 I'll just do a quick introduction so hi everyone and thanks for joining our global liberal arts taster session. Today we've got Dr Mark Whedon who's going to talk about time and histories of the world and give us a short overview of what global liberal arts is and what the programme is like at SOAS. We've also got a student ambassador so Mark do you want to get started? Yeah thanks very much. Okay then global liberal arts what is it? A lot of us probably have never heard of this before global liberal arts. Well it's an idea for taking a new approach to learning about the world essentially and to approaching academic learning in general. Oops why can't I go forward? Oh sorry sorry sorry here we are things are going a bit wrong already. Right so the traditional approach to academia is to learn a particular subject so academic knowledge is divided up into lots of different subcategories lots of silos you become a historian or you become a philosopher you study politics maybe you want to become a politician I don't know cultural studies sociology development studies these are all separate silos and the whole point of global liberal arts is a degree that tries to train you to do the basics in a good number of these disciplines and to basically produce an academic environment where these different disciplines that are usually studied on their own can start talking to each other that I would say is the basic principle behind global liberal arts it's an approach a holistic approach to education that involves learning lots of different disciplines and trying to bring them into communication with each other and so us let's say there are four principles underlying the education in global liberal arts we have flexibility you are able to design your own intellectual journey on this degree into disciplinarity that's really at the heart of it so the degree combines humanities linguistics and social sciences for example reflexivity which is all about learning how to learn and employability thinking critically and solving complex problems working in teams so I'm just going to give you a quick introduction to the structure of the global liberal arts degree and then I'm going to as this is a taster session give you a little extract perhaps a quarter of a lecture that the students got this year from year one from the year one of the year one core courses so the global liberal arts degree is divided up into four tracks you've got a skills and method track each year a global track each year a regional track each year and a language track so in the first year the skills and method track is approaching history which is we are we are situated in the department of history religions and philosophies and the global liberal arts degree its core modules are provided by that department so approaching history trains you in how to deal with sources it's not just for historians but how to do it deal critically with sources we have a global track from which I'll play you a quick extract from one of the lectures which is called well next year it will be called World History's Early Empires and Encounters and this gives you a global framework for your studies then you have the regional introductions from various different areas that are covered by SOAS and then there's the language track so you learn a language or and we encourage you to learn a language especially in the first year because a lot of people who are unsure about learning languages maybe you should try out a language in the first year because in the first year your marks don't count towards the end result of your degree but anyway we do encourage you to try to learn a language or if you feel really uncertain you don't want to do that then there are options for learning about language uh year two so again we have the skills and method track the global track the regional track and the language and literature's track um and in the skills and method track we have philosophies of interpretation and understanding that's basically a philosophy module which helps you to learn to think abstractly in the um global track we have African and Asian cultures in the diaspora for example economic economics of global of developing countries ethnomusicology public international law you can take a whole range of stuff from throughout the university and then in the regional track we have um for example art and culture in imperial China again regional um choices and then you can also change uh continue with the language and literatures and then finally in the um third year you have the skills and methods uh uh track which ends up with a dissertation a 10 000 word essay on a top of your choice uh again you continue with the global track with the regional track and you can continue with language or literature okay so i'm just going to give you then a short excerpt from a lecture that the students were given this year as part of the h102 world histories course uh it's the introductory session from the introductory session and i'm just going to play this back to you and then after that we can have a question and answer on anything we've talked about until recently many people grew up with the map of the world that looks like this all lots of different colors very nice um designating different imperial distributions of lands but also possessing a characteristic shape this is bacon standard map of the world which is based on the mokater protection projection which goes back down to the back to the 16th century i think and it's essentially a projection of the world an attempt to make the world into a from a sphere into a rectangle and if you do that if you imagine that you flatten out what's been drawn onto a sphere into a flat rectangle then obviously things are going to get distorted and that's precisely what's happened here you see green land and africa look like they're the same size africa and north america as well they look like they're the same size india looks smaller than scandinavia uh for example nowadays we have a few alternatives to this typical map of the world um the map on the left by neil k tries to show the respective sizes of countries it's very much about being divided into countries rather than land masses um and does so in a two-dimensional focus in a two-dimensional axis um and you can see there the problem is you've got all these white bits so the land masses don't meet up with each other you can't actually see what's next to what very easily so that's an accurate map but it's a rather difficult to use map the one on the right is a bit of a compromise this is what's referred to as an equal area map but it's also been made more aesthetically pleasing or more accessible for us really it tries to show the relative sizes of the land masses but at the same time it tries to make it accessible as a map that we can relate to um even if there are some inaccuracies so for example Antarctica at the bottom there looks like it covers the whole of the world and is absolutely enormous compared to all other land masses but what we can see from these two maps is how absolutely enormous the land masses of africa and asia are and how much of the world they take up how india is actually quite considerably bigger than scandinavia uh and indeed of europe so this gives us a much fairer representation of the distribution of land in the world land masses at least and one would think if all things were fair that africa and asia would be the central powerhouses of a world economy because they are at the center and they are the largest however that's obviously not the case and why is it not the case well let's go back to our mercator map where greenland was the same size of africa and let's look at our red areas there these are this map is from 1907 and at this time this world was dominated by the british empire so colonialism this is obviously one of the topics that we're going to be talking about in this course the british weren't the first colonialists but they are among one of the more significant and certainly that's what we get taught in this country is that the british empire was an extraordinarily important thing indeed it was um however considering world history from the perspective of the history of colonialism whether we think colonialism is a good thing or a bad thing is in fact to exclude once again all of these very large areas which make up most of the world so colonialism is frequently a distorting lens through which to view history and in this course we're going to try and put colonialism in its place we're going to try and show how there is an independent world in these places that colonialists came to and enthralled to their power and that these places interacted with colonialism they weren't just subjected to it and they changed colonialism so one of the things that we want people to be able to get out of this course is that these very large areas of the world that we usually only see through a colonial lens have their own histories and that history frequently needs to be reconstructed by listening to the voices of the sources that come from these areas let's have a look at another way of considering history of the world this is the histo map it was made by one robert sparks in 1931 and there used to be a lot of these kind of things and you can see he's trying to map 4 000 years of world history again and he does this according to what he calls the relative power of contemporary states nations empires so for him the historical subjects the entities that make a difference to history are states nations and empires this is something that we would want to question because states nations and empires are not always identical with the thousands and millions of people who live in them who perhaps don't have a share in the imperial wealth so here's the histo map now this was written at a time as I say when there a lot of people were doing this kind of thing and you had a lot of attempts to write a kind of global history that's encompassed everything so there was a famous study of history by arnold toinby for example in 12 volumes that saw the world very much through this kind of lens as a series of rising and falling of civilizations who held power to the detriment and exclusion of other civilizations other people let's put it that way and it's not surprising that this kind of thinking about history arose in this time it's very much of its time the 1930s were the time of eugenics of racial theory of so-called racial science the idea is that you could basically breed humans like cats and dogs and somehow make them better in some sense obviously no one accepts that anymore that human beings are divided up into races that are to be bred like cats and dogs but this was a very very frequent idea at the beginning of the 1930s during the 1920s and it was an idea that led obviously to disastrous consequences towards the end of the 1930s with the rise to power of the Nazis and similar movements not only in Germany but across the world so this was a very normal way of looking at things and it's always important when you consider any kind of viewpoint that you ask what kind of society did this arise in and how can we understand this viewpoint against the backdrop of the society that it comes from and the kind of debates that are going on at the time so here we have the Mediterranean people the Alpine people the Semitic people the Alpine and Protonautic people and the Mongolian people so these are the racial characteristics that this person thinks make up the motor of history the other thing that one can observe is that this kind of approach to history assumes that it's a kind of zero sum game that basically there's a limited amount of power to be had and it gets divided up among different peoples at different times let's have a look at it in a bit in a bit in a bit more detail so if we go to the end of the Histo map here we are United States of America has got quite a lot of power according to Mr Sparks in the early 1930s probably the most powerful place on earth you've got England Scotland Ireland Wales coming in second there possibly it's like a bit of a competition isn't it let's pan back a little bit further British Empire France so the period of imperialism essentially in the 1800s following the United States back we get back to 1600 and there's suddenly nothing there so there's no United States before 1600 well politically speaking there wasn't a United States until much later than that but as far as this history is concerned Americans do not go back past 1600 now the British East India Company was founded in 1600 seven years later the colonization of America began and one thing that immediately brings out of considering this map is that all the people that lived in the Americas for all those centuries thousands of years before the coming of the colonialists they don't exist as far as this map is concerned because they're not historically significant as far as the maker of this map is concerned again this is something that we hope to disabuse ourselves of in the course of this lecture or in the course of this lecture series as this is so as we are and as the title of the course suggests mainly going to be looking at populations and developments in Africa and Asia however you can see from this map is a very good illustration there how historical significance is connected to race and race is connected to nation nation is clearly seen to be well the nation state is clearly seen to be the vehicle of history and without having that nation state there can be no history so suddenly America just stops at 1600 so let's go back a little bit further Pan back Ottoman Turks Mongolians before them taking up most of the power that's the limited amount of power that's available in the world and we go back further Roman Empire and the Byzantine or Holy Roman Empire sorry and the Byzantine Empire the Basids Muslim Arabs and Persians Franks Roman Empire absolutely enormous and one has to remember I think that the Roman Empire lived beside a very very large Parthian Empire and other imperial formations um that were also very large if you think the Roman Empire was only really around the Mediterranean and up to Britain that's actually quite a small area but that's not what you learn about at school what you learn about is how the Roman Empire was really really important and so this map doesn't give you this this this hystomap doesn't give you any kind of real historical argument it simply reflects the perception that is communicated in school history go back to the Persians and the Greeks and the earlier we get you see the more the focus begins necessarily to shift away from Europe away from the colonial center and we see that earlier on it's your Babylonians your Assyrians are you people from Asia exactly the areas that we're going to be talking about who take up the most space in this so that gives us a slight overview of various different types of approaches to world history and as said we're going to be looking at history of not only types of people who usually get left out of the record rather than doing a history of events and great battles and great men and politicians and that kind of thing and then we're going to be looking also at areas that frequently get out left out of the historical record because of colonialism because most of the historians that write about world history were educated in a world that has been fundamentally formed by colonialism and in fact the historical discipline the discipline of history itself as an academic discipline started in the colonial world and many of its basic concepts are colonial concepts okay so that was the extract from the lecture so I would suggest we move now to the Q&A have we got anything in the chat so we've got a couple in the chat and also a couple in the actual Q&A right okay so a couple in the Q&A it's a Q&A we've got Sophia P's asking I was wondering if there any SOAS based scholarships funding options for international students yes we have a scholarships office and those are the people I think you need to get in touch with it's quite easy to find on the website just type in scholarships office have you got anything you'd like to add to that and Heron? No all I will say is there's been quite a few new scholarships and there's been a bit of rejigging around but the website has been updated now so they should all be on there with their closing dates and who's eligible but again if you need to know anything else or you want more information there's an email address there you can find out more okay great and then there's a further question from Sophia how does the one grade lower system work if it applies particularly for international qualifications my high school diploma is graded on a scale of 1 to 10 10 being usual I'm afraid I haven't got an answer to that have you got something on Heron? Yeah so this year because of COVID and because of all the disruptions what we've said is that if students have been accepted onto a course and have to get certain grades if it turns out they don't get those grades we will accept them if they are one grade lower so say for example you were you needed to get AAA in A levels and you got AAB we would still accept you for the course it works out we do have equivalents for international qualifications I'm not quite sure with that particular example what the sort of I don't know how much one grade in a level would be in equivalent but we can advise you on that specific qualification if you again just give us an email the general email if you need to know any of these things is studyatsoas.ac.uk Okay thank you very much then we've got a question from Mark about the lecture who says maybe I'm overthinking this but what exactly makes that map a map quite first it seems more like a graph since it doesn't represent the geographical locations of these societies that's that's absolutely right that's the maker of the map who called it a histo map and I suppose what he's trying to say is that the world is a rectangle as it were and you have various different entities which occupy it over a certain amount of space but you remember his his map as he's calling it is a map that traces the amount of power that the states have so I don't know I think you're quite right it's probably better to just call it a graph isn't it rather than a map um quite right that's a very perceptive question thank you very much have we got any other questions so there's something in the chat um so um so Sophia asks again um do you know if Chinese is currently not offered in the website it says to contact the department directly I'm not sure I have to go about that well uh Chinese is definitely offered absolutely Chinese is being taught this year and will be taught next year there's absolutely no way that Chinese is uh not going to be taught at SARS so yes we have people on the global liberal arts degree doing Chinese at the moment um and it's definitely uh something to be encouraged so on the website says to the to um contact the department directly but um you can do that by on the website there should be a um a page which says what where the main addresses are um so you can you should be able to contact the department through the website or you can contact the department through the admissions department what would you say to that and how sorry I couldn't find my unmute button um yeah so um again to contact admissions just use the study out so us email address yeah and comment on the lecture there so it's like the single story mind say absolutely uh this is something that we're trying to counteract um that there isn't just one story or one way of approaching any particular issue whether it be history philosophy uh politics there are lots of different approaches and multiple factors that need to be taken into account and it's precisely this kind of approach of which emphasizes the multiplicity of factors and causes and different disciplinary approaches that the global liberal arts degree is trying to train people to appreciate um so my leaker asks what's the number of student usually present for the lectures of this course so you're referring to the um particular lecture that I was giving that I I just played a fragment from so that particular course has 41 people on it registered on it and um yeah around between 30 and 40 is the number of students you usually have present for that particular course um the global histories the world histories course are there any field trips involved well yes and no um we are trying to organize a year abroad for global liberal arts so as we've got a language and literature track and we do like people to do languages um one thing we want to get going which has been difficult to get going so far but uh hopefully we'll manage it in the next year or so is for global liberal arts students to have a third year an extra year that they can take abroad if they want so it'd be like between years three and four and they'd go to the country of the language that they're studying uh so yes so that's um that's certainly something that we're trying to plan field trips it depends on the module but um quite a few teachers involve field trips whether that's going somewhere in London to look at something or um or something even more ambitious uh so yes individual modules can have field trips and it's it's it's certainly something that we encourage teachers at SOAS to do um okay uh something anything you can't oh right okay um so similar question is Arabic a language that's offered absolutely again there will never be a year at SOAS where Arabic is not offered so Arabic is extremely popular and um and continues to be taught and again extremely important for global liberal arts a lot of people take Arabic all right then um yeah is it likely or the big question coming in here is it likely that university life will be back to normal in September what is the current plan oh well I hope so I think we all hope so um the current plan is that yes it will uh but unfortunately the current plan was that it was going to be getting back to normal by now but the previous plan sorry and uh that hasn't happened uh so yes we will obviously be uh depending on um advice from the government but we hope indeed that we will be back to normal uh by September or at least back to a format that involves majority face-to-face encounters between staff and students I would say the current situation that we have with the online provision of courses has been very difficult for all of us but also has offered us an opportunity to learn a great deal about how we teach and I'm sure there's going to be aspects of this that we will keep on so for example using pre-recorded lectures and interactive online fora for debate um in the run up to uh live sessions and stuff face-to-face sessions these are things that I think we've learned how to use a lot better and it's so once we get back to something approaching normal it's going to be a much better experience that everyone's going to have around uh so it sounds like SARS doesn't take a particularly realist perspective on much topics Sophia says uh since it looks way beyond just nation states and their power would you say it's more like social constructivism oh um well certainly social constructivist uh yeah you mean realist in the in the terms of uh in the terms of uh sort of philosophy of history um yes indeed uh I think that's social constructivism the idea that uh history is something that is constructed by the historian um is essentially is is definitely um an approach that that we take uh and indeed um I would say that I personally as a historian find that the nation state is a very restricting way to look at uh the development of history so um I'm obviously just one historian at SOAS though there's lots of other ones um who take different perspectives so I don't think we can say that SOAS has a brand as it were approach to history or to politics um but you are going to find a multiplicity of approaches and a great diversity of approaches possibly greater than you will find at other places I would imagine okay are the so we've also got here how Malika says how is the course taught are there regular lectures or self-research based both basically um in your first year second year it's going to be more regular lecture based so you'll have four lectures you have to do four modules a a year and you'll get a main lecture in one of those in each of those sorry a main lecture of say an hour and then a tutorial which will either be small groups or a seminar with a larger group um in each of those as well so you should be expecting to get say two hours two or three hours per module and you'll have four modules um a term and uh that's yes so that's the basic the basic uh structure so we try to get a combination of lecturing and discussion going on because discussion is where the real learning happens essentially and as you go through the degree you take courses which are more oriented towards your own research so once you get to um the third year then you are going to be working for one of your modules on your own dissertation your 10 000 word essay which is on a topic of your choosing essentially and which is largely based on your own research but is that is research which is guided and advised by a individual supervisor okay uh do we have any more angharic that you can see questions so i've been ignoring the q and a yeah we've also got a few in the q and a all right so um peter asks can we take both mandarin and cantonese simultaneously i'm sorry i don't know about that um i think i would imagine yes uh i would imagine one would be able to develop from one into the other um but that's something you'll need to find out from the department from the east asian department um should we be taught from a younger age about the negative effects of colonialism i think absolutely we should uh but what i was trying to get at in that short extract from the lecture is that um whether one thinks of it negatively or positively colonialism is something that's shaped the way that we think about things and it's a matter of unpacking this kind of um bias that's inbuilt into the way we think about things and asking where the way we think about things comes from how the knowledge that we assume to have about the world has been constructed and frequently uh the kind of categories that we think in whether we're doing history politics or whatever are ones that have been largely formed by colonialism are assessments mostly exam based well no this is something we're moving away from there is a certain amount of exam based assessment particularly for languages i don't think you're ever going to get away from that um but um although it is possible if uh if people have certain circumstances then it is possible to to apply for alternative assessments um um yes but we are moving away from a system that is mostly exam based to one that is uh more coursework based so more based on essays for example or other kinds of tests um and it doesn't necessarily have to be essays i mean there's there's all sorts of different types of courseworks that we're introducing learning journals for example is a very interesting uh method of assessment that a lot of people are trying out at the moment and seems to be very effective where you have to write a few words that each week about an article you've read each week um and then you get an assessment on the whole journal that you've written over the year um or at least over the semester at the end of that semester uh so that's q and a uh yeah okay um and so we've got another question when exactly will be possible to add a year abroad to your three year programs already now and sometime in the future um sometime in the future i'd say year after next probably so if you were to start global liberal arts next year you would probably be able to do a year abroad i think we need to hear from Medina about the experience of studying at psoas yes um i just feel that especially with the pandemic it just feels very short because i'm in my third year now and um so by the time i finish my degree the half of it has been in lockdown but the time i've been on campus has been great i've really loved it because the atmosphere at psoas is so friendly and unlike any other university because you're surrounded by people who are not only curious about their studies but also about the world and especially with the uh global liberal arts people that are most like interested in this are also um have quite a world view so it's good to be surrounded by people like that so you have great conversations but apart from this studying at psoas and in london has been amazing as well so there are many societies and clubs you can participate in the support system is great whether it's your uh lecturers your academic advisors or the well-being team so especially in the current climate i think psoas has really gone beyond to ensure the students are coping well and staying on top of their studies thanks madina you've got a question in the chat there oh let's have a look i think my chat has disappeared i'll just i'll just try to get it up again i i just stopped screen sharing didn't i so that probably messed everything up for everyone um it says hi madina what is the student union like it's from sofia uh as well as the club societies uh the student union especially at soas is such a vibrant and such a exciting place there's so many interesting societies and uh to choose from so i know there's one which is pizza society where they got together and had pizza so that was nice and quirky um yeah there's there's a lot of sports clubs as well so um soas is part of the university of london so you can sign up to student central which is just down the road and you can take part in the clubs and societies offered by them so yeah there's a lot to do we've also just created a virtual tour of soas campus um we got some uh we got a company with drones and so they've come over soas and you can get a 360 sort of bird's eye view of the campus and you can then click through to different parts such as the library or the students union and you know in these current times where you can't actually get to the campus and see what it's like it's a really good sort of alternative so i'll just post the link to that in the chat in case anyone wants to have a look at it but thank you thank you very much madina no worries thank you yeah thanks oh another question for you madina does soas have anything related to dance uh very likely i mean the best place to find out more information would be the student union page uh there you'll be able to see a list of all the clubs and societies but i'm pretty sure there is yeah i'm pretty sure it would be very unusual if it didn't uh dance and there's lots there's an incredible music department at soas as well absolutely incredible yeah okay have we reached the end of this i think there's there's one final um oh hell there's there's two more questions which we probably have time for and then we'll probably have to wrap it up um is there a language option of russian oh no no i don't think there is at soas um but uh you can learn it at ucl and yes indeed there is a university of london resource sharing scheme um well okay you can every every soas student is entitled to take at least one course at ucl every year um and not many people do though but that is there that is there yes and there's one more on the chat about uh employment after a global liberal arts degree yeah uh yeah oh what employment avenues with a okay and yes indeed okay so we haven't the global liberal arts degree at soas has not been going for that long but um it's a a kind of degree that's much better known in the us um and global liberal arts degrees from other universities are also very successful in producing people who are extremely employable so um what we're aiming to train people to be able to do is to enter um a multiple multiple professions um such as well journalism is what people want to go for we have people who are um doing global liberal arts at the moment who are aiming to work for ngo's for example um because global liberal arts can allow you to combine law with um more humanities subjects in ways that uh you know other degrees can't law is usually something that just gets studied by lawyers um on law degrees that's that's again another avenue that people can go into and it's all also always possible if you decide you want to specialize in something particular it's always possible to do an MA afterwards and I would mostly nowadays say that whatever degree you do in the humanities whether it's history um or indeed in the social sciences whatever degree you do the you should normally take an MA afterwards as well just to uh to specialize a little bit because the degree shows that you can do certain things it shows that you're able to you have certain transferable skills but um nowadays more and more people are doing an MA as well and with the global liberal arts degree that makes a lot of sense too but yes um multiple professions and this is precisely what the global liberal arts degree is supposed to be training people to do is to make a fruitful contribution to any number of employment settings. Thank you very much Mark and thank you Medina and thank you to all our participants if there's a question that you didn't get to ask um I'm sure if you email the department uh is that right Mark we can probably get an answer to that or if it's more general about studying it so us then email us at study at so us I tell you what I can put I can put my uh my email oh that'd be great yeah great thank you yeah anyone wants to ask about global liberal arts particularly then there's my email thanks that's really useful and I hope everyone has a lovely rest of the weekend and uh thank you very much for coming thank you everyone bye