 The SOAS Masters in Labour Social Movements and Development is about understanding the world through a focus on workers and the collective agency of people. Movements that are organised to protect the rights, interests and identities and in some cases the very existence of its participants. To take a historical example, the brutal slave trade on which capitalism was built was not abolished by white Victorian gentlemen, not even by the American Civil War. What really mattered was the collective struggles of black slaves against slavery. Similarly, in today's world, modern slavery will not be abolished or defeated by international conventions against forced labour. What matters more is the collective agency of those trapped in the worst forms of exploitation that the modern economy continued to recreate. It was thanks to feminist movement across the globe that women saw the socio-economic status improved. Gender forms of discrimination and oppression are still at work. They imply greater exploitation for women inside global factories and they also imply lack of recognition for the unpaid work women perform inside the home. LS&D tells the story of all these women workers from across the world economy. So trade unions, the right to organise at work is not simply about defending individual workers against contracts that employers can and often do, ignore. It's also about identifying common interests, about recognising the fact that our interests are not always the same as those of your employers and organising around those material interests. Trade unions in doing this need to face up to the challenge of a changing workplace. As capital moves around the world seeking lower wages, land has been cleared for factories and new zones of accumulation have emerged. Farmers are driven into various forms of wage labour, often disguised as self-employment where they are frequently treated as a disposable factor of production. Our degree focuses on how people organise and resist, be the Dalits struggling against caste discrimination in India, Chinese workers seeking trade union recognition or domestic workers in South Africa asking for a day off. LS&D is taught by academics who are engaged in activism. We are committed to research that does not only study exploitation, but seeks to challenge it. We also work with students to arrange a short placement at a labour organisation or a social movement organisation, a domestic workers organisation or a trade union. We studied LS&D last year with various students from across the world who were coming from experiences of development, from trade union activism, social movements. All of this kind of brought an extra dimension to the cause, which wasn't just focused on articles or books, but rather also experiences of people. The diversity of SOAS and the political commitment of the staff and students here makes it a perfect place to study a degree about how collective organisation and collective actions can reduce exploitation and resist discrimination. This will enable students to combine theoretical and practical experience to reflect on the importance of organisation and the potential impact of organisations to change the world.