 Hi, my name is Irwin O'Kage and I teach at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS. I know that the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown all of us into a state of flux and that the ability to even plan for next week sometimes seems ridiculous. But if I'm catching you at a moment where you're in a planning wound, let me share with you why you should consider the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS as the place where you should pursue your degree programme in September 2020. CGS at SOAS has three on-campus degree programmes and one distance learning programme. Gender and Law, Transnational Queer Politics and Gender Studies. Our new distance learning programme, Gender Sexuality and Global Politics, is an opportunity for professionals who is located in different parts of the world to join us through distance learning and immerse themselves in our very special curricula. Do apply and join us on this adventure. But why come to London? Why come and do a degree at CGS? At CGS we make three promises. The first promise is that decolonisation is a verb, it's not an adjective. The intellectuals and scholars you encounter in your classrooms are deeply invested in the meaning of critically challenging the ways in which we understand the world. Africa, Asia and the Middle East are the regions that SOAS specialises in and what we bring into the classroom is an engagement with scholarship grounded in those regions, an investment in ensuring that we decenter the Global North and the West as the site of knowledge. As an African feminist scholar, I bring to the classroom an engagement with African feminist knowledge production in its diversity and I invite you to converse with those voices. The second promise we make to you is an engaged and active intellectual community. Theory, concepts that you encounter in classrooms are not things that are divorced from the world. We believe in the politics of our work, we are invested in the political stake of our work. What does this mean? That through a range of seminars and other public engagement activities, you will have an opportunity to encounter activists, scholars and researchers and people who are actively working on a day-to-day basis, in policy spaces, in movements, in different kinds of arrangements to transform the world that we are living in. The third promise that we make to you is that feminism for us is a praxis and so that means that the ways in which our academics engage with students as part of our academic advising and pastoral care is one that is invested in feminist ethos. We know that life happens when your degree program is going on. And so we are committed to supporting you in that journey, taking the work that we converse about in the classroom into the way in which we dialogue with our students and support them in their academic journey. Those three promises we will deliver to you if you choose the Centre for Gender Studies as the place where you pursue your degree program, come September 2020. Come along, join us and let's have some fun.