 Well, very nice to meet you all. Welcome to everybody who's joined for this session for talking about the Center for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies and the three MA programs that we host in the center together with PhD program. I'm not sure how many of you here are interested in MA study and how many of you are wishing to follow PhD research. So maybe I can just ask for a show of hands. Anybody here wanting to do a PhD? Okay, that's nobody, right? Anyone here looking to do MA cultural studies? Okay, one, two, one, two, three, four. Okay. What about MA comparative literature? One, two, three, four again. And finally MA postcolonial studies. One, two, three, four, five, six. Okay, so we can see how the kind of how the lay of the land is in terms of the interest that we have. Okay, let me share my screen with you. So hopefully you can see there what I have on screen. I'm just trying to set up the tabs in the corner so that they don't distract me while I'm speaking. Okay. So if you want to interrupt me at any stage and ask a question, please do just shout out because I'm not necessarily sure that I'll see if you raise your hand. I'll stop from time to time to ask if you have any questions. But if I, if you have a question and I don't see you then please just shout out. Okay. I'm Rachel Harrison. I'm the chair of the Center for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS, and we abbreviate that to CCLPS. You can see my email address here is rh6 at soas.ac.uk. And so if you have any questions for me, or for my colleagues in CCLPS that you want to email about after the presentation. Because I know sometimes things occur to you later on, then please do feel free to email me and I'll get back to you or I'll direct you to the person who can answer your queries for you. Okay, so actually, am I doing this as a slideshow? No, I'm not. That's better, isn't it? Okay. So, to start off with some basics about, you know, where we are in the center and what we do, we're located in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, which is one of 10 departments in the school. There are two departments in school dealing with languages and cultures. The other is our sister department, the East Asian languages and cultures. So what we cover in what we abbreviate as SLCL, what we cover is the languages of Asia Africa in the Middle East that are not East Asian languages. So we do, we cover the regions of Africa, near Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia. That's not to say that the languages and cultures of East Asia, that's Japan, China and Korea are not part of CCLPS. They are also covered by the, by the, their courses are also covered by CCLPS and staff members of that department are also members of CCLPS and teach on some of our programs. Now keeping an eye on the chat as well. Thank you, Katie. Thanks. Okay, so our specialists are committed to studying the languages, literatures, film and cultures, both classical and contemporary of Asia, the near Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia. And we cover that kind of remit of literatures, film and cultures more broadly, and we're absolutely wedded to the idea that knowledge of a language is a really important way into understanding literature, film and culture. Although languages are not compulsory in our MA program so we very much encourage them, but we don't make them compulsory. The remit as a department includes the study of linguistics, language learning and teaching, and textual and cultural studies both comparative and language specific. And the range of languages that we work on research on and teach in the department includes Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew and Arabic. So our research remit actually covers something slightly wider than that. So for example, my job description my job title is Professor of Thai cultural studies on the although we no longer teach Thai language in the department. We still have a research commitment to Thai, as well as to other languages that don't appear in that list. Okay, so at the center CCLPS. Sorry, I now have a difficulty that I can't read my own slides. Okay, that's better. The center exists in order to promote the disciplines of comparative literature, cultural studies and post colonial studies in relation to Africa, Asia and the Middle East. We're housed as I said in in SLCL, but the center is dedicated to interdisciplinary study, and therefore it draws its membership and its intellectual diversity from across the SOAS community. That means that not everybody in our department is member of the center, and that the center membership also includes staff from almost all the other departments in the school. So we have three MA programs. The ones that I ran through at the beginning of the, of the opening of the session comparative literature, cultural studies and post colonial studies, as well as as well as an M Phil PhD program in cultural literary and post colonial studies. And in depth and diverse expertise on African Asian and Middle Eastern cultures and literatures unique interdisciplinary focus on what we refer to as non Western intellectual and creative traditions. It's not a term that I particularly like this term non Western because to me it defines our interests by what they are not rather than what they are. They promote comparative critical thought and postgraduate research in critical methods that are derived from the study of the literatures and aesthetic and cultural practices of the regions of the world that we work on in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and that is referred to here on the slide as non European but again that's a definition through a negative rather than a positive. I'll take a pause at the moment and just ask if you have any questions so far. And if you do please just shout out. Okay. If not then I'll continue to talk about the two of the three degrees the MA degrees that we offer a specific examples though what I say also refers to MA post colonial studies, but my, I don't have slides on that, but for comparative literature, and for cultural studies, what, what I'm saying also applies to post colonial. The MA comparative literature offers students a chance to research in the literatures of literatures of Asia Africa in the Middle East. It provides introductions to the frameworks and methodologies of comparative literature, world literature, and 20th century theory. And it's unique for its multicultural, multi lingual and focused interest in the literary worlds of Asia Africa in the Middle East. And the program is convened by my colleague, Dr care and jaria, who unfortunately wasn't able to join us for this session because she's teaching, but she would certainly be open to you emailing her, and you can do that through through my email or you can find her email address on the so as website if you have further questions about comparative literature. But I want to give you a kind of overview of what an MA and comparative literature might look like. If you break down the kind of the the component parts of it so here's a kind of an example of what the MA program would look like if that's what you were thinking of taking all our MA programs are made up of 180 credits. So you need to make sure that you choose 180 credits worth of modules, if and when you register for this degree. And it's, and it's made up of both core and compulsory modules as well as optional modules. If you're doing an MA, you have to take a dissertation. And so this is a core module for all our three MA programs, a dissertation in cultural literary and post colonial studies, not all all three but one of the three, although there is some overlap between them. The dissertation is worth 30 credit. Sorry, I can't read my own writing is worth 60 credits. Just to get that out of the way in terms of what I say about the dissertation. It's absolutely essential part of an MA program. It's a 10,000 word piece of writing. You undertake it at the end of all your taught courses. So all the talk modules first, and then you complete those in the after at the end of the first two terms, or the equivalent if you're doing part time over two or three years. Your dissertation is always the last part of the degree program that you undertake, because it's informed by everything that you've learned in the taught courses. So for someone who's undertaking an MA program in comparative literature over one year full time, you'd have two terms of taught courses that would end at the end of term two around the end of March. You'd have your Easter break which is usually for completing coursework. You may or may not have written exams in the May June period. Most of the component courses for MA programs are actually assessed by continuous coursework. But if you're taking language classes, for example, or language modules, they're often assessed by exam and the exams run in in May and into the beginning of June. Then you have a period from June, July, August and a small number of days in September to write and finish and submit your dissertation. The dissertation is something that you'll be thinking about in terms of what topic you want to work on. At the end of term one, you'll have support from our staff in terms of choosing a dissertation topic and preparing for a dissertation. Usually that support comes primarily from the convener of the MA program in the first instance, working out with you who would be a specialist supervisor. And then you can call on your supervisor for one to one support over a number of hours in preparation and during the dissertation writing period. So that's how we conduct the dissertation. That's an essential element then 60 credit element of all our MA programs. In addition to that, if you're doing MA comparative literature, you have two 15 credit modules, which are compulsory or core. The first is comparative literature methodology and critique. The second comparative literature, a new era. So that makes up altogether 60 credits for the dissertation and another 30 that's 90 you're halfway there to the full kind of credit allocation. In addition, for comparative literature, you have a further you further list a 15 credits from intersecting worlds, race and gender in the contemporary postcolonial novel and world literature. You can then make up between 45 and 75 credits from list B, which can include up to 30 credits in a language. And I say that because you most modules are 15 credits per term for a language, you would take language in term one and term two. So it would normally be a 30 credit choice. Although you can drop language at the end of term one if you want to. There's also a choice of guided options from which to choose a further up to 30 credits what we call postgraduate open options. And you'll see a list of those on our web pages. They will allow you to study a range of different other modules. For example, if you're doing a comparative literature but you have a particular interest in one area of Asia Africa or the Middle East, then you can choose modules, say for example you're interested in the Middle East. You might want to choose a list B module that deals with politics or with media studies, for example, in relation to your area interest. You can pause for breath there and ask are there any specific questions or anything that isn't clear about how we structure MA, MA comparative literature. Okay, in that case I'll move on to talking about MA cultural studies which is the MA program that I convene myself. I've been thinking a lot about what we can do in cultural studies to decolonize the field of cultural studies which has very much emerged from a kind of Western theoretical tradition to some extent. So we're offering ground grounding in the theories on cultural studies, but very much shaped from the perspective of the regions that we focus on in Africa Asia and the Middle East. So one of the kinds of issues that we are considering in reshaping a theoretical lens on cultural studies of the so called non West is to look at the fields of, for example, hybridity and syncretism. And so the question of modernity and post modernity. The question of national cultures and national belongings as shaped through culture. And all of this in relation to larger questions of cultural difference and what it means to be aware of cultural difference and to acknowledge and respect it. We reflect on issues of rate of class, race, gender sexuality, ethnicity, representation and religion. And so it's central questions of epistemology and methodology in relation to the application of cultural studies theories in the context of the geographical regions that we're interested in. Our MA cultural studies is also theory and practice based and therefore it draws on case studies from a diversity of cultural practices genres and contexts to a loose state complex theoretical concepts. And this is a challenge and this is really important, I think, to challenge their limitations and their validity in the context of the regions of our interest. So we're trying to do something a little different I think with MA cultural studies in comparison with how the field is defined in a more sort of in a more traditional Western sense. We're looking for the opportunity to move from the familiar Euro American cultural cannons and theoretical traditions into the fresh but less well known worlds of African and Asian culture in what attracts most students to this popular MA at SOAS. Our students therefore benefit from the unique expertise in this vast field, which is possessed by the schools faculty. We're exploring new horizons and breaking out of Euro centric spaces in which cultural studies has developed so far. These programs cover the major theoretical country contributions made by Western scholars so it's not that we throw the baby out with the bathwater as it were. We're also, of course, drawing on existing Western scholars, we have course acknowledging that it's impossible to extract one set of theoretical perspectives from another that we're working in a globalized world where intellectual thought is absolutely inter meshed. But we're really trying to shape up perspectives that put Asia Africa in the Middle East, and the cultures of those regions to the absolute four in the way we go about studying them. So here's what an MA cultural studies module. The degree program might look like again, made up of 180 credits with required modules of 90 credits, dissertation of course the same. The cultural studies theories and study of Asia and Africa and the Middle East, I apologize I should have, I should have updated this slide is actually now made up to 15 credit modules. One in turn one that looks at origins theory and methodology. And one in turn two entitled New Horizons, which looks at specific case studies from across the range of regions that we cover. They're both compulsory to 15 credit modules are both compulsory, both making up our cultural studies core. And then we have 90 credits available from guided and open options. 60 credits that can can include up to 30 credits in a language, and up to 30 credits from the open options, and the list is available here I think I can share my slides with you afterwards as well. And you'll find links on the website for the MA cultural studies program that will point you in the direction of the kind of options that you can take. So again, you can specialize as well in a particular kind of region, if that's your area of interest. And here's some examples of how you might do that. So an example of student a with an interest in Arabic literature and culture, but doing an MA in comparative literature. We'll take the dissertation. All the core comparative literature modules. Could also take 15 credits in cinemas of the near Middle East could take 15 credits in social and political dimensions of modern Arabic literature. Could also take Arabic to a that's the first a first term of an Arabic course 15 credits. Gender in the Middle East, an open option and cultural and society of near of the near Middle East as an open option in term two. What you're looking for is to balance those courses out over term one and term two. So ideally, you want to have an equal number in in both terms if you're doing a one a one year program. So over two years you'll split the number of credits that you have to take per year but it's still good to balance them out equally over term one and term two so you can manage your workload effectively. And if you do the MA program over three years, then again you can make kind of, you can make choices about how you divide your time over those three years, but the constant is that the dissertation will always come at the end. So take that 60 credits out and factor that don't factor that in over the spread of two or three years. Again I'll pause and ask if there are any questions at this stage. Okay then I'll continue with an example from cultural studies here. So here's another example if you have student a with an interest in contemporary Japanese culture. So even though our department itself doesn't doesn't work on Japan. We collaborate closely with our colleagues and other departments. So certainly you can still specialize on East Asia in the cultural studies comparative literature and post colonial studies programs if that's what you want to do. So here's a dissertation. This time 15 credits in origins development and methodologies of cultural studies in term one 15 credits in cultural studies new horizons in term two. And then you could take, for example, 15 credits in Japanese traditional drama, 15 credits in modern Japanese literature, 15 credits in Japanese transnational cinema. 15 credits in Japanese post-war post-war film genres and the avant-garde, and you could take 30 credits in Japanese three, for example. So these are just illustrations of how you could put the, your MA program together there's quite a bit of flexibility at so as for how you do this catering to specific regional interests, as well as guiding you through the pathway that's required by the MA program guidelines. I don't have specific examples for post-colonial studies, but I can certainly field questions on post-colonial studies, if you have them at the end of the presentation. And I can also point you in the direction of my colleague, Professor Wen-Chin Wu Yang, who is the convener of MA post-colonial studies, and whose email is wo at soas.ac.uk, who can answer any, any further specific questions that you have. I thought it would be useful to see what a student, an example student who'd studied the MA program had to say about it. So I, with my inevitable bias as MA cultural studies convener took one from my own field. MA cultural studies in soas is a course where I was forced to question my perceptions, re-examine my beliefs, and widen my mental map. What's even better is that all of these were done in an open-minded, scholarly atmosphere where nobody is an other. I truly appreciate and highly recommend the critical thrust of the course, the outstanding instruction and guidance of the lecturers and tutors, and the multicultural makeup of the class. And I think that question of othering that Nelsey Carroll-Tann draws our attention to in this quotation is one that's quite central to the work that we're trying to achieve in the centre, where we're drawing into question what it means to, to make another culture and other, as it were, and what processes are at play in that kind of dimension of othering, which we very much try to deal with in our approach to studying in the centre. I have some slides at the end here that are not specifically about the programmes as such, but about the broader context of what it's like to study at soas. And I say that from my own perspective of having worked at so as myself since 1989. And I was before that I was an undergraduate student in the early 80s doing a degree in BA degree in Thai language and history. So, I've been at so as for most of my adult life and my student experience both as a BA student and as a PhD student, whereas so as I've seen it change quite a bit over the years. This building that you see a picture of here is the Paul Webley wing, which when I was an undergraduate student used to be part of the School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies. So, I can say that student life at so as from the perspective of both a student and now as a staff member is certainly a place where you develop lasting friendships. It's a fantastic place for meeting people from all over the world who have a fantastically diverse and engaged student body from different communities and different backgrounds. A vibrant campus life, particularly when there's no COVID-19 around access to lots of famous libraries but our own library at so as is also second to none in terms of some of the collections that we have, particularly, I mean, from my own perspective again working on Thailand, we have an absolutely fantastic collection of material in Thai language, which, you know is is one of the best in the world. I think that that's the case also for many of the other languages and traditions that we're working on. We aim very strongly to provide a safe inclusive and welcoming university environment. It gives students an opportunity to live in London with all the facilities that London has to offer. And that's particularly great I think for working on a field like cultural studies where there are so many opportunities to kind of participate in wider events in London that relate to contemporary culture. So with there's an access to a vibrant network of talks public events and community engagements, both within so as and in the broader environment that London has to offer. Of course we're always thinking about what you might do next after your MA or PhD study at SOAS. And there's a lot of support available for thinking about what careers you might move into. We offer services to current students and recent graduates through our careers office. That includes one to one careers advice on the application process, including CVs and covering letters, as well as advice on how to decide on a career path. Access to jobs, internships and volunteering opportunities through our careers management system, careers zone. Practice interviews to help students prepare their upcoming recruitment process, including assessment centres. A large selection of SOAS specific events such as careers fairs, alumni workshops and skill sessions throughout the academic year. Assistance with navigating our virtual careers information resources on my SOAS student. And we provide information resources including books on further study internships jobs and volunteering. What do people do after they've finished an MA in the Center for Cultural Literary and Post Colonial Studies. Well, some of them might go on to become PhDs and later academics. They might move into publishing, translating, curating, librarianship, teaching, journalism and book and film reviewing. They're a selection of some of the things that our students go on to, as well as into fields that are not so directly related to the kind of skills one learns in the MA of course. Whenever you undertake an MA in the humanities you're learning a number of transferable skills about how you present your ideas, both in terms of written presentation. And in terms of oral presentation, we're trying to vary our way of our modes of assessment for our MA program so that you're not simply writing essays but that you're asked to do things like podcasts and group presentations, PowerPoint presentations and possibly in the future making sort of short films with rudimentary technology that can be ways of submitting your assessments for fields like cultural studies. So that's the end of my presentation I'm closing with a very kind of brightly colored picture from a Thai film that is one of my favorites. Just to give you a flavor of what studying cultures from Asia Africa in the Middle East might look like. I'm going to close my PowerPoint there and turn off the screen sharing and move into the mode of thinking about how to answer some of the questions you have so I'm going to take a look at what's in the chat box. Okay. So I'm going to look at first of all, a question from Tasnia site. Say it. Excuse my pronunciation if I didn't get that right Tasnia. Would you need prior qualifications or knowledge on the language. And the answer to that is, is no we teach languages ab initio from scratch, depending on what the language is. So you can always undertake elementary language courses. But for those people who already have some knowledge I have a student this year for example, who's already, she's from China and she's already done some Japanese studies so she's gone straight into Japanese to instead of beginners Japanese as part of her program. So with some of the, some of the language options, there's a flexibility to go on to kind of more advanced courses, but no normally we expect people to start be starting from scratch and we don't assume that people come with an existing knowledge of an Asian African or Middle Eastern language. Does that answer your question Tasnia. That's like, like to see the enthusiasm in your answer. And I'll move on to Polly's question. Specifically for the cultural studies MA, I'd be keen to hear more about the balance of theoretical and practical work. Okay. And other dissertation and other coursework always required to be solely in essay writing or is there scope for other forms of response. Yeah, these are really great questions. And I'd have to say, as far as the dissertation is concerned, at the moment, the way we have it is that the dissertation has to be a 10,000 word essay. But things are beginning to change. And at the PhD level, we certainly are not just taking written PhDs anymore but there is a practical element that can be a practical element where people are. For example, I've got a PhD student who's likely starting next year, who's going to make a film as part of his PhD rather than doing it as a written piece of work. We're not quite there yet with the MA dissertations, although we certainly aspire to be. So I think that's something that will change in the future. As far as the different ways of assessing the taught courses go at the moment on my MA cultural studies core course, we are assessing it through essays and and through what we call reaction papers which are short and less formal kind of pieces of written work. So from next year onwards, that will be more varied. It will include podcasts, and it will include things like thought diaries. And I think it would be really great to be able to include things like filmmaking. So traditionally so I hasn't been involved in practical cultural production. I'm getting there with making requests for more equipment for filmmaking and so forth. And I have every kind of sympathy and so do my colleagues with wanting to make this more diverse in terms of how you submit your kind of assessments to an MA in cultural studies for sure so including things like photography for example. So yes we're working on that and there's definitely more variation next year in terms of assessment and that will be increasingly varied in future years. Okay. So, Polly does that answer your question. Okay, good. I can see it does. Yeah. Then I have a message from Tashi. If you already have an MA degree from elsewhere but not so us then will that be able to add any any credits to your MA application. I think the answer to that is, is, is definitely no. I'm going to defer to Katie to just confirm that I'm pretty sure that you can't carry over credits from another institution to make up part of your MA. I'm fairly sure I'm correct in saying that. Great. So that's my understanding as well. Okay. Yeah. Yes. So, sadly, no, but I think, you know, you'll bring with you knowledge from having done another another MA and that will certainly inform the way that you approach your study so it all is not lost even if we're not counting the credits. The knowledge that you bring to doing the MA will certainly stand you in good stead. So the more we do the more we read the more we think about the fields that are working on the better position we're into to kind of to think more. Okay. Any questions in the chat. Does anybody got anything that they'd like to add from the floor, as it were, nothing that you, you can think of right now that you want to ask me. I will type into the chat. I can't remember my colleague and Jerry's email address offhand. But from post colonialism. Thank you, Yanni. It's my colleague is Professor Ben Chin. Yeah, I'm just happy typing this into the chat now, and her email address is w o at sowas.ac.uk. But can I, are there specific questions that you would like to ask, Yanni about MA post colonial studies because I might be able to answer them for you. No. I mean you're very welcome to email Wenshin, and sure she'll give you a quick answer. So it so Tasnia, if your background is in a different area. If you're not in literature, would that affect your application. And broadly speaking, I think the answer is no it wouldn't I'm not sure if you what you're thinking Tasnia of applying for in particular. I can answer for cultural studies that we're actually accepting students from a range of different backgrounds and even have some from a science background for for for comparative literature. It's not a requirement that you have a background in literature it's probably a help if you have a background in the humanities and for post colonial studies, because it's an interdisciplinary degree as is cultural studies to agree to a greater or lesser extent. It, you know, you come, you can come to the study of cultural studies and post colonial studies from a range of different backgrounds and bring those backgrounds to bear on the kind of emphasis that you want to put on the particular kind of MA program that you're taking. I mean they're all to a certain extent, their degrees in the in the humanities they include the social sciences as well. They tend not to go beyond that but that doesn't mean that you can't come from, say for example a science background. And some of the work that I've been doing myself in my more recent research has actually been in connection with sciences, particularly medical sciences and medical humanities with things like surgery and biochemistry and parasitology. So I can vouch for the fact that with a with an interesting cultural studies, you can certainly connect up with science and technology. If you want to do that and particularly bring that kind of bring those those subjects into dialogue with each other. In the field of say for example public health. So I think, for example, cultural studies has a lot to say in relation to something like the global pandemic and COVID-19. So I think we can look at applications for a range of different different backgrounds. And even if they are not the kind of standard backgrounds with expect in the field, certainly open to consider a considering the less kind of commonplace applications. I think the thing for you that's important there if you're coming from a background that doesn't appear to automatically relate to the three MA programs that we run is that your personal statement will indicate why it is that you want to study this particular MA degree program. So what you say in your personal statement is also pretty important I think. So I hope that answers your question there. Any other questions I can take. Okay, that I'm glad that you thought that explanation was helpful, but what always happens is that you go away from these meetings, and you'll think of something else you didn't think of at the time. And so you're really welcome to email me and all my colleagues with further questions. I've heard from Janie that is there any form of placement at not at present there isn't as a structured part of the program. But with all of our colleagues were pretty well connected with wider networks, particularly in the countries of our specialization. I think, you know, in the summer break or in any kind of break period that you have, we certainly open to putting you in contact with people who could give you experience of working in culture industries, for example, in different parts of the world so I think, informally, there are plenty of opportunities for connecting you up with people in the fields that you might be interested in working with or having a placement with. Tashi, what's what is your question I understand this is a random question but what do you think of Johnson's Rosella was I don't know what you're referring to actually, which, would you like to speak. I see that is a direct question to me. Maybe we can we can. I mean I like to, I can get very distracted by connecting up contemporary British politics with cultural studies, but I don't want to do that right here. Okay. Thank you. We don't have any more questions Katie shall I hand back to you and, and just again reiterate the fact that you know you're really welcome to contact me at any time I'm pretty good at answering emails. And I'd be, I'd be very happy to hear from you and to feel more questions. Thank you Rachel that was really informative and it was really great to see the breakdown of the modules as I thought that was really interesting. And we will be sending this recording out to everybody so if you want to go back and look at it, please feel free to that will come to through to your emails. Other than that we are next session and our final one today, and just to remind you is a student and alumni panel that's happening at two o'clock so I would really encourage you all to go along to that to finish today's sessions. And other than that I think we will wrap up now so you've got a little break between between that and your two o'clock session. And so thank you very much Rachel that was excellent. You're very welcome it's real pleasure to talk to everybody and I hope to see some of you in classes in the future. Okay, bye bye. Bye everyone thank you.