moving on, there may be the development. While I convene this degree now to be co-convened between me and another staff member Dr. Mathew Bokyore who's not here. In this degree on one hand it's a very theory-intensive degree which looks at development politics of the last century to present day conversations around climate change and environmental politics. On the other it's also a very practice-based degree which engages you with the changing world of digital and digital politics and activism and how you can engage with it both within larger organizations and as individual activists. The MA Global Media Digital Cultures program is now online and you can look at it on your websites. We also have a very vibrant PhD community and you will find that within so as you will find supervisors who will be able to work with you on your particular research areas and as long as your focus is on the media which between us and the center the three of us will be able to handle and will be able to guide you in your various areas. We have summer school activities, artificial intelligence and global digital futures which we'll be talking about this summer 2020. Media and gender will be another one. We have a very vibrant PhD seminar series which we'll run through the teaching terrorist program one and two. We have annual lectures each year which you'll be part of. All in all it's a vibrant small community and we have students ranging from the 30 and 50 so you'll have a lot of time with your teachers and your fellow students and I hope to see some of you here if you have any questions do direct it to me directly at sd127andsoas.ac.uk or I'll take them after. Thank you so much Song. Now we have Santor for Gender Studies. So hello everybody my name is Dr Samia Kattun. I am a senior lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies so I'm just going to tell you about what we do at the Centre for Gender Studies. We're a fairly new young community in the sense in so as the Centre for Gender Studies has only been around for just over 15 years and it's a very it's a special in that it brings together a range of scholars from various different backgrounds to create a truly international classroom unlike any other that I have been taught in before. It houses a range of postgraduate taught degrees and postgraduate research degrees in gender studies so we're talking master's level programs and also a PhD program so the the five degree programs that we've actually got going at the moment is an MA gender studies we've got an MA gender studies with a Middle East pathway and that just you know it's a regional specification it's a regional speciality that for those people who are interested in that particular region we've got an MA gender insecurity, we've got an MA gender and law and an MA in transnational queer feminist politics and this last one that MA transnational queer feminist politics is the newest one we've got in our sort of palette of degrees. Now the reasons to study at the Centre for Gender Studies it's an incredibly active research community the we had a conference in May 2019 called Gender X decolonial transnational perspectives on and beyond the gender binary because all the students coming to the Centre for Gender Studies are graduate students there's plenty of opportunity for people to convene their own conferences as well as participate in the conferences convened by faculty members to give you a sense for the rest of the presentation of what it's actually like to study at the Centre for Gender Studies what the intellectual interests are and what's on the slavery of the gatherings the active research community that holds us together is the seminar series we've got a year-long seminar series in which there is actually a really active attempt to cross over that space between activist communities, policy networks and organisations and the intellectual work that we do at the Centre for Gender Studies. So for example just last week we had a round table on a world in revolt approaching global protests on the feminist perspective and we had students and intellectuals talking about revolutions in Algeria, in Hong Kong, in India and also in Iraq. So it allowed for the bringing together of feminist perspectives on parts of the global south that are never necessarily talked about together because we have the lens of feminist thought sort of guiding how we're looking at the world. There's incredible opportunity in the classroom at the Centre for Gender Studies to actually bring together these very diverse places in the global south and actually make for intellectual and political sessions that are not really possible in many other places in the world. We also have a very very very exciting workshop series for PhD students which buttresses a year-long PhD Mfield seminar program that we do in the first year of the PhD. So the research community is held together not only by these courses but also by a number of visitors and what brings all of these sort of different strands of the Centre for Gender Studies together is we're very committed to sort of thinking through gender through a non-eurosentrical lens. Now this is something you're not going to get anywhere to the same extent as you do as so as. As has already been mentioned by my colleagues the faculty, the student body are so international facing that this is a space from which studying gender in the global south is made possible by the incredible networks and expertise that the faculty actually bring to the classroom. So I'm just going to very briefly talk about the degree structure for the MA Gender Studies. I urge you to take a look at the website for the other degrees that I mentioned that we offer. But the MA Gender Studies is the one that is our most popular degree because it is the most flexibility. So it's a year-long course for a full-time student and there's a dissertation at the absolute core of it. What you do is a dissertation over the entire year and in addition to that you do a year-long theory course called Gender Theory. Now this again, the focus here is on non-eurosentry perspectives on studying gender. Feminism is often thought of as something that has come out of the West. Well here at the Centre for Gender Studies at Syres this is a claim that we challenge and the sort of eurocentres of one's thought is we're at the cutting edge of actually questioning that, challenging that. So the Gender Theory course is at the one of the core courses and the other one is dissertation methods where you really learn how to write and then you have your optional modules. Now as my colleagues have already gestured towards the breadth of modules available to the students who come to Syres are unlike any other. So as a Centre for Gender Studies student you can do modules in Islamic Studies. You can do modules in Romans in the Hindavi canon. It is quite extraordinary the way that you can actually pick and choose depending on what your regional interests are and also what your disciplinary interests are. So the final thing I would say about in my presentation is why study at the Centre for Gender Studies. Now if you are wanting to see the world through a finance lens this is the place where we will equip you with the tools to be able to think through gender, race, class, sexuality together in a way that other gender studies programs across the UK and across the world are not quite able to. And this is because Syres is a very very very unique location in looking outwards to various regions of the global south together. It is a portal to global feminist networks so I urge you to come and join us in this community that is built on feminist principles. If you have any further questions please get in touch with me directly. You can email me at samia.cafun at Syres.edu.uk. I'll be very happy to answer any of your questions. And Professor Shankar is going to talk about the Centre for Environment Development and Economic Policy and looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Thank you Dina. Hello everyone. My name is Bhavani Shankar. I'm Director of the Development Development Policy which we call SEDUP for short. And SEDUP in many ways nicely complements the sort of other centre-based talks that you know just listen to but it's gender or it's media or it's diplomacy. We essentially concentrate on what we see as the biggest problem that the world grapples with now and into the next hundred years which is how do you feed a growing global population while managing the environment systems and resources when we study that. So essentially we're all about environment natural resources transitions towards a less resources intensive and more environmentally friendly future. So that is the rationale for SEDUP. And we do a lot of almost all of this work but exclusively set in low-military countries but equally evolving to the global community and its environmental responsibilities. And we are like the other centres that you've heard about extremely similar. This is our, this is basically our USP if you want to say that base. So this is what SEDUP does. Let me just describe to you a bit about program apps. We have a very simple structure. We offer two MSDs both of which are online exclusively. One is in climate change and development and the other is in sustainable development. And these have been program apps that have evolved from a suite of program apps that we used to run before and over a period of time they consolidated and sort of essentially built into these two broad areas of teaching that we do climate change and sustainable development. Running through all the material that we teach is essentially a social science focus. So climate change does various ways of teaching climate change. You might learn in some places the science of climate change. We are very much social science focus is the people in the centre of it and while we have the essential science background as a necessary first step in understanding the social issues it is really the people in society that are at heart of the material that we present to you. So and we are very interdisciplinary. So we draw on everything ranging from economics to sociology, to policy sciences, to organizations of gender, politics, history all of this cuts through the material that we present in our online programs. We also have an online campus PhD program in development and policy that I will talk about at the end. So if you look at our course structure, the structure of our courses essentially is fairly simple. Students typically take four modules which each carry 30 credits and they write a fairly substantial dissertation. So the dissertation like a couple of other centres is right at the core of what students engage in. It gives them the chance to zone in on the particular areas of interest whether that's a region or it's a particular topic and develop that through their studies as they go on. So the way in which we design this we've got a structure where you first do a first module which is typically what we call a core module, 16 weeks and then you do eight weeks of dissertation initial thinking, developing a topic and then you do another module and then when that finishes you do more dissertation work. So the dissertation work is essentially interspersed between the modules. So you continue developing your dissertation all through the program which is typically a two-year program but people can stay on the program for roughly five years. So it really suits the kind of people who are limited time who are perhaps living in other parts of the world and who are essentially wanting to upgrade their skills or pick up new skills in these areas and so it is built around people with those constraints. So if you look at the actual modules in these MSCs, if you were doing climate change development for example you would do a core module in climate change development which brings in all the basic arguments around climate change adaptation, resilience and so on. On the other hand if you're doing sustainable development it would bring in theories of sustainable development in a core module so you'll do one of those as a core and then you'll have a whole bunch of electives to choose from. So I've set out here a sample of the electives that are available, climate change adaptation, low carbon development, energy and development, full security, global environmental change, urban sustainability, poverty, water and land management but that's what, the list is not limited to that. You can, you've heard about the very exciting modules that other centers in the School of International Studies offer. Now we have the ability for you to pick online modules from those centers. So for example you could decide to do gender and sexuality online course from Center for Gender Studies or you might do a media course or you might do a diplomacy module if you're interested in that. So we are set up to where you can pick and choose electives from across our offerings in different centers and that I think makes for a really exciting way to tailor your particular interests. So again where do our students come from and where do they go to? The nice thing is we have a huge variety of academic backgrounds so we do not require that you have studied for example economics or that you eat sociology or whatever it is. We have people ranging from those who study ecology and conservation to people who study social anthropology, people who study history, a variety of backgrounds. What is really important is good performances in the background and a willingness to be genuinely interdisciplinary and engaging in the material in a interdisciplinary way and learn to be other students as well. We also have like usually diverse levels of experience amongst our students. Many of them are newly graduated students who have just finished coming off a degree to fairly senior management of international organizations, people who are just looking to upgrade their knowledge but who are already fully senior positions. So you'd be surprised at the kind of people who sign up who you might think are extremely busy people. Somehow managers still squeeze in the time to get to the programs and study incomplete and they're more struck by amazed by how these people manage their time. So it's a whole range of people and everyone in between. A range of professional backgrounds, so it could be somebody in NGO management, it could be somebody very much in the field who is on a day-to-day basis talking to people and essentially dealing with development at the front line. Two people were doing, for example, working in the city, working financial accounting. So again, quite amazed by the sorts of people who actually do our courses and the range of backgrounds that they come from. And they learn tremendously from each other and there's discussions which happen and you have people from these different experiences and different backgrounds talking. It's fascinating to observe. What do our students do at the finish? Well, many of them use their qualifications, new qualifications to move up their career lives. So quite often people find that they hit a ceiling and unless they have another advanced qualification in a specific area, let's say their department or ministry or whatever is now taking on a climate change role or a sustainable development role, they find that to make the next move they have to actually get a qualification. Some people are actually trying to change careers. So there are many people and I have this case, I mentioned financial accounting there because we have a person from a major bank, very well established, who essentially wanted to quit the whole thing and look for new meaning in life. Essentially, they were born into a climate change, they wanted to learn about climate change and so they signed up for a program as a way of actually moving into a completely different career. And there are people of course who also transition towards advanced research degrees who actually want to do something slightly different. So, which brings me now to the next slide which is about, if there are any people here interested in actually an advanced research degree, we do offer a non-campus offering, which again, it's called a PhD pathway in development, environment and policy. And Peter again is interested in that again, it's set up to enable students to do an interdisciplinary PhD study with policy focus. The way in which it's set up is that for example, you can have a joint supervision from somebody in our center or in our school, but you could be co-supervisor somebody in say history, that's your other discipline that you're interested in. Or even outside, there was a discussion earlier about the Bloomsbury area where there are other colleges. So for example, you could take, could have a joint supervisor in the London School of IT, which is a major public health institution. So it is set up to do, make those kinds of collaborations possible. And you can do this part-time as well, that's quite often very useful for students. And typically students will do some research methods, but they'll also do modules from across the last number of institutions. So, collaborative, general practitioners, resilience, renewable energy, energy and climate policy, these are things that we know for and that we are specializing in. But I'm going to stop there pretty much, and thank you very much for your time. Again, if you have any questions at all, your most welcome, contact me, b.shankar, s-h-a-n-k-a-r, a-s-o-s-o-p-c-d-u-k, and we're happy to talk to you, or directly to the likewise. Thank you. I'll just add this back now. So thank you very much everyone, and thank you for joining us. We've got maybe a couple of questions that have appeared on the slide, but I just wanted to emphasize why we're called into disability studies and to understand what it means. In a sense, what we encourage is thinking outside boxes. So if you are interested in kind of the question around climate change, so how can we look at climate change through the gender perspective? How does it impact gender issues? How does it impact equality? On another level, we can think about it in terms of development, but also we can think about it in terms of media and communication. What are the narratives around which the climate change debate has been moving into? What is forgotten in those narratives, and what do we need to emphasize? So in a sense, we are moving towards trying to think about themes that matter to all of us as human beings across the world, and trying to look at each of them by looking at the ways in which the different centers can contribute to the debate. And we encourage our students to also take part in that debate, not only through the classrooms, but also through podcasts, through kind of conferences, but also through blocks. So really encouraging you to look at the different center blocks that we have. I think we had a question to Dan around the study tours. Well we have a range of study tours these days. For the campus programs, I think it was a particular question about Geneva, where we've been to for some years, or we may diversify and do Vienna for a change next year. But anyway, we go for a week to Geneva by train. It's much more convenient and exclusively friendly. And we have a range of programs partly organized by the UN and partly organized by ourselves, some posted by the British government. And we have the opportunity to interface with officials, quite secret officials from maybe a dozen different UN agencies and NGOs based in Geneva, dealing with human rights, humanitarian relief all the way through to the telecommunications union, which deals with the internet. So the broad range of institutions in Geneva. And part of that also is that we host a diplomatic reception. So students typically will be in touch with the diplomats from their country and invite them to a diplomatic reception. And we'll also provide a range of UN staff and students use this for networking opportunities. And the final day of the tour, typically groups of students will be hosted informally by their nation state. And to give you one example, being too specific, one of our students was very disappointed that their ambassador had not turned up at the reception. The car was there, the badge was there, they accepted, hadn't come. So the student asked, could they go visit the mission? So they did, they went to the random doorbell, the mission. The receptionist said, oh, we thought it was tonight, not last night. They had a long story short. The person concerned got an internship at the job of the Human Rights Council and is now a special assistant to the foreign minister within, I think, an 18-month trajectory of dealing with that rejection in a highly constructed way. The skills were addition to the traditional analytical skills, we find students are trained in media presentation skills, which doesn't just help them in the workplace, but we also prepare people for public presentations and media. The negotiating skills prove very valuable to students. Indeed, I've had emails from those who've gone on a year or two and found themselves negotiating, saying how useful it was to have this training in negotiating skills. And one of the most common, the common useful ones is that policy analysis that is on a government or an NGO track, you're taking an SU and writing a policy brief for your boss about how they should deal with a particular situation. And these fundamentals are rarely taught in a postgraduate level across the sector. Indeed, even at some of the elite U.S. schools, these sorts of skills are only dealt with marginally. And the people who are doing it are current and former media personalities. You find yourself in a room being taught by someone that's a familiar case. Yes, I saw you on television last night presenting the news. And then on the negotiating side, we have a team who train countries to take on diplomatic roles. So for example, a few years ago, the State of Jordan had to, I don't think 48 hours of notice, take a seat on the Security Council because Saudi Arabia had declined for political reasons for the first time in history to take a seat on the Security Council. And the team that Jordan brought in to train them are the same training team who train you. So hopefully that gives a reasonable survey of what we have on offer. But how do you happily take more questions? I'm the same for all of us. If there are any more questions, can you see any more questions? If there are no more questions, we'll probably say thank you for coming and thank you for some of the questions and hopefully you can get in touch with us. You're very welcome. So email me at dp27atsoas.ac.uk and dm27atsoas.ac.uk. Thank you.