 How do we create a world where people aren't forgotten? How can we do development without having a neocolonialist attitude? Why are women marginalised in peace processes? Are military-owned businesses good or bad for a country's economy? So why is there so much opportunity and equality within the world? Questions are always a part of development studies and so what it's taught me to do is look at the world and question and to begin to unravel questions. How is it that differences both between and within social movements affect their characteristics, affect the way they organise? What do you notice? Do states respond to the movement of people? How do social movements build and organise? So it teaches you to be innovative, to think differently, to think creatively, to try push boundaries, to try to reimagine things where perhaps you hadn't before. I think development studies is two different kinds of things and one way it's the study of a historical political process of change but development can also be a planned project so you have development policies and development programmes and so we're interested in the ways in which that deliberate plan of development is imagined and the way it's carried out and what are some of the problems with carrying it out? There's a huge amount of inequality in the world and the way that the world works and I was curious about why that is and then out of that going what do you do about it? What do you do when a world of inequality, a world of poverty where people have and some people don't have that led me to want to study in development studies? What you learn at SOAS is more than just what you learn in your lectures and in your tutorials the opportunities that SOAS presents I think it's the contacts and the connections that SOAS generates the content is relevant but it's more than that all of these connections allow you to really take your work and go further that's the beauty of SOAS I think unlike a lot of social sciences development studies is not apologetic about wanting to change the world wanting to be really different and has an agenda of change I think that SOAS creates world impact through the type of people that come to SOAS it's the strength of our student union it's the social movements that we try and create it's more than just being a university it's about creating how we believe the world should be run I think that's the way that SOAS makes world impact creates good values and gives you a voice Want to make a change? Come join us at SOAS