 So, this is the webinar for the MSc Research for International Development. I'm going to take you through a few key points about SOAS, the approach of the degree, and then give you a taste of the kind of issues and themes that you will be exposed to if you were to take this MSc. So, welcome. First of all, you are here either as you have an offer, so as prospective students, or whether you are interested in considering applying for this MSc. And just to start, SOAS is easily one of the world's most diverse and exciting campuses. And you will be here with us for one year of what is a very intensive learning experience. Walking with the most international campus and set of both staff and students across the world. We are of course in London that offers a lot of opportunities. And we are very confident that when you come, we will be very important moment in your intellectual life because you will be stimulated to very important inputs about the nature of development and what can be done about it in the world. The MSc Research International Development is an interdisciplinary degree that is the only one of our degrees that is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, which is the public sector, the British government body that looks after research in international, in social sciences. And with their funding, they give a kind of seal of quality approval to the nature of this program. It is very exciting because it is an interdisciplinary and it teaches you three main things. First of all, research methods. You will be training research methods through the lenses of the main debate and topic in international development. And it also tells you to understand the link between these two dimensions because the key argument we make is that the conclusion in different positions, the different organization or scholars take when it comes to development programs, like why are some countries rich and some countries poor? Why is work so precarious and lowly remunerated in developing countries? The different positions on these questions rest on different value, politics and assumptions that researchers or institutions make and that influence their choices of research questions and research methods that they adopt when they get and collect evidence about development debates. So training in research methods is central to the three core or compulsory courses that you take for this degree. The first one is called research methods in international development. It runs in term one and there is an introduction to the fundamentals of research methods. How do you design research? How do you set your research questions? Are the main research design issues and the main type of evidence, qualitative and quantitative research that you might deploy when working as a researcher in international development? The second core course is called statistical research techniques in international development. It runs in term two and there is about learning the nuts and bolts of statistical research techniques and also very important to read critically statistics about development. Often one reads very critically numbers about a certain issue. So x percent of children are malnourished. Then we teach you the choices can you do when you create these statistics and numbers about a certain issue. And then the third core course is called battle feeds of methods approaches to international development research. So the first and the second one courses are about understanding and learning the fundamentals of research design of qualitative research and quantitative research. The core course called battle feeds of methods is saying there is more to research methods than to be able to know how you use a certain technique. Research methods are also and perhaps more importantly about politics, the politics of researchers, the politics of interest and agendas that they have, the politics over the position of a researcher within a field of colleagues with different values and politics. So we will show our politics frame research methods by introducing the connection between politics and methods and then seven case studies each lasting two weeks. They explore a certain theme or topic in development for instance microcredit and then explore a clash a political battle between two different approaches to the same topic. For instance, is microcredit the solution to poverty eradication or is this a problem because it is misleadingly celebrated as a good solution to poverty eradication. So we call it battle feeds of methods because we select case studies where you see researchers all training research methods taking very diverse and different and contrasting approaches to the same issue trying to tease out what are the politics of these and what do you do to navigate the evidence when the debate is really fairly heavily politically charged. The course is our teaching takes place in two ways either a one-hour lecture followed by a one-hour tutorial with 12 students per tutorial group or a two-hour seminar which is what battlefields of methods takes as a route. In this case you have a two-hour interactive seminar where about 50% of the time is led from me or other teachers and the other half is about coursework, attribuity, group work, question and answer sessions. In addition to core courses you will take four optional courses most of them are two over one term you can choose according to your thematic or regional interest and then there is a dissertation. The assessments vary across courses there are essays, there are book reviews, there are policy briefs, there are exams, there are single individual presentation or group presentations and we have materials to help students to familiarize with what is expected of each assignments and on top of that we provide students with office hours or academic advice slots where you get the academic advice before you write your assignments and also feedback once your assignments are returned and marked. Battlefields of Method is taught by a team while the other two core courses and most options in general are taught by a single lecture. When we talk about the teaching takes first and foremost full-time members of SOA staff together with senior PhD researcher or post-doctoral researchers who tend to hold that tutorial there's more group discussion in the core courses or in some of the options. Now in terms of prior requirements you will know that international development and development studies are by definition a multi-disciplinary social science field and you will be eased into the degree if you have prior degrees in this field but there are every year several students who come from either maths, physics, doing an academic career change or from literature languages. So I think what is realistic to expect and this is perhaps what has made you interested in this degree in first place is that you have an interest in ongoing developments in the world some basic understanding of world histories and in particular the history of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In terms of quantity of work for each course you will read approximately six c pages per course per week and that might be on top of that some newspaper or agency reports that you can read to understand this topic further. Frequently asked question is do I need to read before coming to us we say the real learning starts when you come but for those who are anxious to get going and to do some of this preliminary groundwork there are preliminary readings that are uploaded on the web and so is a case of seeing what's out there right now and the check later over in the summer for more readings if you are coming to show us. Now it's very likely that you are looking possible options for your degree so what is specific about source development studies and what is different from other degrees in development studies? First of all we are a world leading department we are consistently in the top 10 in the world and in the latest the qs world university ranking exercises in 2020 we were ranked as sixth in the world and together with the world leading excellence of our work the the brand of source development studies is famous for its critical approach to the study of development so you might be asking yourself what does critical development studies really mean is about understanding how mainstream agendas of development the one held by the world bank by the imf that the key bilateral players we look at how they are created whether they work or not and how power and relations of power affect who decides what the development agenda is and we also consider the theoretical roots of different approaches to development so for instance you ask yourself how is the economy to be run are labor regulations good or bad for development is industrialization essential for development and then we look at the the roots in theory of different policy and practical approaches of course it would be difficult to avoid any mention to the current situation that has me speaking from home and you are likely listening to this from home and that is the coronavirus emergency which of course has the shift or at least considering the possibility if campus learn degrees were forbidden in september due to the crisis to consider online or blended learning so there are possibilities of doing the so-called blended learning in which you combine on campus studying with some distance learning and these are the the five courses that have been at this part of this blended learning strategy but we offer two online degrees one is the msc international development and the other one is the msc humanitarian action now we are going to spend a few minutes giving you a taster of our teaching and that would be to think about the battlefields of methods through the case study of a researching city's urban life and trying to explore the theory assumption and research methods nexus and how it affects the type of stories and the work the different researchers tend to put forward when they study cities so the obvious point is that the rapid and sustained growth of cities and in particular the urbanization of the planet is a key feature of our time in 2014 there was a milestone where 54 percent of the world population became urban so this is a picture of the world in 1950s you can see that in red on the right of the screen i'll use the pointer can you see yeah in red on the right there are the mega cities very few of them in the south and then orange yellow is about slowing a lower number of inhabitants so orange is a cities with five to ten million inhabitants yellow is one to five and going down and down as we go left towards the screen and you can see very little of the world population was living in red areas 0.9 percent while the majority of the planet was gray which is rural now fast forward this to the present to 2015 you see how many reds and orange and to some extent yellow spots are in the in in the world i go back and forth so you can visualize it again from here to here and so is what we need to notice is how much cities are growing and now so much of the global growth of urban life is taking place in latin america asia and africa so unsurprisingly the interest of social science in the understanding cities of the global south or of development country is growing and what you have is a proliferation of approaches that try to understand the nature of urban life that the political and policy priorities for cities and i want to illustrate that the clash between two approaches the so-called post-colonial approach against the political economic approach to urban life and i think the key is to understand that there are fundamental questions we have to ask ourselves or that we are even asking even if we are not aware of it when we ask the research questions of our work when we design our research so the first question is does attention to diverging levels of development matter when we try to understand the urban experience across the world what are the assumptions and standpoints that inform different research agendas and how do they affect the choices of the research methods that these researchers make finally if you were to express your opinion after you've done this work what are the distinctive traits strengths and weaknesses of different theoretical approaches so starting with the post-colonial narratives on the southern cities there is very recently this idea that we need to move away from understanding the urban experience of cities in development countries as chaos as dystopia and instead we need to understand that these cities follow a different order and that if we understand that there is some very important hope that we can derive from the study of the city so it's an attack to Eurocentric approaches to understanding cities as failure the fact that they look at Dar es Salaam and Tanzania or they look daily in India and approaches of a certain tradition tend to emphasize the things that don't work the fact that these cities are cities as a policy failure and they say hold on a minute we need to move away from materialistic explanation of urban life center failure and we need to go beyond what they deem as an obsession to attention to levels of development as the central entry point to understand cities so a key scholar following this tradition says every city is ordinary enough of calling Maputo or Dar es Salaam or whatever city in the south as dysfunctional every city is ordinary you just need to understand the different logic that each city has now compare this with the second approach we are reviewing here which is the political economy approach there is a scholar called Mike Davis who wrote this book called Planet of Slums and these is a quite uh anxiety driving read because he starts explaining that what is historically unprecedented is the fact that for the first time we have over one billion people living in the slums of cities of the south in and I quote pollution, extreme and decay why is that because they say these are cities without jobs where the failure to create jobs for the those who live in cities or move to city looking for a better life creates what it calls a surplus humanity a humanity that has no place in the economy of this place absolutely unable to get a foot into the formal economy so if you ask the same question as before what is it that defines the nature of cities in cities of developing countries when you compare it to that of other parts of the world the answer here would be we need to pay attention to different levels of development because they do affect the differences in levels of economic growth and income in these cities a cities which has no industry behind it will be unable to employ its population and that leads to the deprivation that is typical of slums life and this level of development will have a profound impact on outcomes and on urban possibilities so you can see is a clash where the room for common ground is not there what we need to do is therefore understand how is it that two different social scientists reach such a different conclusion when they look at cities of the global south so we take this debate and we have a two-hour session exploring this debate and then for the second week of this case study remember each case study is taught over two week you will take one of three books of your choice all available as a e-book on in sauce library and you prepare through independent reading for the next week task which is a in-class group work so you have done your reading you've done your notes so you bring them to the classroom and in group you will prepare a presentation not lining and critically assessing three things the link between the evidence that the book presents the research methods that e deploys to generate this evidence and its theoretical contribution so the key points that you need to bring to the class is what is the key argument of the book what are its implications for development practice and intervention so this is not just about theory but trying to tease out the practical implication of theoretical which is pull up the key quotes to really define the key arguments of the book and then together with a strong sense of what the scholar is saying you then need to come with your own argument do you agree with the argument of this book if so why if not why and then you fit this to the group work and then you prepare a presentation so this is a very brief taste there of the kind of work that we do the themes the color the linking of the thematic issue in this case the nature of urban life with the research methods dimensions of this what jobs prospects after the degree you have quite a broad range of skills you are trained in research methods confident in the use of the main quantitative and qualitative research techniques you are also develop an understanding through the core courses and through the optional courses that you select of the main debates in international development and you are quite fungible and flexible as a prospective employee because you have the thematic expertise about some debates the main ones but you also have a capacity read these debates critically because you can explore how is it that a certain researcher reach that kind of conclusion how does he square with the approach of another voice that has a very different take on this sound surprisingly because they are flexible because they come from a famous institution we found that our graduates do very well in the labor market after graduation another thing is if you are interested I couldn't put you in touch with our graduates either and then you can get their feedback on their experience we find that they tend to work in two sets of job either as policy advisor and researchers in international development working in the public governments of developing country private or NGO third sector kind of institutions and for instance there is a recent graduate that is now working in monitoring and evaluation in Mozambique or there are those who work as in the policy departments of organization the second type of career avenue is that of further research doctoral studies either so in other universities what we find is that you are a very well trained prospective PhD students because again you have a strong training in the research methods and design so with the training in research methods you have the flexibility for your research project of deploying a number of methods rather than knowing just one and then you also also have that work over research design so this is in an actual what I wanted to give you and now there is time for question and answers which I think the best way is use the chat and send to everyone so that I can then reply okay you can also record messages in messages in this chat maybe okay maybe I can talk about the questions that see here so I got one from a young John Cheng will the school change any arrangement of the courses due to the coronavirus we need to see of course the situation changes from now to September our changes with regard to the coronavirus emergencies and our changes with regard to our capacity for the time being we are offering this course as an on campus only degree you can take the MSc international development online if you would like to study online but still with a source degree it might be that if the situation becomes clear to be a long-term one that there might be a push to make this and other degrees available online very quickly and I can follow up that with you but for time for the time being you are offered this degree only online okay of course if you want to know more after I answer your question just write again and I can follow up any unclear aspects now I have a question from Ruisci will the department organize extra development studies talks seminars delivered by external guests politicians NGO workers absolutely we do in a number of ways we have a weekly seminar in international development which is really world leading where outsiders and very rarely occasionally our member of staff present cutting edge research and is a very prestigious seminar series on top of that on top of that there is the professional practice seminar that brings external speakers who work in international development practice talk about their work and what can be learned from it for our students and the would be development practitioners on a weekly basis do the curriculum and faculty also reflect the diversity so as price itself on absolutely so the the the faculty in terms of members of staff is very diverse our staff from India from different parts of Europe from Africa one member of staff so is as diverse as you will get a profile of member of staff you can quickly log in and look at our member of staff and you will get a sense of that the in terms of the curriculum is very diverse in a number of ways first of all it's heterodoxy is capacity to give space to radical critiques of international development and then there is also that element very big these days of trying to decolonize the reading list and the curriculum in a way that reflects the current requests by students and staff worldwide I have another question from Stosci will we have a chance to conduct on the spot survey in developing countries not as part of your compulsory studies what you do is there is a dissertation and you need to agree to supervise the topic part of your dissertation some students undertake fieldwork and that would be the scenario that Satoshi is would be choosing if interesting carrying a survey we need to be realistic about the time and how compress is the time for a dissertation because you are finishing assignments course exams the latest early June or mid-May and then you need to submit by September so it is unlikely that you are able to do very large-scale survey but many students choose to do or not many a significant but not the majority of students choose to do fieldwork for their dissertation another question from Ruisci does SOAS offer any field trip opportunities we don't provide that as part of our studies we if students undertake fieldwork for their dissertation they do so by funding it and there are very limited opportunities for fieldwork for that but basically that the rule of thumb is that if you're doing fieldwork for your dissertation you need to have the means to organize it and often people who have connections in development link it with the interest of an organization that will then fund their studies and trip do we have another question from a young Gau Cheng do we have our own academic advisors for our dissertations yes you do it works that you are writing a dissertation proposal that is handed in in February then we allocate supervisors and then you are working with your supervisors towards the development of your dissertation through a number of meetings and they take place over the summer term with a certain deadline after which no supervision is allowed but each of you as a dedicated academic supervisor deliver supervision for the dissertation development I am now posing leaving you time for writing other questions if you have any if you on the other end don't have any more questions just let me know and we can bring this to an end no do we have to defend our dissertation asks charades no it is submitted and then marked by your supervisor and another member of staff but there's no vibe any other question yes there is a question from really she is this course a direct pathway to apply for phd in international development as so yes it is so this course is available as an msc a standalone but is also available if I told you that is a src funded so as part of the src funding there are a number of studentships available every year and depending success in a competition for the scholarships and they have applications that run every year in december the preliminary round and then in I think late january the full application is invited if you pass the preliminary round and then we are deciding now for next year so for next year you have already missed the boat on funding by every year if you are able to apply by december the year before your studies you can compete for funding and there are places for the so-called one plus three funding pathway where you do the first year the msc research for international development and then you move to a phd in international development at source uh wish you can you clarify what is the minimum grade that you need to achieve for what uh there's no there's no uh rule but it's a very competitive uh process the one for funding so uh you it's also not just about grades it's about the statement the proposed research the match to the proposed supervisor because when you apply for a one plus three uh studentship what you need to do is in the application put a two-page proposal research proposal with also a training plan which you need to work out with your prospective supervisor so if we don't just look at grades there are people who get funded with a two one there are people who get funded with the first but it is a very competitive process so the strongest degree uh the more you are helping yourself in the competition a little bit any more questions thank you yang gong cheng if you have any other query question you can email me and as you can see in the last slides you just need to add my initials mr like mr three at soas dot ac dot uk so mr three dot ac dot uk so rishi you are also good you have any more question okay thank you very much for joining you stay safe wherever you are uh actually i haven't asked you what part easy with this meeting where are you based when you listen to this rishi is in darum charades in the netherlands hong kong and satoshi is in japan vegin vegin okay so stay safe whatever you are and if you have any other question just email me and i can try to answer it okay bye take care