 I am Amina Yakin, and I am the director of the Festival of Ideas, Decolonizing Knowledge. That is something that is inspired by global South context. In particularly, I was inspired by lectures done by Akhil Mbembe in conversation with the Roads Must Fall movement in South Africa. I'm also inspired by my own work in relation to the global South and working on Pakistan and from a South Asia context as well. So I think, you know, so as has that sort of reached across regions and across continents in terms of its historic relationship to those places, which is embedded in a colonial time, but also how that relationship has evolved in post-colonial contexts of decolonization. That's the theme that it borrows from Mbembe. And the other thing that we used to have at SOAS was the Enlightenment motto of knowledge is power. So it's a really important link to make with SOAS history, you know, we have a history of over 100 years, to see where are we, you know, where were we, and where are we now, and how important is it to think about those directions as we go forward as an institution that is at the cutting edge of a decolonizing movement that is inspiring both students, researchers, activists, people across the world to change the relationships of power that exist both in terms of how capital travels, how the differences between the rich and the poor are emphasized in society. And it's also about the power that is exercised from the color of your skin, you know, it's about de-mythologizing whiteness. One of the things, you know, in terms of an institutional thing that we are very keen to do through the festival is to promote that idea of that we are doing classrooms or that are not classrooms with walls, you know, these are open classrooms and they are about having access to knowledge in a way that is not hierarchical. It is a learning process in which we are co-learners in the classroom. So it means quite a lot for the work that we do at SOAS. Our research, our teaching, what kind of real world values do we offer? It is about the acknowledgement and reordering of our world from a global south perspective to look at the flow of knowledge, something that is not just a one directional flow from the global north to the global south and it stops there but actually it is something that's a south-south flow as well so that we are looking at knowledge as something that is not unidirectional but multidimensional and there are so many more ways of rethinking globalization, of rethinking those relationships and of rethinking our past and being sort of actively ready for the present and the future as we go forward because we are going forward into a precarious future. The context that we've specifically thought about with regards to this project of the Festival of Ideas is to think about specifically climate change and global voices. What are our commitments to cross-cultural encounters? Because SOAS is poised to make an important impact on the public debate that is taking place in this country and through its extraordinary student body that is a BME, a very large number of BME students to really make sure that those voices are heard and understood. We are going to be talking through things that have shaken British society to the very core of contexts of antisemitism and Islamophobia. We're thinking also about the work that is going on in the institution under the theme of border crossings, the really huge question of refugees and migrants, the context of colonialism, education and sexualities. There are huge questions, huge debates going on in the UK right now about how the teaching of the curriculum that is there for secondary schools is a very exclusive curriculum that is not necessarily open to contexts of blackness, to contexts of a wider community of the minority communities that live in this country and of race. How do we make contexts like Windrush absolutely essential to our knowledge in how we go forward? Why should we need to think about Grenfell Tower? We need to think about Stephen Lauren. Related to that is the issue of history of memory and trauma. To what extent can we enable communities through our work and to what extent can we get more enabled by working with them? Capital and conflict, I mean that's a big question in terms of how money travels, how economies are made and how economies are destroyed. When we think of heritage and repatriation, what is our relationship to reparation? There'll be some conversations, I think that will be heated and I hope exciting for people to hear and contribute to as they take part.