 Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for tuning in. This is an online webinar for the BA Creative Arts Programme at SOAS, and the reason we're doing this is because this degree is a totally new venture for us here at SOAS, and it's a very unusual degree programme, and there really isn't anything else quite like it out there. So it occurred to us that lots of people would have questions about how this degree works and the kinds of subjects that you can study within it, so we thought we would run this webinar just so you get a sense of what we have to offer and to find out more. So if you do have any questions throughout this presentation, you can make a note of it in the chat section of your screen and I'll answer any question at the end, whether it's about SOAS or whether it's about the subjects within the degree programme or anything else relating to the creative arts. My name is Richard Williams and I'm a lecturer here at SOAS in the School of Arts and I'm primarily a teacher of ethnomusicology, which is the study of society and culture through music, and in particular I focus on the music of North India and South Asia, but I've got a range of interests and I teach a variety of things here. So not many of you will necessarily have visited SOAS and you may have heard different things about us, so I thought I would start off by saying a little about the institution that is SOAS and after that I'll talk through what this degree is all about, what we mean by creative arts and then after that I'll work my way through some of the things you can expect to find here in the School of Arts, the kinds of skills and methodologies that we bring to the table and then after that I will work through the structure of the degree in a bit of detail so you can see really what you can expect if you come and join us here and I'll talk a little bit about the career prospects of the degree in the creative arts. So lots to get through today and like I say, feel free to ask any questions at the end and the slides will be available afterwards. So if you missed something, a piece of information, don't worry you can look at it again some other time. Okay, so just to get started I'm going to say a little bit about SOAS which stands for the School of Oriental and African Studies and this is the leading higher education institution in Europe, specialising in the study of Asia, Africa and the near and Middle East but also the diaspora as well and it's a really unique institution and I really can't stress that enough. So part of the time when you study a subject at university, in most universities, the concentration of your subject, of your discipline will be on Europe and North America if you're lucky and occasionally you'll have a course that talks about Asia or Africa if you're lucky and we flip that round. So we like to say let's take in all of the different aspects of human society and cultures from around the world and foreground what is happening in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and the diaspora and think through the complexities and the varieties of culture that are out there rather than just concentrating on the familiar. We are located right in the heart of London. We are next to the British Museum so you know that sort of area. We're right in the heart of London, we're incredibly central but at the same time we're very small and I think this is one of the real benefits here. A lot of students when they go to a university in London can feel a bit engulfed or a bit overwhelmed by the city but we have the advantage of being relatively small and so you get to know everyone on your course, you get to know your lecturers very well and you have a real sense of a community. It's a very human scale community in the heart of a huge metropolis. So it's that nice balance I think between having all of the advantages of a city like London but also not feeling totally overwhelmed at the same time. So altogether we have about 6,300 students studying on campus and we have an incredibly diverse student body. About 50% of our students come from outside of the UK so it's a hugely international community here and it really is an exceptional place to live and to study. I say that all of these students come from all around the world and there's a huge diversity there but I think one thing everyone here has in common whether they've just arrived or whether they've been working here for 20 or 30 years, one thing that everyone here has in common is this passionate curiosity for the world at large and for thinking outside of the box and asking questions about what else is out there. I think a lot of the students I teach here when they were at school felt a bit thwarted to an extent and kept thinking there must be more to life than this and there must be more than just reading things about English history or European ideas. There's a lot more out there and where can I find it and it was that question that brings them to Saas. Everyone I think comes to Saas for a reason. Now one of the traditional values that we have at Saas is our language training and that's part of our heritage but if you don't like learning a language do not panic. It is not compulsory at all but it is something that we offer on all of our degree programs. So we have a huge range of non-European languages some of them you would have heard of and others you will not have heard of definitely. It's an enormous range so you know typical things that students are interested in are Mandarin, Korean, Hindi, Punjabi, Vietnamese, Swahili, Burmese, there's a house there's a huge range of language options here but more than just studying grammar we like to think how do people in these languages express their ideas and think about culture. We have a hugely rich concentration of specialist staff at this university which again makes it unique and we have people who study an enormous range of topics some of which you'll be familiar with and others you may have never heard of before but here we have scope to cover an enormous variety of topics within our programs. So that brings me to this degree the BA Creative Arts and like I say this is an incredibly unusual and unique program there really is not something else like this out there. It's specifically designed for students wishing to develop a critical theoretically informed approach to the arts and the cultural industries. It's so really it's ideal I think for those students who are interested in film, who are interested in music, who are interested in literature, who are interested in painting who have a variety of different interests and they're finding it quite difficult to pin themselves down to a single discipline. So maybe there are aspects of the English that you're doing at school, English literature that you're doing at school which interest you but you think do I really want to do an entire degree in that maybe you are really excited about visual art but also want to look at it from other perspectives taking into account film and music. It could be that you love music but have never studied it formally that you can't read notes on the page but you're so interested in musical culture. These are the kinds of students we're looking for and I think they can really benefit from this program because it is fundamentally interdisciplinary and we try to bring together critical, really scholarly approaches to thinking about art, to thinking about music to watching films critically and then also to ask questions from literature as well. So it is interdisciplinary, it's also cross-cultural and by that I mean we offer expertise in the expressive arts of Asia, Africa, Middle East and the diaspora. So that means you can cover an enormous scope of things in this degree. You could be looking at African film festivals one week you could be looking at Korean pop music the next you could be studying 18th century Japanese painting in this degree. There's a huge, very rich range of things that you can do here which I'll go through in a bit more detail when I discuss the overall structure of this program. At the same time, one of the key elements with this is apart from giving you the theory the history of these traditions, expertise in these traditions we're also very interested in giving you experience and skills that you can take with you after you've graduated to engage with the creative and cultural industries and so that's thinking through how do we interpret art how do we consume music what is the influence of technology and digital media in the way we are engaging with arts from Asia and Africa. So one of the key things about this is this balance between subject knowledge and then a whole range of technical skills that will help you as you move forward after your degree and engage with industries and there's a whole range of industries that we here are very interested in it could be media and journalism the art world from museums to art houses and auction houses to the music industry, film production and film curating so again there's a really interesting scope here for a variety of skills. So how does this actually work in practice? How do we bring in that practical creative orientation to our programs? We offer a range of practical skills which you can ask about more in detail skills involving radio or producing podcasts skills in curating and thinking through how you would actually arrange an exhibition thinking through film festivals but then also opportunities for getting your hands dirty and also getting involved with creative expressive practices yourself so we have a very strong tradition here of musical performance which I'll talk about more but throughout your different modules and your courses that you cover here we have a range of ways of processing all of the things that you're learning so rather than just writing essays the whole time we'll give you a bit of flexibility so it could be that rather than writing an essay on some topics you might do a radio program or you might design an event like a festival or an exhibition we're also thinking about creative writing and different kinds of writing skills so rather than writing an essay every time how would you write a review of a concert or a review of a film? so we've really been quite imaginative in the uses of writing and the uses of the skills that we're trying to give you already with our students who are already here we have a whole range of events that they can go to or opportunities that they can enjoy so for example our music students who are taking modules which are available on the creative arts degree some of them study sound recording and throughout contacts last year we took some of our students to BBC Broadcasting House in London where they sat in the studios and approached how to make a professional standard broadcast we also organised workshops with visiting musicians with visiting artists we're also interested in creating opportunities for our students to find placements in the creative and cultural industries and we have an never-ending expanding database of contacts in the creative and cultural sectors so it's possible to use these contacts to develop opportunities for internships and for other very hands-on experiences which will put you in a very good position for when you finish with this degree equipped with this knowledge, equipped with these skills and you want to engage with the industries out there and again being placed in London gives you access to a huge range of opportunities on site you know even before you leave the campus there's a huge range of things that we have here we have an excellent concert venue and we run our own concert series we have a radio studio and recording studios we also have an excellent gallery the Brunei Gallery which has its own website so I encourage you to look at that page and to see the kinds of exhibitions that are curated here all of this is right on our doorstep and you'll be in lectures and seminars right next door to the exhibition space or gallery or down the corridor from the recording studio so these things are very much on hand and available for use so here is just a list of some of the things that you could end up doing on a practical level when you're taking this degree creating exhibitions, composing music doing fieldwork in London, ethnography in London we also have pockets of money to help people do fieldwork on specific research projects abroad the opportunity to create a film festival design a radio program we have courses that talk about the music business and think through how digital platforms and new media are shaping the way musical artists put their work out there so all of these things are possible within this program which sounds quite ambitious so how does it actually work so now I'm just going to run through the structure of this degree which is just to give you a sense of what you could look forward to so this is year one and year one is about giving you specific skills and then also giving you a taste of different subjects not many people will have studied film for example at school and so this is a way of you to get a taste of the different possibilities that you could pursue further in your degree so you begin with a course we call Great Works which gives you an overview of the different kinds of art object out there be it a novel be it a painting, be it an album we couple that with a course called Writing Across the Arts which again gives you skills to think through and write about something like music or how do you critically interpret a piece of art or how do you write a film review so these are already giving you the building blocks to build on throughout the rest of the degree Studying Popular Music is a course which is really looking at popular culture and the history of film critically with what society is doing and so that will give you skills throughout everything else that you look at introduction to film the language of film, the history of film, the theory of film and then you have a range of options so you can do an option in the history of art and archaeology you could go down a theoretical route or you could get some experience in a particular region if you want to do the art of East Asia then you can take an introductory course on that or the arts of Africa and so on you also take a music option module and these are not designed necessarily for people who are brilliant performers and have been playing the cello since they were five this is really not that kind of course it's not being intimidated by the music options there's one course on global pop which thinks about why particular forms of music like Korean pop are becoming so dominant and powerful and influential around the world there's a course on sounds and cultures which again introduces you to thinking through how to study a culture or a society through its music and then also the opportunity to do performance and we don't do performance like other places we have Southeast Asian gamelan ensemble if you've never heard gamelan before look it up on YouTube and have a listen and we just do things quite differently when it comes to musical performance here so on top of that you also have 30 credits and those 30 credits can be used for an option module taken from anywhere across Saras so if you see something in a different department and you think actually yes I've always wondered what literature from Southeast Asia looks like or I really want to know about philosophy in Africa then you can take that kind of option or you could do another option from within the School of Art so you could do another course out of these option lists that are here on display so you could do another art and archaeology course for example or there is room for a language and so that would be a good option as well so you could take Arabic here you could take Mandarin if you wanted to and really this flexibility is very exciting so the skills the themes of engaging critically with art run throughout the degree but you have the elbow room to really pursue what interests you and that continues into Year 2 which is on display here so again we have a couple of core courses that you do one is critical readings in arts and cultures and you do the critical frameworks and the tools to really interpret what you're looking at or listening to we also have a fantastic course called curating global arts which is ready up and running at science and it's a very popular module which again thinks through the challenges of how to present objects and how to curate them and how to interpret them for the general public and then we have two option courses for you which go across our different interests so again you could pursue museums and museology that would be very complimentary you could study ethnomusicology you could do something practical and very hands on like introduction to sound recording or we could study the novel and it's others which again in a very sass way is the idea of the novel as being something English or French or German what does the novel look like in China what does the novel look like when it's being written by a post-colonial author in post-colonial Sri Lanka these are the kinds of questions that we're asking because at the end of the day this is where literature is moving as we become increasingly globalised and more open minded about the art that we are engaging with we also have a range of regional options the options are incredibly varied I really encourage you to have a look at our website for the School of Arts and if you look on there and you look in our different sub-departments for music for history of art you'll see the range that we have here so I've put a few of our current options up on the screen like framing Pakistan, Japanese cinema painting in Africa, pop and politics in East Asia the world of Cuban music again this is a really exciting and unique selection of things that you can do here and again we give you more scope so you can pursue open options or you can keep cultivating that language that you started in year one the opportunities here are quite diverse you know you could use this degree to start really pushing yourself in one particular direction you could decide that you want to do regional options around the Middle East for example and start picking up the art of the Middle East the film of the Middle East novels from the Middle East you could do that work or you could cast a wide net and get a very broad range of very education that covers a whole set of different things and then finally because this is a three year degree you have this line up of choices before you so throughout your third year you'll be doing an independent study project in the creative arts and you will be assigned a tutor for that who will talk you through it and normally this would be a ten thousand word final project where you can really focus on a particular piece of research a particular question that is driving you but we also give you the option of putting in a practical element there so if you don't want to just write an essay but you also want to design a podcast or design an exhibition a film festival if you want to develop a musical composition or build a website that is an option and again that will be a really nice thing to have on your CV when you go into the city looking for work in the creative and cultural industry so there is room to be quite imaginative with that final project at the same time you have a range of taught courses again there's one which is really about the industry side of it so you can look at arts cultural modification which thinks through digital technology and how that's changing the arts world all directed studies in the creative industries and that would be where you get a sense of how a particular organisation engages with the arts be it a gallery be it with a media platform be it with a magazine so there's scope there to get a real taste before you graduate of how the creative sector works in action and then we go back to our key disciplines so there's a course to do literature there's a course to do with the art world and then a course to do with music and you have a range of flexibility there as well and then again you have a chance to do one of the option choices that excites you or again to develop your language skills so this is a flexible format really it gives you a lot of choice and it gives you the ability to cover as many interests as you want really but all the time acquiring very specific skills and expertise and I think this is really important when you're thinking about working in the creative and cultural industries in a global world so who are the kinds of students we're looking for who do we think will be excited about something like this our students at Sir Ash have are incredibly diverse they come from an enormous range of backgrounds and a lot of people come here and very much find a home here that they haven't found elsewhere they find people who have just as exciting and innovative a range of interests as they do there are lots of people here who felt like they were the odd one out at school for being interested in film in Africa here you are never strange in your interest that people here are have a huge variety of backgrounds that have led them to come into Sir Ash and we really encourage anyone with a passion for the arts for the expressive creative arts to come and join us all for people who are interested in the creative industries and who want to develop really hands-on skills you don't have to go into the creative industries of course this degree would give you a really rich sense of history theory cultural studies that would prepare you for doing further research further studies if you wanted to but if you did want to go into the creative industries you would be in a very unusual position having those practical skills those very transferable skills but also expertise and nuanced understanding of cultures from all around the world which nowhere else can really give you that depth and that breath looking at career options like I say this degree combines nuances of the global arts with the applied skills there's a vast range of career options that come out of this and we're constantly checking in with our students from our other programs to see where they've ended up and what they have been able to do with the training that we've given them here there's throughout the degree like I say there's scope for making contacts while you're studying contacts which you could then pick up at the end of your degree and explore further so possible avenues editorial and journalism auction houses musical journalism freelance media working in a gallery or in a museum working in the realm of NGOs and developing cultural sectors publishing careers in music and so on one of our students in music who finished up recently you know she did her final independent study project and she as part of that recorded EP an extended play so a sort of mini album and she had that as part of her final project and so we marked that along with her essay and that EP is now up on Spotify and she's gaining a following on social media and she's very much pursuing a career in music so there's a very exciting set of future options out there for people who take these courses so that's the end of the formal section of this presentation so just to remind you my name is Richard Williams that's my email address up there if you forget then have a look on our website the school of arts webpage in the SOAS main website feel free to get in touch feel free to drop me an email at any time thank you very much for tuning in and I hope this has been useful I'm also joined by one of my colleagues Maria from History of Art who looks after the curating side of things so if there's a question which I can't answer then to her as well so feel free to drop a message or a question at any time I'm going to sign off now and like I say my email address is up there we're going to make all of these slides available have a look at our website see the kinds of things we teach and I hope to hear from you sometime soon and best of luck for searching out for the right degree for you okay thanks very much bye