 and I will go through, I'm going to pop my slides up so you can see them as well. So this is a session called, provocatively called, High Gender Studies as well, great to hear. Okay, so this is provocatively called, Viral Feminisms, Studying Gender, Sexuality and Law in Times of Crisis. And what I'm hoping to do is bridge both the programs within the School of Law and the School of Interdisciplinary Studies that cross between gender and law in particular, probably with a slightly kind of broader focus on the gender components of that, rather than necessarily the legal bits, but that will come up and I will talk to my courses which include a legal component as we go through and which can also talk to who's one of my current students, who's here with us today. So why Viral Feminisms? Well, first of all, I have to admit that I stole my, from my colleague, Yasmin Gunnatananam, who is a colleague at Goldsmiths University and came up in a discussion we were having and I, I thought it was just a really kind of neat capture of the potential for existing feminist literature to perhaps be framed as a response to some of the kind of current crisis modes that we find ourselves in. Yasmin's work on feminist methods, race, migrants, care, debility and frailty, and is just a massive inspiration on my own work and there'll be some links to some of her writing as we go through. But in framing the lecture Viral Feminisms, I also wanted to reflect on, I guess, two interrelated aspects of what I think we might all be experiencing at the moment. And that is this kind of very prominent calling of, for a kind of reimagining of the world through, through the idea of care and community. I've sat with human rights scholars and colleagues that saw us talking about how they see the end of the pandemic as a moment when we might rethink how we build our communities and how we might centre care. I have to say I was a little bit shocked when they said this because I was like, oh, have you not read any feminist literature? You don't need to rethink the world to centre care and community. There are plenty of blueprints for doing this already. And I think this is most particularly in the histories of black feminist writing. So my colleague at Queen Mary University, Aziza Johnson, writes in response to COVID-19 and again, I've got a link coming up on a slide. And this is Aziza's words. And as I feel my rage bubbling over at this superficial and delayed concern with health and well-being, I know that rage is the last emotion they want to process from a disabled black Muslim woman. And this is in a blog post that she wrote about her own kind of struggles at the moment dealing with simultaneously with cancer and COVID-19, but also the politics of race, politics of care, politics of voice. And it really brought home to me that so many feminist writings have long kind of considered many of the themes that are being pushed to the forefront at the moment. And this element is in kind of theorising care, vulnerability, and different ways of living. I guess we could pick up on the viral aspect of viralizing something that is kind of spread in a more of a horizontal, you know, this is what's kind of challenging our politicians and political structures, which are so used to kind of a top-down and imposed structure. And instead, we have knowledge about care, knowledge about the disease that's kind of travelling in these horizontal ways that, again, already exists in the framing of feminist, queer, trans, critical race scholarship. So perhaps what we need to do, and this is, I guess, the theme of what I'm talking about, look to the peripheries of our dominant knowledge frames if we want to imagine the world anew. So rather than this is a starting point, perhaps this is a looking back point for many feminist scholars. So in terms of who I am, just a quick kind of brief picking up on that. I'm a reader in gender studies and international law at service. So welcome to all of you just joining the session. We've only just begun. And I hold a peculiar place at SIRS in the sense that I work across two different departments. I was originally employed in the School of Law, but I'm also now employed in the Centre for Gender Studies. I have a very close working relationship with both departments, and part of the work that I've done is being set up for MA in gender studies and law, as well as an LLM in law and gender. So nearly all of my courses have some students from the law school, some students from gender studies. I'm sure some students from other departments as well certainly join us on some of our classes, but I'm sure you've already looked and seen that we also have a kind of much broader range of gender studies modules that many of you might be interested in. My own research focuses on predominantly collective security and feminist methodologies within international law, and at different moments I might come up with some of that as we go forward. So I just, for those of you that have just kind of arrived, I also want to just introduce Chandi again. Do you want to say a quick hi? I think your microphone should be working and just tell us a bit about your degree and your modules. Oh maybe she's just up to play. Oh yeah. Oh you're there. Can you hear me? Yeah we can hear you. Okay. Hi everyone. I'm Chandini, I'm one of Gina's students. I'm doing the LLM in Human Rights Conflict and Justice, and this, well it's only a one-year program, so this is my last term. And if anyone has any kind of student related questions they want to ask me to let me know. I think you can message in the chat. To me individually, I'm not sure, or I don't know if Gina, we can work out a way that I can answer questions offline after the things finished. Yes, so we can have a question section at the end, or if you want to throw questions as we go forward through the chat, that's absolutely fine. And I guess also you're taking the gender piece and international law course at the moment. So how do you find it being in the interdisciplinary classroom? Because I think that's one of the very specific things about interdisciplinary modules is that we do have very interdisciplinary classrooms, students from across the school. I think it's probably my favorite thing about doing the gender modules is the interdisciplinary nature of the learning, especially at the beginning of the term, you know, when everyone kind of goes around and says the name where they're from and what their kind of background and study is and what they're studying now. It kind of creates this little microcosm where you get so many different views from so many different places and you're all still talking about the same topic, and I really think that's the beauty of interdisciplinary classrooms. And I also think just generally that it's almost a shame that disciplines are so separate because so much magic comes from where disciplines combine and it's just such an act of looking at most topics. So I think it's really valuable. Yeah, I think it's also, I really like that last point. I think it in particular stops, I guess, as someone that kind of went through a lot of disciplinary background with kind of constraints of that thinking because the colleagues from different departments sort of will challenge the language or challenge the assumptions within another discipline. I think that's really, really powerful. But also our methodologies. Sophie, are you all right? I know you've dropped in and out. I've got mine. I wonder if it connects. It's not good. Send us a message in the chat if you need some support in the background, and I've probably got someone that can help you, Sophie. I know you just see now on your third attempt at entering the room. Thanks, Chandi. So I want to move on. This is what I might outline for what I'm going to go through now. So I just have a very short slide on the multiple side of COVID-19 and sort of contingency plans and what we're hoping will happen and what will happen if what we hope happens can't happen before I talk a little bit about the kind of gender sexuality law study that you can do at SARS and then a kind of much more in-depth digging into the kind of feminism and gender studies that we do at SARS as well. Okay. So just quickly, first of all, just so you all know, obviously it's probably at the forefront of your mind and you probably or may or may not know that term three at SARS for this current year. So we run on a three-term program. We've just finished term two. The last week of that was online and all of term three is going to be online, including our assessments, any lectures, any outstanding tutorials or student meetings, including around dissipation. So in that sense, it's been a bit rushed, but we've certainly managed to kind of, I hope, kind of move the programs online. Our hope is and our expectation is that we'll be on campus in October for the new academic year, although of course, students come for welcome week in the last week of December and you'll see the aspect there. I'm sorry, it's off the slide. Actually for anyone taking the MA and gender studies in law or an MA in law, so if you don't have a law degree already, but taking a law program, you would be expected to come earlier in September for the pre-tensional law course. But for all of those programs at this moment, we're working to be on campus with backup kind of processes around, you know, some of our cohort aren't there mechanisms for people to keep up to date with the learning through recorded lectures such as this or, you know, if heaven forbid, we're not on campus at all an alternative online learning practice. We're running our summer schools and our English language learning over the summer also this year. If you're super, super anxious, you might want to look at the MA in Gender, Sexuality and Global Politics, which is our first so as gender studies full MA that will be online and the first intake is due to commence and join us in October 2020 and does include a new module on gender sexuality and law, which we're currently finessing and should have it up online soon. If you want some information on that, I think the best thing is just email me directly. Great. So there are different ways that you might be coming and for example, I know some of you are looking to come on to other programs that take some of our gender studies modules, which is absolutely fine. As we were just talking about, one of the things that makes many of our courses so rich and we have many students across different disciplines that join us. If you are enrolling in the Centre for Gender Studies, we run three different programs, the MA in Gender Studies and Law, which is the one that I convene. The MA in Gender Studies, which is our biggest program and I know some of you have talked to me mentioned that this is what you're coming to study anyway and our new MA in Transnational Queer Feminist Politics, which is a kind of a revised version of what was previously called the MA in Gender and Sexuality. If you're in the School of Law, you might be in Gender Studies modules through any of our LLM or MA in Law programs, but we do have a specific LLM in Gender and Law, although it's a little bit more constrained than the Gender Studies modules. In relation to gender and law in particular, I've got a list of the modules there that you might be taking, Gender Sexuality Law, Theories and Methodologies, Gender Sexuality Law, Topics, which comes off the page, Gender, Peace and International Law, Gender Uncontrollable and International Law, but I think our broader modules, Gendering, Migration and Diaspora for example, Gender and Security and Africa module, all also speak often to kind of legal and political arrangements and there is a certain amount of crossover and kind of broader discussion. Great, so I wanted to start by thinking in terms of content about how we approach gender and feminism in, so as, I don't think it's always self-evident and what point of feminist history is histories of gender that we think about and the notes I've got written here are, How We Understand Gender It's So Us and I've written Intersectional, Post-Colonial, Knowledge, Frames and Epistemologies and I guess if we were in a class at the moment, they would be the bits that I wanted you to write down, Intersectional, Post-Colonial, Knowledge, Frames and Epistemologies. So I'm sorry for the kind of size of the text, I didn't want to leave anything out, but in particular I guess and certainly when I think about gender sexuality and law, but I think more broadly in the approach to gender access is a commitment to intersectionality and there's a quote there from Yasmin who I spoke about before in relation to the pandemic and COVID-19 in particular where she says the pandemic is also surfacing long-standing feminist concerns and I guess this is in part my response to the pandemic as well. These are long-standing feminist concerns around care and community that are perhaps being voiced more widespread, more widely at the moment and she says and disillusionment with the constraints of heteromasculinist and ableist approaches to bodies and subjectivity as well as the enduring colonial and racial legacies of method and knowledge economies. It's a great quote but it needs a little bit of unpecking and what does it have to do with it intersectional feminism? Well I think it pushes us to think about intersectionality as not a kind of list of identities or kind of means to identity politics so it's not about blaming a particular label and owning a label it's more about looking at how power privileges certain identities and reproduces the kind of privilege of certain identities over time with an enduring kind of legacy of both colonial and racial histories and an intersectional feminist approach therefore is interested in the methods and the knowledges that ground power intersectionality of course as I'm sure you're aware emerges from critical race writing in the U.S. particularly the work or the the Talamitz office framed and phrased by Kimberley Crenshaw in the early 1990s but critical race feminism in the U.S. extends well beyond Kimberley Crenshaw's work and of course what told us as critical race feminists do more broadly is that gender doesn't operate in isolation it operates action tandem with other power structures in our communities and Kimberley Crenshaw was particularly interested in the intersection of race and gender and looked at how that intersection between racial discrimination and gender discrimination in the U.S. was more than race plus gender but that's something qualitatively different happens at the intersection of race and gender for racialized and gendered subjects. Now if you've read Crenshaw if you've read critical black feminism critical race feminisms from the U.S. you'll know that this then isn't a project that is interested in kind of reproducing identities it's looking at how political legal economic structures in and of themselves reproduce and alienate some while empowering others within the structures we already have. Intersectional feminisms today obviously look beyond gender and race look at sexuality ableism religion ethnicity and well beyond to articulate and mobilize around the idea of intersectional harms and discrimination interlocking with each other. For feminists interested in law I think what's most important from the most important kind of takeaway from this is to appreciate that if we have a gender law reform policy that doesn't think through kind of intersectional privilege and intersectional power what we reproduce in our gender law reform is the capacity really only for some women to advance and the reproduction of intersectional harms in other spaces so that we find women whose identities otherwise much uh elite groups in society are often advised we have a law reform or if we think of this in a more global sense we see gender law reform in use as a tool that's imposed on some communities rather than others so it becomes part of civilizing tools. The other aspect of intersectionality for me is always a kind of methodological one so taking the end of the quote there it's about thinking about how diverse speaking subjects love may manage quote in the second part of this slide the diversity of speaking subjects and the forms of expression and treatment treatment themselves so I think intersectional politics also asks us to ask about the conditions for speech the conditions for agency and I'm sure you'll get the slide sent to you after the lecture and when you do what I encourage you to do is to click on this slide which actually has um has a short trailer for latter money's film the politics sorry the poetics of fragility embedded in it and you can see Angela Davis there really very beautiful evocative exploration of fragility which seems I think ever so timely at a moment when of course we're talking about vulnerability and fragility globally locally regionally nationally and again it just strikes me that we have some sophisticated theorizing around this rather than kind of this preoccupation with oh there's a new new way of doing community that we're doing at the moment a new way of doing care um and I want to encourage you to think about that not just as um a knowledge framing or who speaks and how we speak but people embedded kind of reorientating of the methods on which we enact and kind of uh so uh moving forward um the next slide um actually picks up how I've been monitoring the the crisis uh if we if we see it as a crisis or global pandemic uh as gendered um and why would I even question the idea of whether we see it as a crisis this is often a slide because there's so much feminist writing around how crisis thinking in and of itself is a gendered form of thinking that lends itself towards masculine solutions and embedding kind of a gendered binary in our thinking between masculine and feminist feminine not feminist form uh and um I guess this leads to asking the question of how does a program on gender such as the courses you might do at SARS but also kind of a theorization of gender such as intersectionality as we've been talking about also wider approaches such as colonial feminisms or transnational feminisms uh such as what we we deal with that look at at SARS deal with a kind of tension between focusing on women's lives and theorizing gender because to see they're two slightly different things I don't think they're unrelated and I think they're really important to think through in our approach um so just surveying the type of literature that's merging around the gender of COVID-19 I've seen quite a bit of writing on women and disaster responses in the sense of who's being cared for how caring for personalised who has access to care gendered vulnerabilities I'm sure we've all seen the kind of reports about raised risks with respect to domestic violence in particular and gendered ideas around protection about who needs protection in the state and just how protection is sort of narrativised in the kinds of public discourses we've seen at the moment and of course a little bit of attention to the idea of women and decision making in crisis times I think there's an interesting article going around that sort of looks at I think Prime Minister of Iceland, Norway and New Zealand who are all women and kind of makes a case for their kind of response to the crisis or COVID-19 being different to that of other states which I found really really very interesting of course if we focus on women's lives we always risk um we risk essentialising their lives and making some claims that perhaps women are this or women are biologically inclined in this way or women's nature is such that they are vulnerable and in need of protection while men are the agents men are the experts and men are the decision makers in the in the world so I think this kind of work is really important perhaps undoes that some of that and of course one of the most interesting aspects of COVID-19 is that we've seen more male deaths so there's a gendered kind of variance but it's not necessarily creating a vulnerability for women but what does it mean to talk about women but actually wanting to theorise gender and I think that going back to this idea in the former slide about thinking about power structures and privileging being co-opted into gender so it's not actually about necessarily finding what is what is essential to being a women but looking at how our societies organise around gendered modes of operating and that's where I think the second set of the second list three topic becomes quite important to us um so a reference there Hilary Charlesworth's famous it's famous international lawyers anyway peace international law discipline of crisis which is in the modern law review is very easy to find and it's actually about humanitarian intervention it's not about the kind of disasters and pandemic moment but in this piece she reminds us that this idea of looking at the crisis moment and trying to make a decision during the crisis can neglect the kind of long history of decisions particularly political and economic decisions that have helped contribute to the crisis so for those of us in the UK we I think we're watching our kind of a conscious forgetting of the last 10 years of austerity the austerity politics which have cut back the resources to our hospitals and our health systems and the role that they are playing in the actually production of crisis at this moment now Charlesworth says crisis thinking is gendered because it forces us often and she's talking about insecurity and conflict in the same humanitarian crisis forces us towards militarised thinking instead of a politics of the everyday of course COVID-19 is pushing us back into the politics of everyday today I'm talking to you from my home rather than my workplace or my home is now my workplace and all of us are kind of navigating the kind of complexity of the public sphere entering our everyday so perhaps it will be a moment where we move away from crisis thinking that is gendered and we perhaps will something different through using tools such as gender as an intersectional tool where it's not enough to just look at women's lives but to think about how women's lives constructed through the production of gender, race, sexuality, ableism and how they inform the kind of capacity that access resources to access knowledge to actually speak and be perceived as holding knowledge or expertise. So crisis thinking it potentially kind of reconstruct the histories of inequalities the way that inequalities might already be enshrined and embedded in the structures in which we've got to work within assumptions about who works how we work our where expertise lies and I think COVID-19 has of course been very interesting you know in sense of who's been articulated and identified as an essential worker at this moment in time who we rely on from supermarket employees to the cleaners that keep going to work although I have to say I've seen very very little written about the cleaners the cleaners in hospitals the cleaners in number 10 Downing Street who are doing who are still going to work throughout the whole pandemic. So the next slide puts a couple of references for you so what I wanted to do was to give you some starting points to go and do some further so one of the ones that I've referred to a little bit already is the Feminist Review Blog I have to admit my own bias I'm part of the Feminist Review Collective and we sat down a couple of weeks ago and talked about you know how we wanted to respond and I think we wanted to pay attention to feminist methods and feminist practices of working around care and community so Yasmin's piece that I drew on before you can if you once you get you can either google Feminist Review Blog and you'll find it quickly or you once you've got the slides you can click on the link embedded in the slide and so Yasmin talks about feminist method as necessary and as a part of the work that we might all be doing at this moment a much broader reading list the second one that I encourage you to have a look at this is by my colleague Owino Akerch in the centre of Agenda Studies who's put together a feminist reading list on care, crisis and pandemics and this is not a collection of writing on COVID-19 but a collection of writing on disaster politics on pandemics that already exist this kind of recognition we don't necessarily need to start anew so the list goes through writing on Ebola, HIV, AIDS and of course Hurricane Katrina as well as other you know big crisis that we've seen in recent history and of course the communities that are writing this literature where we can find the expertise from Africa, LGBT, EUIA communities, African-American communities so I think it's about remembering when they're like wow at this kind of moment when things might change practically we might be theorizing or re-theorizing care and community to not forget the knowledge on the peripheries of mainstream writing even mainstream writing on gender where we can see quite different kinds of accounts and possibilities already have been thought and kind of problematized. The third one is in response to coronavirus and I have to say it's one of the most satisfying references I've found along my journeys in the last few weeks and it's written by a group that title it Asian-American feminist antibodies care in the time of coronavirus. It's very beautiful design that's online again the link is in the slide but you can also probably Google it to find it as well. Drawings, very short pieces, interjections and kind of interruptions on how we imagine care and which bodies receive and give care particularly in the context also some more practical knowledge and love this kind of re-thinking our methodologies in that piece as well. The last piece from just before who might be familiar with is an older piece again hominationalism as a somebody viral travels effective sexuality is really and I'm sorry that the full title has just scrolled off my page I'm just going to write here it's actually in the Kingdall global law review again into google and you will find it online I think it's volume four yeah you can see volume four is already there so just pop back into the chat for you as well um but I think the reason I want you to maybe think about reading something like Poir's writing is thinking about the role of sexuality and the politics of sexuality uh as again already theorizing many of the things that so many of us are facing experiencing firsthand or maybe contemplating and reflecting uh at this during the pandemic and the first of those is um how we theorize care and of course if you want to theorize care you can't you can't not look to radical uh black feminist writing uh writers such as Audrey Lord and you know and pay attention to how they articulated a theory of care that is both entwined to a theory of sexuality a feminism and an anti-racism project these are theorizations of care that move beyond essentialism um and what I mean by that what I mean by that is that um I think when we theorize care what we're not saying is that women are natural caregivers that there's something in uh in a female psyche that produces an affinity with care but rather that within feminist politics there is a deep theorizing of care for example when we talk about this uh in the editorial collective that I belong to feminist review one of the things we talk about is care's responsibility uh and that one of the ways that we invoke care amongst the feminist collective is through responsibility for the work that we take on taking responsibility for the collective kind of life and space which which we which we enter though care is work rather than something intrinsic that care is a choice in the way that we uh build a feminist space and what we pay attention to as opposed to something that is uh intrinsically or essentially feminine or associated with women um the second point on kinship uh I think uh the best writing on kinship comes through queer projects that theorize alternatives to the heteronormative family uh the idea of queer queer kin as a chosen active space of kinship um and as well many of us are stuck in our homes maybe on our own maybe in family networks that we maybe otherwise no longer choose to spend so much time within uh or maybe in friendship groups that we have unexpectedly be constrained uh within and constrained by and I do think one of the things we might see is a theorizing of kinship a re-theorizing of kinship but what I would argue is that in fact we might start by looking queer kind of understandings of kinship uh someone like Jasper Foire's writing around the effective uh and and the role of um the production of sexualities that's not about subjectivity not about identity politics moving beyond rights frameworks uh and thinking about how knowledge kind of moves in our communities and choosing alternative spaces for kin for me this is related to ideas around community but what I want to talk about here is uh theorizing community through transnational feminisms which is much of the work that informs the writing that I think and and undertakings that we draw into the center for gender studies and the kind of gender modules that you do at SOAS but for me transnational feminisms is about horizontal accounts of activism histories of kind of mobilizing from the local to the global which is of course what we're seeing at this moment kind of horizontal functioning of community where there is um in a sense um you know what who's around you who's closest to you has become uh incredibly important I know uh in my own street there is a kind of renewed sense of community through a local uh social media group that allows us to connect while we're all constrained and confined to our homes um but of course these aren't new transnational feminisms have always done this and I guess we can look also into uh very very recently in London the Grenfell Tower and the kinds of theorizing and voicing and agency that's been expressed uh through the activism there uh refugee support structures again we theorize from the local to the global but always hold these ideas around care and kinship about how we take responsibility how we provide and who we see as our kin around us and of course violence against women networks which have functioned for a long time for local to the global and and by example I mean for example violence against women and women's shelters of course have to work at a local level they support local women uh they take in uh those most vulnerable they also knowledge share they work in networks for global and regional well beyond so this kind of horizontal kind of traveling of knowledge uh long exists in international activism and as a lawyer I know an international lawyer I know the power of those local networks they uh inform and um you know are heard often at an at an international level although they are grounded very much in local understandings of power and privilege and navigating that and kind of responding and challenging to that and so then number five the sort of fifth area where we might go back to feminist histories feminist reading lists and writing is around security insecurity militarization and crisis so this picks up again a little bit of the work from Charles worth that I mentioned in the last slide but I think the COVID-19 moment really does ask us some serious quest questions about how we frame security and insecurity how we respond to crisis and where we see the kind of most effective mechanisms for that and I think much of the work that we're doing it's us is already looking into and responding to global insecurity in important ways and it is a reminder that actually the best way to understand insecurity crisis and militarization is go to those places where that is experienced and understood firsthand rather than theorizing it from the position of the global north where the solutions have been ineffective again and again in gendered ways in racialized ways in and all the intersections so um I obviously could just keep talking you might have put up so I've got but I'm gonna end there it's just a kind of taster for you I think that you know there's a hope that the center for gender studies modules allow both theorization a kind of platform for different methodologies and ways of thinking about everything from security and insecurity to histories of knowledge to intersectionality what we mean by gender except but in terms of the legal work in particular I think what I'm most interested in working with students is understanding that we already have significant gender law reform in different international spaces in different national spaces you could think about where you come from what legal jurisdictions you've lived in and you can probably identify a handful of kind of gender law reforms that have happened around violence against women perhaps around maybe abortion laws uh anti-discrimination laws so I guess for me one of the things we do at SIRS is think about we live in a world where gender law reform has uh happened and some of it's happened not all of it obviously how do we understand critiquing appraisal laws how is it that we still live gendered lives that we see the gendered kind of power dynamics continuing to influence uh different lives so it's about situating legal change within these kind of transnational feminist networks and asking how it is that the translation from feminist transnational network into law doesn't produce the kinds of changes that we will have perhaps hoping for personally I'm interested in the nexus between feminist activism protests and policy how do we move from the state of space of protest to see a policy on the books yet the policy doesn't necessarily respond effectively to the original activism and then some of the things that we've talked about already gender at SIRS is an interdisciplinary classroom and we mentioned this already what do we mean by that it's not only a space where as students come from interdisciplinary backgrounds but it's also a space where we probe at knowledge through intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches so that when we hold law perhaps if that's the discipline that we're working within we don't hold as something separate to other kinds of disciplinary knowledges in fact we would interrogate law through other disciplines for example history um agenda as all these courses do politics IR development studies language or or area studies and regional studies as well but it's not just kind of bringing together an amalgamation of lots of different disciplines it's interdisciplinary in the sense of what new knowledge do we produce when we sit between the disciplines and we can see one discipline from the perspective of interdisciplinary classroom all the work that we do is attention to transnational lgbtq by a and intersectional approaches we have trans positive center and law school and we embed that in the knowledge frames and methodologies that we use across our modules cgs offers like most master's courses a combination of added and intensity and we love working with you all to kind of make that happen and beyond myself who's an international lawyer lawyer there's kind of wealth of regional expertise and the last thing which is kind of sliding off which is amazing community alumni and there's actually a link when you get the slides you'll see to the center for foreign policy sorry the center for feminist foreign policy which was set up by one of my former gender and law ma's and i'm proud of them all to go out and do some amazing things at the end of your trees right so uh that's been about 45 minutes of me talking which is probably more than enough for all of you um so i am quite happy to take some questions now um or and i just got my email address in the chat box you can also email me if you'd like to come back to me with a question if it brings to mind later on happy to take practical questions or intellectual uh kind of subject college questions uh whatever whatever you might have um so i can see there's a few of you still here so if you've got a question type away or um pop your hand up or just shout out mon happy to answer your questions no no questions i'll just quickly throw out an offer as well in case anyone has general questions about being a student at SOAS or choosing which degrees to apply for or what subjects and just general things you're also welcome to ask those to me as well and um i'm sure you'll take questions offline so that they know that i'm not telling you what to say or yes i can pop my email address in too if that's helpful if you don't mind i mean i i think it can be a quite nice way to find out about different modules if you get in touch with one of our current students i can also put you in touch with some of our gender studies students if you allow me i'm more than happy to do so great any questions regarding applications what do we look for in your in the personal statement and experience um well uh for the most part we look at um your academic profile first of all um and then we will look to your personal statement to see what your kind of motivation is for coming to cgs uh or or to the law school so what kinds of things you've done in the past you think might inform um your capacity for critical analysis or understanding of gender um you know that i mean it is really a personal statement and we used to talk about this a lot in different studies about how deeply moving many of your personal statements were and we felt we wish that we could put a book together of them all because um you all come from such amazing backgrounds um so i just encourage you to be honest this is why i want to do this course sometimes it's like i don't really know much about gender but there's something in me that's kind of bringing you here uh other times it's more well you know actually i've done this work and there's a more policy space and i really want to think behind it you know whatever works for you but i think we're just interested in that personal statement any additional work that you've done whether it's writing analytical activism organizing you know it might be in gender it might be around sexuality it might be around race um you know you should also include that as well does that help great excellent so we got time for a couple more questions if anyone uh oh sorry um your mic isn't quite working okay no problem i'm quite happy to read the questions as they come through that's not a problem um great any other questions okay so if there's no further questions i think we'll probably end on the last slide there's a short I'm not going to play it now but you may have seen it already it's on our front page for the Center for Gender Studies website and it's just a handful of our current students talking uh okay i'll just go back to this question before i end but make sure you do go and watch our video we we're really proud of it in terms of academic profile is that that regarding models and interests or regarding degree classification well it's a little bit on both we will look at your degree classification um and we are an interdisciplinary center so we do take uh people from most uh sort of backgrounds uh in terms of academic profiles but occasionally we'll get an application from someone that's come from a discipline that we feel is just a little bit too far from uh what we would expect so for example a kind of uh i guess hard science background or um you know a finance and management background where we're just maybe would want to know more about what other work that they've done um so that would be the only time we'd look more at the modules but um you know i'm sure you know if you want to come back me in an email and ask me about your specific case um but we'll first look at your classification and we'll look at the modules more broadly but i wouldn't worry too much about that unless you're coming from a kind of degree where perhaps you aren't writing long essays for example mathematics or then we might want kind of a little bit more information uh just to know that you're going to cope with the academic requirements of the course uh first and foremost so we might ask for a writing sample if we had any concerns for example but you can send in a writing sample from the outset if you prefer not necessary at this stage uh no problem right so as i was saying there's a video on our home page the centre of jenn studies so i asked do have a look some of our current students talking about uh what they love about the degree and the different aspects of the different degrees that have a look at as well okay thanks everyone for joining us uh i'm gonna end there