BA Global Liberal Arts

This module introduces the idea of global liberal arts and the interdisciplinary programme at SOAS that brings together the Arts and Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences. Over ten weeks we will examine the conditions of being human in the ever-changing world. By applying a self-reflexive praxis, we will interrogate both our standpoints and our understanding of knowledge and knowledge production by engaging with critical theories as well as our own experiences as learners. Additionally, these critical theories provide an introduction to core concepts in the interdisciplinary fields of Global Studies, and Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, which you will encounter throughout the programme.

This module takes the interpretive skills and overview of the field of History gained in H101 Approaching History to examine History in the broader context of the modern university. We look at the history of the 'Humanities' and address the way in which humanities and social science disciplines emerged in the context of the Enlightenment and colonial expansion.

This module introduces students to key topics in global linguistic diversity, enabling students to put into a global context the language, region or culture that their degree programme focuses on.

This module is designed to enhance students' understanding of cross-cultural representation in film and animation. The module focuses on contrasting the perspectives of filmmakers from the Global North and South. This approach provides an in-depth look at how these different viewpoints shape portrayals of the Global South.

This module introduces some of the major musical cultures of selected regions in Asia, Africa and the Middle East through a focus on musical instruments. We explore what instruments can tell us about society, class, and gender; symbolic systems related to music; the histories of musicians and performers; creativity and the imagination; and the transformation of “traditional” musical systems in contemporary societies and global industries.

This course introduces selected popular music cultures of the world, examining case studies from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as diasporic and globalised styles. Each lecture will introduce: representative musical styles with their characteristic sounds, instruments and forms; the cultural contexts within which they have developed; relationships between music and global and local forces including political power structures, gender, nationalism, tourism and globalisation; the roles of musicians and those working in music industries; circumstances surrounding musical performance, recording and dissemination of music.

This module provides a critical introduction to the film and screen cultures of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Approaching film in terms of cultural identity and self-expression, this module will place screened films within a general framework of national tradition and identity and provide a platform for students to reflect on the unity and diversity of the human condition across different regions. A selection of 21st century films will be explored within their cultural, social and political context of production, exhibition and reception, and students will be guided to reflect on different functions of cinema.

This module will explore genres such as the oral epic, the graphic novel, puppet theatre, and internet literature with particular attention to the ways that texts interact with other forms of expression from music and dance to the visual arts. Each of the stories studied will be presented in its cultural context, and connections between cultures will be interrogated in an effort to solidify conceptions of the universal and the local.

This module is primarily designed to introduce students who have no background in Film Studies, or in analysing cinema, to the vocabularies used to understand and analyse film language. The module will thus focus on the close reading of specific films – from the early days of cinema, just after its invention in 1895, to the present – so as to deconstruct and analyse their technical, visual, aural and spatial features. While it will be inevitable that we look at certain European and North American films – particularly when analysing ‘mainstream’ film language – we will put the emphasis on our regional film expertise to introduce students to important films from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and also the Soviet Union and Latin America.

Based around the three broad themes of Religion, Trade and Empire, this module examines a series of individual objects in context from across Asia and Africa to explore the role of material and visual culture in understanding the history of global connectivity. Each case-study will demonstrate the transmission of ideas, motifs, materials, objects and people within Asia and Africa and in interaction with Europe, over around 1500 years from the 2nd-3rd to the 18th centuries CE.

Building upon Global Arts: connected histories (to 1800)(Term 1), this module develops an understanding of the arts of Asia and Africa from the 19th century to the present, encompassing the period when many regions were impacted first by European colonialism and later by nationalist and postcolonial movements.

This module introduces the scope, aims and methods of art history as a discipline from its Eurocentric origins through to contemporary approaches to art and its histories in a global era. In conjunction with Theories of Art, this module establishes the methodological and theoretical foundations for further art historical study. In Objects of Art History, approaches to objects and their histories will be explored with a focus on key concepts, such as art, artefact, style, form and media, artists and makers.

Alongside studying individual objects, art historians also examine the spaces, locations, institutions and contexts within which they may be seen and evaluated. This module will introduce the many contexts of use for objects, including the religious, social and material circumstances in which a 'work of art' was created and used.

This course examines the political economy of development processes and the specific development policies and strategies undertaken in different regions and countries of the world. The syllabus is designed to provide insights on the historical evolution of development debates, and an overview of the elements of theory and policy that are especially relevant to the study and practice of development.

This course not only covers major concepts and theories in the study of Comparative Politics, but also offers empirical analyses of the government and politics in a select group of countries. The course covers a wide range of issues, including the formation of the nation-state, democratization, authoritarianism, political culture, political development, comparative political economy, nationalism, ethnic politics, politics of religion, and political institutions. The course will also discuss some debates in Comparative Politics that have been important in the policy-making community in recent decades, such as state-building, role of the state in economy, the concept of social capital, and the effort to promote democracy around the world. Although paying attention to countries in Asia, Middle East, and Africa, a select group of Western countries will also be studied in a comparative format.

Comparative Growth: Theoretical Approaches offers an introduction to theories of economic growth and structural change with reference to major economies of Asia and Africa. It introduces students to issues of measuring development, growth trends, and debates on demographic factors, physical and human capital investments, roles of institutions, and the state and natural resources. The module is a co-requisite for Comparative Growth: Contemporary Debates and a prerequisite for Issues in Development Economics.

This module explores the history of humankind from the Paleolithic period to the globalized twenty-first century. It proceeds chronologically to understand how the world as a whole got to be the way it is while also exploring the process from different angles, allowing us to make comparisons between and connections among different parts of the world.

This module introduces some of the major musical cultures of selected regions in Asia, Africa and the Middle East through a focus on musical instruments. We explore what instruments can tell us about society, class, and gender; symbolic systems related to music; the histories of musicians and performers; creativity and the imagination; and the transformation of “traditional” musical systems in contemporary societies and global industries.

This course provides an insight into how society has been conceived of in different places and times.You will read a broad range of classic texts of social theory from ancient China and classical Greece to eighteen century Enlightenment and onwards to the birth of anthropology and sociology as academic disciplines. You will attain a sense of the long conversation of social thought that preceded and produced the discipline of social anthropology. And you will be introduced to the art and skill of interpretation.

In this course we explore social thought between, roughly, 1900 and 1960. We do so by studying a sample of the writings of influential social thinkers hailing from Europe, the Caribbean and China, and by situating these in their social, intellectual, and wider historical contexts. The age we look at was one of extremes - of imperialist domination and struggles for national liberation, of free-market capitalism, the Great Depression and protectionism, of communist revolutions, world wars, fascism and genocides, and of women’s suffrage, workers’ rights and the rise of the welfare state.

This module examines approaches to a number of metaphysical questions from both Global North and Global South traditions. Students will critically approach metaphysical arguments in a comparative way, emphasising the permeable, cross-cultural way of thinking about topics such as personhood, the nature of gender, and the relationship between normativity and nature.

This introductory module surveys the entire sweep of Africa's history, north and south of the Sahara, from the emergence of civilizations to the present day. Themes covered include Ancient Egypt and Nubia, Christianity and Islam in Africa, state and society in Sudanic and in Bantu-speaking Africa, slavery and the slave trades, colonisation and the postcolonial period.

This module introduces students to the history of the part of the world that was profoundly influenced by the Chinese cultural sphere through a gendered lens. Chronologically, it covers the periods of early state formation and the rise of the first unified empires, the centuries of political and religious plurality of the first centuries of the common era, and the heyday of Chinese civilization following the 'reunification' in the Sui/Tang and the social and economic transformations of the Song dynasty. We will look at this history through the experience of women from different walks of life and study how women were represented in different kinds of texts, from the Classics to biographies of exemplary women and tales of the strange. This perspective will provide a focused and engaging way to learn about the ideological foundations and hierarchical and patriarchal social structures that supported the expanding Chinese states.

This module is an introduction to the history of the late medieval, early modern and modern era Middle East. It begins roughly around the time when Islamic empires became the dominant powers in the region and explores thenceforth the political, social, and cultural developments up to the present. While the module is structured around events that are primarily of military and political nature, it gives ample importance to the broad social and cultural currents, as well as the circumstances of everyday life as shaped by the former. Throughout the semester, we will also (re)visit, question, and complicate some of the main concepts and debates, such as modernity and the decline thesis, that have informed the field in the past decades.

South Asia (comprising of present-day India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Maldives) has a history stretching back millennia. This module introduces the historical processes that shaped the society, culture, economy and political landscapes of the subcontinent over this long period. We begin with the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization and conclude with the English East India Company’s conquest of Bengal, a moment that marks the beginning of the colonial period. Students will study the principal historical themes, debates and controversies that have concerned scholars over the decades and thus build a foundation for further study of the history of South Asia at more advanced levels.

As it was a century ago, Southeast Asia as a region continues to be one of the hotspots of great power rivalries. Much of the world’s trade runs through the region, it is on the fringe of the Chinese economic power-house, and is a major focus of the US pivot back to Asia. As a result, longer term historical developments and shorter term regional developments have important implications for the balance of world power. Even so, these developments remain poorly understood by world policymakers. This module examines the region’s historical emergence from 1830 to the present, roughly two centuries, with a focus on explaining how its intersection with the prevailing global forces has shaped the region as it exists today.

This module is an introduction to the history of the early modern and modern era Middle East. It begins roughly around the time when Islamic empires became the dominant powers of the region and explores thenceforth the political, social and cultural developments up to the present.

Japanese manga and anime, as well other popular products, have firmly taken hold of global popular culture. In addition, Japanese food, such as sushi and bento have become a staple for many busy people in London and elsewhere in the world, leading to the image of Japan as a cool country with great food. The Japanese government has therefore proclaimed the Cool Japan initiative in the effort to brand Japan and lift it to the public consciousness around the world. However, many of these images are formed by the media, some within Japan, some outside of Japan. Looking at Japan via the various channels of its consumption – manga, anime, media and food – this module aims to analyse how the various aspects of our ‘imagination of Japan’ come together, working outhow some of our stereotypes are formed. It will enable student to understand how the concept of ‘Japan’ came about. Students thinking of writing an ISP on popular culture/media or any other topic in relation to the topic of the module in their final year are strongly encouraged to enrol in it.

This module aims to offer a broad understanding to the study of Africa in the world. Students will be able to gain insight into the key themes, debates and concepts of the changing continent. 

Key themes will include: Continuity and Change, Culture, Society and Communication, Translocality, Boundaries and Borders, Migration and Trade, Conceptions of Africa as Physical, Cultural and Social Space. We will look at different perceptions and representations of Africa, and at connections and intersections between Africa and the wider world. Taking the continent as a starting point, we will explore both global connections and specific regional, sub-regional and local contexts. Our discussion will be informed by a range of sources and in particular by scholarship from Africa.

This is the first of a pair of modules that introduce students to some of the major topics and approaches in the study of East Asian civilization, from prehistorical times to the early modern era.
Taking a thematic approach, East Asian Civilizations A addresses the key issues of prehistory, rulership, religion, the world of sinographs, and otherness in China, Korea, and Japan. Together, these units give students a grounding in some of the major commonalities and intersections that exist across East Asia through to the early modern period, while also allowing them to see how local dynamics and priorities affected social and cultural forms in each state.

The second of a pair of modules, East Asian Civilizations B continues with a thematic approach to the study of premodern East Asia, with units on Buddhism, warfare, and gender, law, and hierarchy. The structure of the module encourages students to compare the civilizations of China, Korea, and Japan so that they can see their commonalities and intersections as well as identify the particularities of each that arose from local contexts.

This module will critically engage with theoretical texts from a range of disciplines that engage critically with today’s globalised world with a focus on the Global South. Students will be given support and training to explore how they can apply these theories and approaches to answer a range of questions and contexts that go beyond the classroom and link them to everyday experiences.

This module is concerned with the ways the mind and mental illness are understood in different cultural contexts. We explore the cultural and historical shaping of Western psychiatry and its interaction with other diagnostic and healing traditions. Are psychiatric diagnostic categories like depression or PTSD universal or culturally and historically specific, bound to particular notions of mind, body or spirit? Is Western psychiatric knowledge imposed on other societies through Global Mental Health, or does the expansion of evidence-based treatments address a critical ‘treatment gap’? Is the globally rising diagnosis of mental disorders a consequence of new stressors, undiagnosed conditions or the medicalisation of ordinary sadness and coping responses? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions. It will probe the universality of psychiatric knowledge, and examine how illness classifications are the result of political and epistemological struggles, both on local and global scales.

This course explores the intersection and social construction of race" and gender through an anthropological lense. The course emphasises the lived realities of race and gender and how these have been shaped by cultural, historical and economic power relations. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. A special focus is given to the ways in which anthropology has contributed to and been complicit in histories and experiences of oppression, empire and colonialism. By looking at whiteness as a system of power that undergirds gendered ideologies and privileges, the course critically analyses knowledge practices and the representation of race and gender in science and media."

Historical Linguistics.

This module introduces students to fundamental concepts and approaches in the study of the links between language and society. Using numerous examples, students will learn about the interplay of language with social factors such as class, gender, ethnicity and age, including how language varies and changes.

This module will impart a solid grounding in the dynamic evolution of the Chinese state and Chinese nationalism, China's self-identified problems of weakness and underdevelopment, the difficult choices made by political elites over the course of three quite different regimes of the 20th and 21st century. Throughout the academic year, this module will stress how this legacy offers both the opportunity and constraint for the present politics of China.

International Relations of South Asia will give students a broad and comprehensive introduction to this subject. Beginning with conventional IR theory disciplinary frames, it will explore inter-state relations in the South Asian region including the history of conflict between India and Pakistan, the nature of Indian dominance/hegemony over the South Asian region, the place of Afghanistan in conceptualisations of ‘South Asia’, as well as the security perspectives of smaller states in the region including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Other topics in the course will examine non-conventional security issues including questions of economic and environmental security posed by the sharing of international rivers and climate change, as well as the human security issues provoked by ethnic and other forms of conflict in the region.

This module traces the history and politics of Palestine and the Zionist movement, within a regional and international context, from the late nineteenth century to the present. It examines Palestinian and Israeli understandings of the past and present through primary sources, scholarship, and cultural production. The module seeks to understand how and at what costs Israeli and Palestinian political institutions and nationalisms have been constructed and analyzes British and US involvement in the conflict. Key themes to be introduced and explored include imperialism, settler colonialism, nationalism, Orientalism, violence, anticolonialism, and revolution, all as understood by a variety of actors involved in the region.

This course examines the international politics of sub-Saharan Africa since Independence organised around four main themes. The first concentrates on the emergence of African states, the nature and analysis of that statehood and the degrees of conflict and cooperation between African states. The second theme looks at the insertion of African states into the international order, including the economic order and their participation in international politics. The third theme assesses the period after the end of the Cold War and concentrates on three main sub themes: firstly the nature of conflict within Africa and the emergence of a greater degree of outside intervention in that conflict; secondly the attempt, also largely by outside agencies, to effect long-term fundamental change within African societies; thirdly the ways in which African states have changed regional organisations to meet a new international environment. The last theme raises the question whether new developments in global politics (e.g. the growth of China) are fundamentally changing the international position of African states.

This course is about the economic structures, institutions and policy challenges in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The course starts with a broad economic history of the region and goes on to address the emergence of the economic structures, resource endowments, and political economy institutions of the modern Middle East. The course highlights the specificities of the political economy of the region in a global cotext and covers selected aspects of economic policy in the contemporary period in these countries. The contemporary nature of the problems facing the MENA countries are addressed throughout the course.

The climate crisis is clearly one of the primary existential threats facing the human species. But how we understand the roots of the climate crisis, its current and future impacts on world politics, and its possible solutions, is inherently contested terrain. Nothing less than the future of life on earth, and competing conceptions of the ‘good life’ and how we should organize our societies, is at stake. This course will investigate the global politics of the climate crisis, starting with scientific debates regarding the possible severity of climate change (how bad could it get?), and then moving through questions about climate governance, the political economy of climate change, the energy and food system transitions, migration, geoengineering, possible global futures, and activism. We can hardly hope to exhaust such a complex topic in the span of 10 weeks. Instead, we will cover some key topics and hear from a wide range of perspectives. The goal will be to give students a basic grounding in the science, politics, and economics of climate change; to enable them to critically engage with a multiple perspectives on the key causes and possible solutions to the climate crisis; and to help them think through its implications for their own lives and futures.

This course, which brings into undergraduate Year 3 an MSc course, is the only such course on this side of the Atlantic and the only other such course outside Columbia. It brings a properly political scientific appreciation of postwar, independence and post-independence thought in Africa as enunciated by leading political figures and public intellectuals.

This module is about cultural and social change in Africa in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It covers the entire continent, north and south of the Sahara, as well as considering the cultures of the African diaspora. The aim to is explore African cultures and societies across the established divide in the continent's modern history between the era of colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century and that of renewed African sovereignty from around the 1960s. A range of social changes are examined, but the focus will be on the history of popular and visual cultures, including artistic production in the fields of music, dance, theatre, film and plastic art. A central concern is to think about the historical processes that have shaped contemporary society and culture today.

This module introduces students to the history and legacy of the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa from Senegambia down to Angola from ca. 1500 to the present. It gives a political and economic understanding of key developments and of social and cultural change and continuity. Students will explore the causes of the transatlantic slave trade, and the consequences of involvement in the trade for West African societies. The consequences of the abolition of slavery and local and global legacies of the slave trade will also be considered.

This course examines the histories of nationalist and imperial politics that are held to account for the partition of British India. It examines the ‘experience’ of partition beyond its politics along with with the historiography of colonialism, nationalism and gain an understanding of cultural, political issues involved in the politics of governing diverse groups.

The course focuses on Mughal rule in north India within the context of the Muslim World. Using the political developments in India from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as guiding lines for the discussion, the course will examine some of the main political, social, and religious institutions and processes in the Mughal Empire and their role in shaping state and society in South Asia.

This module embrace those frameworks but also challenge their limitations for understanding the history of the non-western world and the interconnectedness of global history. This module challenges students to explore new research methods, as they need to think creatively about source materials that can shed light upon the histories of regions about which there are often few historical records.

This module explores gender in historical perspective, combining a general introduction to gender history with a case-study based on the specialisation and research expertise of the tutor. The module provides a detailed introduction to the positioning of history as a discipline vis-à-vis gender studies.

The course is designed to equip students with a broad range of theoretical and practical approaches to the study of museums. It examines the strategies and practices by which museums interpret, organise and display objects – especially non-Western objects – within diverse cultural contexts.

Arts of the African Diaspora addresses an important and, in many ways, an emerging field of study, long forsaken in chronicles of (art) history but now critical to its understanding, as well as those legacies borne of Atlantic slavery, turmoil, and global migration. Taking the twentieth century as its primary focus and spanning the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean and the African continent, this module considers the enduring impact and influence such histories have had on artistic practices assembled here under the rubric Arts of the African Diaspora.

This module aims to introduce students to the many ways in which law and society interact in the subcontinent. We seek to do so by using, as far as possible, authors from the region, and focus on issues that continue to hold contemporary relevance.

The Music Business.

This course will focus on urban musical practices and soundscapes, including theoretical approaches drawn from contemporary literature in ethnomusicology and associated disciplines, and will enable students to put classroom learning into practice via a guided individual field study.

Hip Hop inspires strong opinions, whether in culture war debates or among urban youth born in the digital era. It is the music of grass-roots activists, but it is also big business. It is often described as a primarily lyrics-driven genre, but its best songs are condensed histories of migration and labour trauma that play out at the level of melody. This module considers how it came to be that this genre, born of post-industrial urban decay but gestated through decades of Afrodiasporic conceptions of versioning, has come to dominate not only the Music industry, but academic discussions of youth culture. Through consideration of Hip Hop’s history, pre-history, and global reach, we draw broader conclusions about migration and diaspora, ethnicity and gender, nation and place, all of which hide in plain sight embedded in musical style.

The module gives students a good general introduction to Contemporary African Literature(s) and to demonstrate to them some of the ways in which creative writing in the form of prose narratives, the novel, poetry, drama, etc help create an understanding of the socio-cultural, economic and political issues that define life and existence on the African continent and its diaspora. The module is also meant to help encourage students develop critical and analytical skills that move away from dominant Eurocentric and Western perspectives and to present the teaching, researching, understanding and analysis of Africa from African-centred perspectives.

This module takes the specific topics of health, well-being, embodiment, resilience, human relations to the environment and questions of climate change and views and analyses them through the lens of culture studies. The module is team taught by lectures with expertise in language-based cultural studies with reference to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, whose research and teaching incorporates a focus on areas of health and well-being such as HIV-AIDS, cancer, Covid-19, public health discourses and their relation to difference cultural perspectives on embodiment. The module interweaves these concerns into the study of the need for human resilience in response to current global crises, first and foremost among which are questions of environmental destruction and climate change. The module concludes with an emphasis on the need for cross-cultural communication and intercultural understanding for global collaboration to find effective solutions to the problems of our times.

This module will examine a range of genres and forms, and aims to provide students with an insight into motif and interpretation of love and loss by looking at specific selection of texts in English translation (in poetry and prose) by different authors from across the regions of Africa, the Middle East, South and South East Asia, from the ancient times to the present day.

The module is intended to complement modules such as ‘History and Culture of Korea to the Late 19th Century’ and ‘Culture and Society in 20th Century Korea’ (which focuses on South Korea) to provide BA Korean students with a more comprehensive overview and understanding of the Korean peninsula and how it has developed, especially since the Pacific War.

This module is an introduction to the literary history of Iran and Persian poetry and the different schools of poetry, as well as the major genres related to the mediaeval period, from its origins to c.1500. A selection of poems by well-known poets of the genres of epic, romantic, didactic, spiritual & mystical writing will be read, and discussed.

This module examines themes and notions of 'modernity' in the Korean cultural context, through a syllabus which considers issues surrounding representation, identity, landscape and memory in Korean literature and film. It aims to provide students with the skills to read, analyse and understand Korean literary works and films against past and present socio-historical contexts and critical discourses.

This module will examine the historical development of African philosophy focusing on the two key periods or phases: the precolonial period and the postcolonial period of African philosophy as well as the key approaches and trends within these periods.

It will also examine the primary concerns and key themes in African metaphysics, African epistemology and African ethics. The module will also explore some other aspects of African philosophy such as African political philosophy, African existentialism, African feminism, African philosophy of difference and disability.

This module focuses on Choson (1392-1910), the last dynasty of traditional Korea, and covers in depth aspects of society and culture that are of crucial importance for our understanding of not only traditional Korea but also developments on the Korean peninsula in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This module introduces students to some of the most prominent themes of East Asian mythology. From mythical culture bearers and warring monkey kings to mischievous fox spirits and perfidy sensing goats, we will examine the origins of various myths, their sources and evolution over time, as well as their historical and cultural significance.   

The objective of this module is to provide students with a firm understanding of financial global markets. The module will focus on topics including the role of finance in economic development, the relevance of different financial system structures, and the European Monetary and Economic Union.

This course offers a historical and contemporary exploration of the important roles played by film festivals in defining, validating, exhibiting, distributing, and (increasingly) producing global cinemas. While it introduces students to the inner workings of the oldest and largest international film festivals, it takes a critical postcolonial approach to the analysis of festivals worldwide and focuses in particular on the treatment of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American films and filmmakers on the circuit.

Focusing primarily on the Asia-Pacific War, this module critically explores the multiple ways in which memories have been created, circulated, and consumed in Japan, the Koreas, and the Sinophone area.

This module aims to provide students with a broad knowledge base to understand Taiwan's culture and society. Because of its multifaceted cultural and ethnic mix and the complex colonial history, the module looks at Taiwan’s contemporary culture, unpicks the various dimensions of the complicated social change, and considers the colonial legacy and the impact of globalization.  The focus of the module is placed on the highly contentious issue of identity politics of the post-war era. By exploring contemporary Taiwanese cultural change and social development, this course facilitates a solid understanding of the complexity of this place, offers an interesting reference point to think about China and Japan, and provides a better understanding of the greater East Asian society. Because most courses cover China, Japan and Korea, this module can connect the dotted line to form a more complete picture of East Asia.

The course will offer a survey of films from the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and Israel, as well as an overview of the historical development of film in the region and a grounding in the socio-cultural contexts in which films have been produced. Films will be analysed aesthetically, with an awareness of multiple aspects of film technique, and meanings will be interrogated through a number of interdisciplinary and theoretical prisms.

There are multiple ways of thinking about resistance. Simply writing about oneself and the space one is not allowed to occupy can be a mode of resistance. Writing about past or present oppression, stirring protest, and imagining alternative futures can also be read as resistance. Cultures of resistance makes us think about what literature, film and other media seeks to do and the silences or censorship it challenges. It directs our attention to forms of injustice, but also to its mode of address, and to its intended and non-intended audiences, as well as it effects. Through narrative, poetic technique, political inclination, subject matter and authorial position, texts highlights the often intersectional dynamics of everyday living and the power structures that shape it. The module will examine an array of examples and forms of cultural texts from South Asia, and may include anticolonial, Dalit, feminist and LGBTQ narratives, political satire in prose, poetry, film, drama, dance and other such forms. 

This module introduces students to the major aspects of contemporary Middle Eastern fiction from the 20th and 21st century through the theme of race, gender and resistance. It will look at how resistance is expressed in relation to violence, freedom and humour in the fictional world and expressions of where resistance has failed. It will introduce students to postcolonial studies to anchor contemporary critical race and gender critique within literary studies. It will also engage with freedom-fighting narratives as well as intersectional identities of resistance where race, class and gender (among others) come together.

This course offers a transdisciplinary look at contemporary cultural products and cultural modes of production in South and South East Asia. Combining the theoretical framework of British Cultural Studies (Hoggart, Hall, During) with the post-colonial discourses that have underpinned the study of culture in South and South East Asia, the course will explore how particular cultural practices in both regions relate to wider systems of power as embodied in belief systems, ethnicities, caste, national and transnational politics, language, and gender. Working from non-essentialist views of culture as constantly changing sets of practices and processes, the course will seek to introduce the students to reading/readings of cultural texts and use these exercises as engaged approaches to a critical understanding of the cultures of both regions, as well as the continuities and discontinuities between them.

The overall aim of the course is to introduce students to Zoroastrianism - its doctrines, rituals and observances within a historical framework. The teachings of the religion will be discussed on the basis of the Zoroastrian sacred text, in particular the Avesta and Pahlavi literature, in the context of the Indo-Iranian religious system from which the religion emerged. The history of Zoroastrianism will be traced from its prehistoric roots in Indo-Iranian times through its development under the rule of three great Iranian empires, Achaemenian, Parthian and Sasanian, its gradual development into a minority religion after the Muslim conquest of Iran, the subsequent migration and re-settlement of a diaspora community in India, and from there up to the present day.

This course will discuss the many different ways in which Jews have expressed their ethnic, cultural, and religious identity historically from antiquity to modern times. Jewish identity formation and expression needs to be explored within the context of the respective historical, political, social, and economic circumstances in which Jews lived. For the respective time periods under discussion here, the various forms of acculturation and assimilation to surrounding societies and cultures will be examined. Even the more traditional religiously defined forms of Judaism functioned within and in reaction to the non-Jewish cultures Jews had contact with. We shall analyse the significance of ethnicity, nationalism, culture and religion in the definitions of Jewishness and trace developments in the expression of Jewish identity. Our approach is primarily historical and sociological. For some subject areas literary criticism and gender studies approaches will be employed.

This team-taught module will bring together different scholars from across the arts and humanities to consider at an advanced level the impact of digital technologies, such as digitisation, translation or artificial intelligence, on various aspects of human life when they are digitised: language, translation, arts, memory, history and its preservation, authenticity and “fakeness”, religion, pilgrimage, archives, structures of knowledge and information management, and others. Drawing a strong humanities foundation, the module will enable students to consider the impact of digitality on the human in a sophisticated way, without reducing/overlooking the implications of digital transition or falling foul of digital exceptionalism.

This module will give students the opportunity to experience what it is like to work in their chosen industry, while developing their employability and graduate career prospects. It will allow students to acquire greater knowledge of the industry of their choice and enable them to explore and experience its practices. Students will apply some of what you have learned on their programme and reflect upon their career aspirations.

Important note: This module is offered on a first come, first served basis. In term 1, students have to engage with the SOAS Careers team to find a suitable internship for their degrees. Only upon the successful completion of this task, students will be invited to take this module in semester 2 of their degrees.

The course is designed to explore themes – around the emergence of the cultural industries, the commodification of art and culture and the potentialities of digital culture – that are relevant across Media, Music and Arts and Archaeology, and to bring together expertise from each department in a team-taught course. It will give students an overview of the history and scale of the global cultural industries and how they intersect with politics, the economy, and ideas of the self and of community. It will use case studies drawn from across SOAS regions to ground the course in specific examples that address transnational and localised framings.

This half-unit introduces students from across the School of Arts to key texts of post-colonial theory that deal with aesthetics and the senses. The team-taught module mixes different disciplinary approaches from Music, History of Art and Archaeology, and Media to engage key concepts in post-colonial studies.

This School of Arts unit combines curatorial training with an exploration of key debates in the theory, history and practice of curating art, music and media in a global context. The course includes a series of off-site visits in galleries and arts institutions during which students will meet curators and engage with current perspectives on curating in London. Students will study the histories and debates of curating through a close reading of seminal exhibitions, manifestos and texts, and will cover themes including collecting and display, postcolonial exhibition practice, representation and the ‘other’, curatorial initiatives in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, curating sound and music, and the use of archives and digital technologies in curating. Throughout the course, students will work on group projects to develop practical and conceptual skills for curatorial research, and will end the course by producing an exhibition proposal. The course will appeal especially to students interested in pursuing a career in the arts sector.

Democracy and Authoritarianism in Asia

This module delves into the complex regime landscape of Asia. From burgeoning democracies to firmly entrenched authoritarian regimes, the module explores the historical, cultural, and socio-political factors that shape the region's diverse governance structures. Through comparative study, students will analyze how different Asian states have navigated their paths between democratic ideals and authoritarian governance in order to situate Asian cases within broader theories.

The course  provides a nuanced understanding of political development across the varied experiences of India, Pakistan, China, Japan, South Korea, and various Southeast Asian states. Through the study of political theories, historical trajectories, external influences, and contemporary challenges, students will learn to contextualize the dynamic interaction between democracy and authoritarianism broadly defined. 

Drawing on a rich array of sources, including scholarly articles, historical documents, and multimedia content, the module encourages students to assess the strengths and weaknesses of different political systems and the theories that illuminate them. The coursework is designed to encourage a critical evaluation of the complex interplay between democratic aspirations and authoritarian tendencies in specific empirical contexts.

WEEK 1. INTRODUCTION TO DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITARIANISM
- Overview of political theories and concepts related to democracy and authoritarianism.

WEEK 2. COLONIAL LEGACIES AND POLITICAL EVOLUTION: REGIME TYPES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
- The impact of colonialism on political structures and institutions with a focus on the full spectrum of postcolonial regime variation in Southeast Asia

WEEK 3. DEMOCRACY (AND DEMOCRATIC AUTHORITARIANISM) IN SOUTH ASIA
- Analyzing the development and challenges of democracy in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

WEEK 4. AUTHORITARIANISM (AND AUTHORITARIAN REFORM) IN CHINA
- Exploring China's political trajectory and its impact on governance and society.

WEEK 5. DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION IN JAPAN AND SOUTH KOREA
- Comparative study of democratic practices and challenges in Japan and South Korea.

WEEK 6. THE MILITARY IN ASIAN POLITICS
- Assessing the influence of military institutions in countries like Pakistan, Indonesia, and Myanmar.

WEEK 7. POLITICAL PARTIES AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN ASIA
- Tracking the interaction between political parties and social movements in Taiwan.

WEEK 8. RELIGION, ETHNICITY, AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN ASIA
- Exploring the role of religious and ethnic identities in shaping human rights debates across Asia.

WEEK 9: POLITICS, MEDIA, AND THE (DIS)INFORMATION AGE IN ASIA
- Understanding the ways in which media drives both democratic and authoritarian trends in Asia.

WEEK 10: THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY AND AUTHORITARIANISM IN ASIA
- Speculating on future trajectories and challenges for governance in the region.

The purpose of this module is to familiarise students with the main debates in gender and development and to introduce new ways of conceptualising the field, critiquing the concept of gender as generally applied in development, and also development itself. We will study issues relevant to gender and development not usually included within the development paradigm, like the coloniality of gender. We will also discuss how the gender binaries came to be so pervasive globally. Gender here is viewed as a set of normative behavioural prescriptions that apply to men as much as to women and men and masculinities will be treated as an integral part of the field alongside women and femininities. Gender is also understood not simply as an issue of individual male-female relationships but as inherently political.

Business across borders offers both challenges and opportunities. This module provides a framework for analysing decisions made by firms in an international context. While the foundations of the course are concepts developed in economics, they will be combined with (and challenged by) insights from strategy, international finance, marketing, human resource management, and other areas. The final aim of the course is to provide you with a critical understanding of whether and to what extent the ways economists have studied and modeled firms’ internationalization decisions offer any support in real world decision making.

This module introduces students to the basic principles of economic analysis and decision sciences. It applies economic theory and decision sciences to business and management decision making.

This module introduces the basic concepts of corporate governance and theory of the firm. It is specially designed for the undergraduate study of such areas as management, finance, financial law, corporate law, economics and related subjects. The course is designed to increase the depth of your understanding of corporate governance issues. As corporate governance is a multi-disciplinary subject – covering such topics as law, politics, management, finance, and economics - the course outlines the key theoretical and practical issues underpinning the study of corporate governance, and how they affect the governance of the modern corporation. International comparisons and differences in corporate governance are emphasised throughout the course.

This course introduces students to contemporary issues in the relationship between business and ethics. Through studying principles of academic thinking about these issues, and working on the problems experienced in actual case studies, students learn how to think through the complex problems of business ethics and consider how ethical principles could influence management decisions.

For international companies to achieve significant competitiveness in the marketplace, it is important that managers understand consumer behaviour. This module discusses the internal processes that occur within consumers´ minds as well as external processes that influence consumers’ experience, engagements and relationships with international companies/brands. Knowledge of how these processes can be useful for choosing marketing strategies is attained through the theoretical models and practical examples discussed during the lectures and seminars. The module is designed to develop students’ understanding of the specific models and concepts necessary when evaluating and analysing consumer behaviour.

This module is concerned with the ways the mind and mental illness are understood in different cultural contexts. We explore the cultural and historical shaping of Western psychiatry and its interaction with other diagnostic and healing traditions. Are psychiatric diagnostic categories like depression or PTSD universal or culturally and historically specific, bound to particular notions of mind, body or spirit? Is Western psychiatric knowledge imposed on other societies through Global Mental Health, or does the expansion of evidence-based treatments address a critical ‘treatment gap’? Is the globally rising diagnosis of mental disorders a consequence of new stressors, undiagnosed conditions or the medicalisation of ordinary sadness and coping responses? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions. It will probe the universality of psychiatric knowledge, and examine how illness classifications are the result of political and epistemological struggles, both on local and global scales.

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This module explores these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times.

This course explores the intersection and social construction of race" and gender through an anthropological lense. The course emphasises the lived realities of race and gender and how these have been shaped by cultural, historical and economic power relations. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. A special focus is given to the ways in which anthropology has contributed to and been complicit in histories and experiences of oppression, empire and colonialism. By looking at whiteness as a system of power that undergirds gendered ideologies and privileges, the course critically analyses knowledge practices and the representation of race and gender in science and media."

Historical Linguistics.

This module introduces students to fundamental concepts and approaches in the study of the links between language and society. Using numerous examples, students will learn about the interplay of language with social factors such as class, gender, ethnicity and age, including how language varies and changes.

The purpose of this course is to examine the effects of political factors on economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It aims to familiarise students with various theories of economic development, specifically the role of the state and government intervention, and then to guide students in tracing these theories against the empirical evidence from a range of examples from states in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It will thereby enable students to acquire a nuanced and empirically grounded perspective on the reasons for wide variations in economic development.

The amended module focuses on major concepts, theories, methodologies and academic approaches to the study of nationalism, national identity and nationhood. It begins with an examination of the historical contexts and socioeconomic conditions under which nationalism emerged in the West and subsequently spread across the globe. By familiarising students with the key concepts, theories and approaches to the study of nationalism, the module aims at enabling students to understand the processes which appear to make nationalism a powerful mobilizing and homogenising force and also point to its contingent, shifting and fluid nature. The module focuses on understanding the political contestations underlying the notion of nationalism in various regional contexts

The course shall examine debates in the discipline of politics about the role of “culture” in politics – as practices of meaning-making in politics; as a series of everyday practices and rituals with implicit (or overt) political content; and as cultural products (art, films, etc.) both whose making and content reflects a specific politics. To do so, the course will require two activities outside class: A visit to a diasporic enclave in London – as the basis of a discussion of questions of identity-making, immigration, and the political economy of “cultural” practices (restaurants, specific shops catering to specific communities, etc.). And a selection of a film, or art piece, or theatrical production – to discuss what politics goes into the production of such artwork; the ways in which the overt and implicit politics that such artwork espouses can be critically understood and explained. The course will also examine the role of meaning-making and semiotics in social movements and political mobilisation, in the production of hegemony, and critically assess outdated and problematic “national culture” paradigms.

This course will chart the dominant features of this scholarly territory by familiarizing students with major issues and controversies in immigration research and by examining empirical cases in Africa, the GCC, and East Asia.

This course introduces students to economic perspectives on environmental and development issues. The course covers various macro and microeconomic issues as well as economics of climate change.

This module will introduce students to contemporary political theory through a focus on key concepts. These include liberty, rights, justice, democracy, representation, power, hegemony and secularism.

The climate crisis is clearly one of the primary existential threats facing the human species. But how we understand the roots of the climate crisis, its current and future impacts on world politics, and its possible solutions, is inherently contested terrain. Nothing less than the future of life on earth, and competing conceptions of the ‘good life’ and how we should organize our societies, is at stake. This course will investigate the global politics of the climate crisis, starting with scientific debates regarding the possible severity of climate change (how bad could it get?), and then moving through questions about climate governance, the political economy of climate change, the energy and food system transitions, migration, geoengineering, possible global futures, and activism. We can hardly hope to exhaust such a complex topic in the span of 10 weeks. Instead, we will cover some key topics and hear from a wide range of perspectives. The goal will be to give students a basic grounding in the science, politics, and economics of climate change; to enable them to critically engage with a multiple perspectives on the key causes and possible solutions to the climate crisis; and to help them think through its implications for their own lives and futures.

This second year undergraduate class will focus on the variety of ways in which performance is enacted in politics, broadly construed. It will augment more conventional approaches to politics by demonstrating the ways in which performance either attempts to soften and legitimise or conversely challenge and subvert institutions, interests, and power.

This module introduces electoral and party politics in modern democracies. It will involve the discussion of a wide range of theoretical approaches to the study of parties and elections and assess their applicability to non-western cases.

The purpose of this module is to examine the effects of political factors on economic and social transformation (and vice versa) with reference to some of the most successful developing economies. It focuses on two main issues. First, how did political factors (i.e. types of regime and the conditions of their formation) facilitate the transformation of certain developing economies towards upper middle-income status during the GATT or pre-globalization era (c. 1950-90). Second, the module will examine how upper middle income economies are facing up to the challenges of the globalization era, notably mobile capital (financialization and the emergence of global value chains) and the complex of constraints that constitute the “middle income trap”.

This module provides UG students with an advanced introduction to key issues in postcolonial theory. The module covers fundamental concepts in postcolonial theory, such as orientalism, the subaltern, self-determination, agency, and resistance. It also looks at the intersection of postcolonial theory with Marxism, feminism, and queer theory. More recent approaches to settler colonialism and the decolonization of knowledge are also addressed in this module. On successful completion of this module a student will be able to engage with key debates in postcolonial theory and assess the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding contemporary global politics.

In this module, students will study various conceptions of republicanism, empire and revolution in both western and anticolonial political thought. This module examines the republican language of political activism, virtue, liberty, equality, revolution and constitutional foundings. We will consider how the republican mixed constitution was deployed to promote social hierarchy and empire in some contexts, and radical equality and anti-imperialism in other contexts. Students will read about Roman, French, Haitian and Indian republicanism through the ideas of Cicero, Montesquieu, CLR James, Anna J. Cooper, Nehru, Arendt and others.

This module is about the politics of normative change in world politics, and more specifically, in international responses to violent conflict i.e. the contestations over the norms, institutions, and law associated with the regulation of armed conflict and the management of its effects and consequences, and, more generally, the securing of a peaceful world. The module examines these both theoretically and empirically, with a focus on key domains within world politics - including human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal justice, the laws of war, and the legitimacy of the use of armed force - and the associated frameworks that have developed over the in recent decades as a wider architecture understood as ‘liberal’ in its ostensible foundations, goals, and commitments.

This course is an introduction to urban history, exploring how cities have been shaped and in what ways urban dynamics have transformed human society. The idea is to examine urban history as a process in which economic, social, political, cultural, and morphological changes are interrelated, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of urban history.

This module embrace those frameworks but also challenge their limitations for understanding the history of the non-western world and the interconnectedness of global history. This module challenges students to explore new research methods, as they need to think creatively about source materials that can shed light upon the histories of regions about which there are often few historical records.

This module explores gender in historical perspective, combining a general introduction to gender history with a case-study based on the specialisation and research expertise of the tutor. The module provides a detailed introduction to the positioning of history as a discipline vis-à-vis gender studies.

This module therefore seeks to understand war and violence from a non - Western perspective - to understand how they emerge from particular historical circumstances and how they produce different consequences in different periods and geographical, cultural, ethnic, and even religious contexts.

The course is designed to equip students with a broad range of theoretical and practical approaches to the study of museums. It examines the strategies and practices by which museums interpret, organise and display objects – especially non-Western objects – within diverse cultural contexts.

Arts of the African Diaspora addresses an important and, in many ways, an emerging field of study, long forsaken in chronicles of (art) history but now critical to its understanding, as well as those legacies borne of Atlantic slavery, turmoil, and global migration. Taking the twentieth century as its primary focus and spanning the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean and the African continent, this module considers the enduring impact and influence such histories have had on artistic practices assembled here under the rubric Arts of the African Diaspora.

This module introduces the foundations of international environmental law, including its subjects, sources, principles and measures of implementation, compliance and dispute settlement. It explores the range of laws and norms that impact on global environmental problems. This module is built around the understanding that international environmental law is about both conservation and use (captured in the notion of sustainable development). It is also structured around an understanding that it is the North-South dimension of environmental issues that explains a large part of existing international environmental law

It provides an introduction to the principles of international environmental law (such as the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and the precautionary principle), environmental justice (human rights, participatory rights), examines questions related to compliance, effectiveness and enforcement of international environmental law; the governance and institutional framework governing the environment at the international level; and links with other branches of international law, such as human rights.

The Music Business.

This course will focus on urban musical practices and soundscapes, including theoretical approaches drawn from contemporary literature in ethnomusicology and associated disciplines, and will enable students to put classroom learning into practice via a guided individual field study.

Hip Hop inspires strong opinions, whether in culture war debates or among urban youth born in the digital era. It is the music of grass-roots activists, but it is also big business. It is often described as a primarily lyrics-driven genre, but its best songs are condensed histories of migration and labour trauma that play out at the level of melody. This module considers how it came to be that this genre, born of post-industrial urban decay but gestated through decades of Afrodiasporic conceptions of versioning, has come to dominate not only the Music industry, but academic discussions of youth culture. Through consideration of Hip Hop’s history, pre-history, and global reach, we draw broader conclusions about migration and diaspora, ethnicity and gender, nation and place, all of which hide in plain sight embedded in musical style.

This module provides a broad introduction to debates on Criminal Justice, Race and Rights and is designed for students who are interested in theories of race, crime, rights and the Criminal Justice system in the UK. It is set out to give a deep understanding of the theories and rationales underlying race, crime and the criminal justice and to help students critically reflect the system. It engages with some of the most important issues in the UK, such as the discretionary police power, stop and search, police questioning, pre-trial detention, the under-funded and variable quality of criminal defence, the value and limitations of human rights, guilty pleas and its impact on racialised communities in Britain and beyond. It begins with a socio-legal approach to the subject grounding theories of crime and race within a broader socio-political analysis and context.

Criminal Justice, Race and Rights is a broad-based topic and the course therefore adopts a theoretical, substantive and case-study approach while adopting critical, social legal approaches to understand contemporary race, crime and criminal justice issues. The seminar materials provide students with the historical, legal practice and theoretical foundations while adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of law and provides tools for analysing the material in the case studies with a critical analysis of case law and statutory instruments.

This module takes the specific topics of health, well-being, embodiment, resilience, human relations to the environment and questions of climate change and views and analyses them through the lens of culture studies. The module is team taught by lectures with expertise in language-based cultural studies with reference to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, whose research and teaching incorporates a focus on areas of health and well-being such as HIV-AIDS, cancer, Covid-19, public health discourses and their relation to difference cultural perspectives on embodiment. The module interweaves these concerns into the study of the need for human resilience in response to current global crises, first and foremost among which are questions of environmental destruction and climate change. The module concludes with an emphasis on the need for cross-cultural communication and intercultural understanding for global collaboration to find effective solutions to the problems of our times.

This module will examine a range of genres and forms, and aims to provide students with an insight into motif and interpretation of love and loss by looking at specific selection of texts in English translation (in poetry and prose) by different authors from across the regions of Africa, the Middle East, South and South East Asia, from the ancient times to the present day.

This module examines themes and notions of 'modernity' in the Korean cultural context, through a syllabus which considers issues surrounding representation, identity, landscape and memory in Korean literature and film. It aims to provide students with the skills to read, analyse and understand Korean literary works and films against past and present socio-historical contexts and critical discourses.

This course builds technically on the second-year module, Econometrics, which is a prerequisite for this module. It also builds conceptually on the two second-year core modules: Microeconomic Analysis and Macroeconomic Analysis. The course is designed to provide students with a hands-on" environment. It aims to help students deepen and broaden their knowledge and understanding of econometric techniques needed for empirical analyses of both cross-sectional household-level data for micromodelling research and time-series data for macro and also financial modelling research. In addition, the course also aims to develop students' abilities in critical evaluation of what is taught in econometrics textbooks."

The objective of this module is to provide students with a firm understanding of what the financial system does and how it is organised. It is designed to examine a broad series of topics, including what a financial instrument is and how it is valued; what a financial market is and how it works; what a financial institution is and how it operates. It equips students with the core principles of finance such as time has value, investors need to be compensated for taking risk and information is the basis for investment decision.

This module provides a critical overview of theoretical, empirical and policy issues relating to international trade and investment. It provides an introduction to the main theories of international trade, including standard neoclassical free trade approaches and more recent theories addressing imperfect competition, economies of scale, national competitiveness issues, and managed trade. It also discusses topics in international trade such as the effects of trade on income distribution and poverty, the debate about import substitution and trade protection, and alternative approaches to trade policy. Moreover, it analyses drivers of international factor movements, foreign direct investment, and the role of multinational corporations.

The objective of this module is to provide students with a firm understanding of financial global markets. The module will focus on topics including the role of finance in economic development, the relevance of different financial system structures, and the European Monetary and Economic Union.

This module is designed to introduce students to the major theoretical approaches and concepts in contemporary Development Economics. Both mainstream and heterodox approaches to Development Economics will be covered. Students will have the opportunity to critically engage with international development policy debates by unpicking the theories, frameworks and methods underpinning these debates. The module will apply theories to contemporary issues in low income countries, relying on a variety of case studies throughout.

This course offers a historical and contemporary exploration of the important roles played by film festivals in defining, validating, exhibiting, distributing, and (increasingly) producing global cinemas. While it introduces students to the inner workings of the oldest and largest international film festivals, it takes a critical postcolonial approach to the analysis of festivals worldwide and focuses in particular on the treatment of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American films and filmmakers on the circuit.

The course will offer a survey of films from the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and Israel, as well as an overview of the historical development of film in the region and a grounding in the socio-cultural contexts in which films have been produced. Films will be analysed aesthetically, with an awareness of multiple aspects of film technique, and meanings will be interrogated through a number of interdisciplinary and theoretical prisms.

This course will explore the deconstruction and reconstruction of philosophy from ‘the margins’, primarily examining epistemological arguments about the nature and form of knowledge, truth, subjectivity, and power (and their intersections) from perspectives traditionally marginalised by mainstream philosophy.

The philosophy of language is the branch of philosophical inquiry concerned with questions related to the nature, use and limits of language as a medium between language-users and between them and the world.

Do words merely describe non-linguistic things in the world, or does language have more to do with expressing intentions, vulnerabilities, and the like? This module looks at a range of Anglo-American, critical theoretic, and African takes on language - with particular attention devoted to language's interrelations with a range of power dynamics.

Students will learn how these various perspectives stand in conversation with each other, how the analysis of language has been linked to and conditioned by metaphysical commitments, and how language's imbrication with power buttresses different self-understandings of the aim of philosophical discussion.

The module explores different attitudes towards death, dying and the meaning of life in contemporary cultural, religious and philosophical traditions. It starts from the recognition that in many cultures death is not seen as the end of life, but as a starting point to inquire about what life means. As Robert Hertz (1907) has pointed out in his classical study, it is an episode in a journey which integrates life and death. 

Death and death rituals are central concerns of most cultural and religious systems. Their specific interpretations across cultures are intrinsically connected with prevalent conceptions of the self, the person, the body, and with definitions of life, including visions of the good life, which are transmitted through ritual and (oral) literature. Students will explore notions of meaningful life and good death through an introduction to the main theoretical debates in religious studies on the topics of voluntary death, sacrifice, rites of mourning, as well as ancestor worship, the idea of the self, and the quest for immortality. 

This module is intended to complement modules on individual religious and philosophical traditions in the Department of History, Religions and Philosophies. It will also be of interest for students interested in religions and politics and cultural aspects of medicine. 

This team-taught module will bring together different scholars from across the arts and humanities to consider at an advanced level the impact of digital technologies, such as digitisation, translation or artificial intelligence, on various aspects of human life when they are digitised: language, translation, arts, memory, history and its preservation, authenticity and “fakeness”, religion, pilgrimage, archives, structures of knowledge and information management, and others. Drawing a strong humanities foundation, the module will enable students to consider the impact of digitality on the human in a sophisticated way, without reducing/overlooking the implications of digital transition or falling foul of digital exceptionalism.

This module will give students the opportunity to experience what it is like to work in their chosen industry, while developing their employability and graduate career prospects. It will allow students to acquire greater knowledge of the industry of their choice and enable them to explore and experience its practices. Students will apply some of what you have learned on their programme and reflect upon their career aspirations.

Important note: This module is offered on a first come, first served basis. In term 1, students have to engage with the SOAS Careers team to find a suitable internship for their degrees. Only upon the successful completion of this task, students will be invited to take this module in semester 2 of their degrees.

The course is designed to explore themes – around the emergence of the cultural industries, the commodification of art and culture and the potentialities of digital culture – that are relevant across Media, Music and Arts and Archaeology, and to bring together expertise from each department in a team-taught course. It will give students an overview of the history and scale of the global cultural industries and how they intersect with politics, the economy, and ideas of the self and of community. It will use case studies drawn from across SOAS regions to ground the course in specific examples that address transnational and localised framings.

This half-unit introduces students from across the School of Arts to key texts of post-colonial theory that deal with aesthetics and the senses. The team-taught module mixes different disciplinary approaches from Music, History of Art and Archaeology, and Media to engage key concepts in post-colonial studies.

This School of Arts unit combines curatorial training with an exploration of key debates in the theory, history and practice of curating art, music and media in a global context. The course includes a series of off-site visits in galleries and arts institutions during which students will meet curators and engage with current perspectives on curating in London. Students will study the histories and debates of curating through a close reading of seminal exhibitions, manifestos and texts, and will cover themes including collecting and display, postcolonial exhibition practice, representation and the ‘other’, curatorial initiatives in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, curating sound and music, and the use of archives and digital technologies in curating. Throughout the course, students will work on group projects to develop practical and conceptual skills for curatorial research, and will end the course by producing an exhibition proposal. The course will appeal especially to students interested in pursuing a career in the arts sector.

This module provides theoretical, practical and historical training in decolonising the study of the arts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It equips students with decolonising tools and perspectives needed to establish and articulate their intellectual position within the study of the arts.

This module is concerned with the ways the mind and mental illness are understood in different cultural contexts. We explore the cultural and historical shaping of Western psychiatry and its interaction with other diagnostic and healing traditions. Are psychiatric diagnostic categories like depression or PTSD universal or culturally and historically specific, bound to particular notions of mind, body or spirit? Is Western psychiatric knowledge imposed on other societies through Global Mental Health, or does the expansion of evidence-based treatments address a critical ‘treatment gap’? Is the globally rising diagnosis of mental disorders a consequence of new stressors, undiagnosed conditions or the medicalisation of ordinary sadness and coping responses? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions. It will probe the universality of psychiatric knowledge, and examine how illness classifications are the result of political and epistemological struggles, both on local and global scales.

This course explores the intersection and social construction of race" and gender through an anthropological lense. The course emphasises the lived realities of race and gender and how these have been shaped by cultural, historical and economic power relations. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. A special focus is given to the ways in which anthropology has contributed to and been complicit in histories and experiences of oppression, empire and colonialism. By looking at whiteness as a system of power that undergirds gendered ideologies and privileges, the course critically analyses knowledge practices and the representation of race and gender in science and media."

Historical Linguistics.

This module introduces students to fundamental concepts and approaches in the study of the links between language and society. Using numerous examples, students will learn about the interplay of language with social factors such as class, gender, ethnicity and age, including how language varies and changes.

The climate crisis is clearly one of the primary existential threats facing the human species. But how we understand the roots of the climate crisis, its current and future impacts on world politics, and its possible solutions, is inherently contested terrain. Nothing less than the future of life on earth, and competing conceptions of the ‘good life’ and how we should organize our societies, is at stake. This course will investigate the global politics of the climate crisis, starting with scientific debates regarding the possible severity of climate change (how bad could it get?), and then moving through questions about climate governance, the political economy of climate change, the energy and food system transitions, migration, geoengineering, possible global futures, and activism. We can hardly hope to exhaust such a complex topic in the span of 10 weeks. Instead, we will cover some key topics and hear from a wide range of perspectives. The goal will be to give students a basic grounding in the science, politics, and economics of climate change; to enable them to critically engage with a multiple perspectives on the key causes and possible solutions to the climate crisis; and to help them think through its implications for their own lives and futures.

This module embrace those frameworks but also challenge their limitations for understanding the history of the non-western world and the interconnectedness of global history. This module challenges students to explore new research methods, as they need to think creatively about source materials that can shed light upon the histories of regions about which there are often few historical records.

This module explores gender in historical perspective, combining a general introduction to gender history with a case-study based on the specialisation and research expertise of the tutor. The module provides a detailed introduction to the positioning of history as a discipline vis-à-vis gender studies.

The course is designed to equip students with a broad range of theoretical and practical approaches to the study of museums. It examines the strategies and practices by which museums interpret, organise and display objects – especially non-Western objects – within diverse cultural contexts.

Arts of the African Diaspora addresses an important and, in many ways, an emerging field of study, long forsaken in chronicles of (art) history but now critical to its understanding, as well as those legacies borne of Atlantic slavery, turmoil, and global migration. Taking the twentieth century as its primary focus and spanning the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean and the African continent, this module considers the enduring impact and influence such histories have had on artistic practices assembled here under the rubric Arts of the African Diaspora.

The Music Business.

This course will focus on urban musical practices and soundscapes, including theoretical approaches drawn from contemporary literature in ethnomusicology and associated disciplines, and will enable students to put classroom learning into practice via a guided individual field study.

Hip Hop inspires strong opinions, whether in culture war debates or among urban youth born in the digital era. It is the music of grass-roots activists, but it is also big business. It is often described as a primarily lyrics-driven genre, but its best songs are condensed histories of migration and labour trauma that play out at the level of melody. This module considers how it came to be that this genre, born of post-industrial urban decay but gestated through decades of Afrodiasporic conceptions of versioning, has come to dominate not only the Music industry, but academic discussions of youth culture. Through consideration of Hip Hop’s history, pre-history, and global reach, we draw broader conclusions about migration and diaspora, ethnicity and gender, nation and place, all of which hide in plain sight embedded in musical style.

This module takes the specific topics of health, well-being, embodiment, resilience, human relations to the environment and questions of climate change and views and analyses them through the lens of culture studies. The module is team taught by lectures with expertise in language-based cultural studies with reference to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, whose research and teaching incorporates a focus on areas of health and well-being such as HIV-AIDS, cancer, Covid-19, public health discourses and their relation to difference cultural perspectives on embodiment. The module interweaves these concerns into the study of the need for human resilience in response to current global crises, first and foremost among which are questions of environmental destruction and climate change. The module concludes with an emphasis on the need for cross-cultural communication and intercultural understanding for global collaboration to find effective solutions to the problems of our times.

This module will examine a range of genres and forms, and aims to provide students with an insight into motif and interpretation of love and loss by looking at specific selection of texts in English translation (in poetry and prose) by different authors from across the regions of Africa, the Middle East, South and South East Asia, from the ancient times to the present day.

This module examines themes and notions of 'modernity' in the Korean cultural context, through a syllabus which considers issues surrounding representation, identity, landscape and memory in Korean literature and film. It aims to provide students with the skills to read, analyse and understand Korean literary works and films against past and present socio-historical contexts and critical discourses.

The objective of this module is to provide students with a firm understanding of financial global markets. The module will focus on topics including the role of finance in economic development, the relevance of different financial system structures, and the European Monetary and Economic Union.

This course offers a historical and contemporary exploration of the important roles played by film festivals in defining, validating, exhibiting, distributing, and (increasingly) producing global cinemas. While it introduces students to the inner workings of the oldest and largest international film festivals, it takes a critical postcolonial approach to the analysis of festivals worldwide and focuses in particular on the treatment of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American films and filmmakers on the circuit.

The course will offer a survey of films from the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and Israel, as well as an overview of the historical development of film in the region and a grounding in the socio-cultural contexts in which films have been produced. Films will be analysed aesthetically, with an awareness of multiple aspects of film technique, and meanings will be interrogated through a number of interdisciplinary and theoretical prisms.

This team-taught module will bring together different scholars from across the arts and humanities to consider at an advanced level the impact of digital technologies, such as digitisation, translation or artificial intelligence, on various aspects of human life when they are digitised: language, translation, arts, memory, history and its preservation, authenticity and “fakeness”, religion, pilgrimage, archives, structures of knowledge and information management, and others. Drawing a strong humanities foundation, the module will enable students to consider the impact of digitality on the human in a sophisticated way, without reducing/overlooking the implications of digital transition or falling foul of digital exceptionalism.

This module will give students the opportunity to experience what it is like to work in their chosen industry, while developing their employability and graduate career prospects. It will allow students to acquire greater knowledge of the industry of their choice and enable them to explore and experience its practices. Students will apply some of what you have learned on their programme and reflect upon their career aspirations.

Important note: This module is offered on a first come, first served basis. In term 1, students have to engage with the SOAS Careers team to find a suitable internship for their degrees. Only upon the successful completion of this task, students will be invited to take this module in semester 2 of their degrees.

The course is designed to explore themes – around the emergence of the cultural industries, the commodification of art and culture and the potentialities of digital culture – that are relevant across Media, Music and Arts and Archaeology, and to bring together expertise from each department in a team-taught course. It will give students an overview of the history and scale of the global cultural industries and how they intersect with politics, the economy, and ideas of the self and of community. It will use case studies drawn from across SOAS regions to ground the course in specific examples that address transnational and localised framings.

This half-unit introduces students from across the School of Arts to key texts of post-colonial theory that deal with aesthetics and the senses. The team-taught module mixes different disciplinary approaches from Music, History of Art and Archaeology, and Media to engage key concepts in post-colonial studies.

This School of Arts unit combines curatorial training with an exploration of key debates in the theory, history and practice of curating art, music and media in a global context. The course includes a series of off-site visits in galleries and arts institutions during which students will meet curators and engage with current perspectives on curating in London. Students will study the histories and debates of curating through a close reading of seminal exhibitions, manifestos and texts, and will cover themes including collecting and display, postcolonial exhibition practice, representation and the ‘other’, curatorial initiatives in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, curating sound and music, and the use of archives and digital technologies in curating. Throughout the course, students will work on group projects to develop practical and conceptual skills for curatorial research, and will end the course by producing an exhibition proposal. The course will appeal especially to students interested in pursuing a career in the arts sector.

The dissertation is the capstone of the BA Global Liberal Arts that draws on and brings together the different strands of the programme. It is an exercise in critical thinking, problem solving, and project design that can take various forms, depending on the student’s individual intellectual journey and academic and professional interests. It is an opportunity to work independently, but with guidance from an academic supervisor. The planning of the dissertation begins in the summer term of the preceding year with an indication of the research topic and a preliminary reading list.

The purpose of this module is to familiarise students with the main debates in gender and development and to introduce new ways of conceptualising the field, critiquing the concept of gender as generally applied in development, and also development itself. We will study issues relevant to gender and development not usually included within the development paradigm, like the coloniality of gender. We will also discuss how the gender binaries came to be so pervasive globally. Gender here is viewed as a set of normative behavioural prescriptions that apply to men as much as to women and men and masculinities will be treated as an integral part of the field alongside women and femininities. Gender is also understood not simply as an issue of individual male-female relationships but as inherently political.

This module introduces the basic concepts of corporate governance and theory of the firm. It is specially designed for the undergraduate study of such areas as management, finance, financial law, corporate law, economics and related subjects. The course is designed to increase the depth of your understanding of corporate governance issues. As corporate governance is a multi-disciplinary subject – covering such topics as law, politics, management, finance, and economics - the course outlines the key theoretical and practical issues underpinning the study of corporate governance, and how they affect the governance of the modern corporation. International comparisons and differences in corporate governance are emphasised throughout the course.

For international companies to achieve significant competitiveness in the marketplace, it is important that managers understand consumer behaviour. This module discusses the internal processes that occur within consumers´ minds as well as external processes that influence consumers’ experience, engagements and relationships with international companies/brands. Knowledge of how these processes can be useful for choosing marketing strategies is attained through the theoretical models and practical examples discussed during the lectures and seminars. The module is designed to develop students’ understanding of the specific models and concepts necessary when evaluating and analysing consumer behaviour.

This module is concerned with the ways the mind and mental illness are understood in different cultural contexts. We explore the cultural and historical shaping of Western psychiatry and its interaction with other diagnostic and healing traditions. Are psychiatric diagnostic categories like depression or PTSD universal or culturally and historically specific, bound to particular notions of mind, body or spirit? Is Western psychiatric knowledge imposed on other societies through Global Mental Health, or does the expansion of evidence-based treatments address a critical ‘treatment gap’? Is the globally rising diagnosis of mental disorders a consequence of new stressors, undiagnosed conditions or the medicalisation of ordinary sadness and coping responses? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions. It will probe the universality of psychiatric knowledge, and examine how illness classifications are the result of political and epistemological struggles, both on local and global scales.

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This module explores these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times.

This course explores the intersection and social construction of race" and gender through an anthropological lense. The course emphasises the lived realities of race and gender and how these have been shaped by cultural, historical and economic power relations. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. A special focus is given to the ways in which anthropology has contributed to and been complicit in histories and experiences of oppression, empire and colonialism. By looking at whiteness as a system of power that undergirds gendered ideologies and privileges, the course critically analyses knowledge practices and the representation of race and gender in science and media."

Historical Linguistics.

The course shall examine debates in the discipline of politics about the role of “culture” in politics – as practices of meaning-making in politics; as a series of everyday practices and rituals with implicit (or overt) political content; and as cultural products (art, films, etc.) both whose making and content reflects a specific politics. To do so, the course will require two activities outside class: A visit to a diasporic enclave in London – as the basis of a discussion of questions of identity-making, immigration, and the political economy of “cultural” practices (restaurants, specific shops catering to specific communities, etc.). And a selection of a film, or art piece, or theatrical production – to discuss what politics goes into the production of such artwork; the ways in which the overt and implicit politics that such artwork espouses can be critically understood and explained. The course will also examine the role of meaning-making and semiotics in social movements and political mobilisation, in the production of hegemony, and critically assess outdated and problematic “national culture” paradigms.

This course will chart the dominant features of this scholarly territory by familiarizing students with major issues and controversies in immigration research and by examining empirical cases in Africa, the GCC, and East Asia.

This course introduces students to economic perspectives on environmental and development issues. The course covers various macro and microeconomic issues as well as economics of climate change.

The climate crisis is clearly one of the primary existential threats facing the human species. But how we understand the roots of the climate crisis, its current and future impacts on world politics, and its possible solutions, is inherently contested terrain. Nothing less than the future of life on earth, and competing conceptions of the ‘good life’ and how we should organize our societies, is at stake. This course will investigate the global politics of the climate crisis, starting with scientific debates regarding the possible severity of climate change (how bad could it get?), and then moving through questions about climate governance, the political economy of climate change, the energy and food system transitions, migration, geoengineering, possible global futures, and activism. We can hardly hope to exhaust such a complex topic in the span of 10 weeks. Instead, we will cover some key topics and hear from a wide range of perspectives. The goal will be to give students a basic grounding in the science, politics, and economics of climate change; to enable them to critically engage with a multiple perspectives on the key causes and possible solutions to the climate crisis; and to help them think through its implications for their own lives and futures.

The purpose of this module is to examine the effects of political factors on economic and social transformation (and vice versa) with reference to some of the most successful developing economies. It focuses on two main issues. First, how did political factors (i.e. types of regime and the conditions of their formation) facilitate the transformation of certain developing economies towards upper middle-income status during the GATT or pre-globalization era (c. 1950-90). Second, the module will examine how upper middle income economies are facing up to the challenges of the globalization era, notably mobile capital (financialization and the emergence of global value chains) and the complex of constraints that constitute the “middle income trap”.

In this module, students will study various conceptions of republicanism, empire and revolution in both western and anticolonial political thought. This module examines the republican language of political activism, virtue, liberty, equality, revolution and constitutional foundings. We will consider how the republican mixed constitution was deployed to promote social hierarchy and empire in some contexts, and radical equality and anti-imperialism in other contexts. Students will read about Roman, French, Haitian and Indian republicanism through the ideas of Cicero, Montesquieu, CLR James, Anna J. Cooper, Nehru, Arendt and others.

This module is about the politics of normative change in world politics, and more specifically, in international responses to violent conflict i.e. the contestations over the norms, institutions, and law associated with the regulation of armed conflict and the management of its effects and consequences, and, more generally, the securing of a peaceful world. The module examines these both theoretically and empirically, with a focus on key domains within world politics - including human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal justice, the laws of war, and the legitimacy of the use of armed force - and the associated frameworks that have developed over the in recent decades as a wider architecture understood as ‘liberal’ in its ostensible foundations, goals, and commitments.

Arts of the African Diaspora addresses an important and, in many ways, an emerging field of study, long forsaken in chronicles of (art) history but now critical to its understanding, as well as those legacies borne of Atlantic slavery, turmoil, and global migration. Taking the twentieth century as its primary focus and spanning the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean and the African continent, this module considers the enduring impact and influence such histories have had on artistic practices assembled here under the rubric Arts of the African Diaspora.

This course will focus on urban musical practices and soundscapes, including theoretical approaches drawn from contemporary literature in ethnomusicology and associated disciplines, and will enable students to put classroom learning into practice via a guided individual field study.

Hip Hop inspires strong opinions, whether in culture war debates or among urban youth born in the digital era. It is the music of grass-roots activists, but it is also big business. It is often described as a primarily lyrics-driven genre, but its best songs are condensed histories of migration and labour trauma that play out at the level of melody. This module considers how it came to be that this genre, born of post-industrial urban decay but gestated through decades of Afrodiasporic conceptions of versioning, has come to dominate not only the Music industry, but academic discussions of youth culture. Through consideration of Hip Hop’s history, pre-history, and global reach, we draw broader conclusions about migration and diaspora, ethnicity and gender, nation and place, all of which hide in plain sight embedded in musical style.

This module provides a broad introduction to debates on Criminal Justice, Race and Rights and is designed for students who are interested in theories of race, crime, rights and the Criminal Justice system in the UK. It is set out to give a deep understanding of the theories and rationales underlying race, crime and the criminal justice and to help students critically reflect the system. It engages with some of the most important issues in the UK, such as the discretionary police power, stop and search, police questioning, pre-trial detention, the under-funded and variable quality of criminal defence, the value and limitations of human rights, guilty pleas and its impact on racialised communities in Britain and beyond. It begins with a socio-legal approach to the subject grounding theories of crime and race within a broader socio-political analysis and context.

Criminal Justice, Race and Rights is a broad-based topic and the course therefore adopts a theoretical, substantive and case-study approach while adopting critical, social legal approaches to understand contemporary race, crime and criminal justice issues. The seminar materials provide students with the historical, legal practice and theoretical foundations while adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of law and provides tools for analysing the material in the case studies with a critical analysis of case law and statutory instruments.

This course builds technically on the second-year module, Econometrics, which is a prerequisite for this module. It also builds conceptually on the two second-year core modules: Microeconomic Analysis and Macroeconomic Analysis. The course is designed to provide students with a hands-on" environment. It aims to help students deepen and broaden their knowledge and understanding of econometric techniques needed for empirical analyses of both cross-sectional household-level data for micromodelling research and time-series data for macro and also financial modelling research. In addition, the course also aims to develop students' abilities in critical evaluation of what is taught in econometrics textbooks."

The objective of this module is to provide students with a firm understanding of financial global markets. The module will focus on topics including the role of finance in economic development, the relevance of different financial system structures, and the European Monetary and Economic Union.

This course offers a historical and contemporary exploration of the important roles played by film festivals in defining, validating, exhibiting, distributing, and (increasingly) producing global cinemas. While it introduces students to the inner workings of the oldest and largest international film festivals, it takes a critical postcolonial approach to the analysis of festivals worldwide and focuses in particular on the treatment of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American films and filmmakers on the circuit.

The course will offer a survey of films from the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and Israel, as well as an overview of the historical development of film in the region and a grounding in the socio-cultural contexts in which films have been produced. Films will be analysed aesthetically, with an awareness of multiple aspects of film technique, and meanings will be interrogated through a number of interdisciplinary and theoretical prisms.

This course will explore the deconstruction and reconstruction of philosophy from ‘the margins’, primarily examining epistemological arguments about the nature and form of knowledge, truth, subjectivity, and power (and their intersections) from perspectives traditionally marginalised by mainstream philosophy.

The philosophy of language is the branch of philosophical inquiry concerned with questions related to the nature, use and limits of language as a medium between language-users and between them and the world.

Do words merely describe non-linguistic things in the world, or does language have more to do with expressing intentions, vulnerabilities, and the like? This module looks at a range of Anglo-American, critical theoretic, and African takes on language - with particular attention devoted to language's interrelations with a range of power dynamics.

Students will learn how these various perspectives stand in conversation with each other, how the analysis of language has been linked to and conditioned by metaphysical commitments, and how language's imbrication with power buttresses different self-understandings of the aim of philosophical discussion.

The module explores different attitudes towards death, dying and the meaning of life in contemporary cultural, religious and philosophical traditions. It starts from the recognition that in many cultures death is not seen as the end of life, but as a starting point to inquire about what life means. As Robert Hertz (1907) has pointed out in his classical study, it is an episode in a journey which integrates life and death. 

Death and death rituals are central concerns of most cultural and religious systems. Their specific interpretations across cultures are intrinsically connected with prevalent conceptions of the self, the person, the body, and with definitions of life, including visions of the good life, which are transmitted through ritual and (oral) literature. Students will explore notions of meaningful life and good death through an introduction to the main theoretical debates in religious studies on the topics of voluntary death, sacrifice, rites of mourning, as well as ancestor worship, the idea of the self, and the quest for immortality. 

This module is intended to complement modules on individual religious and philosophical traditions in the Department of History, Religions and Philosophies. It will also be of interest for students interested in religions and politics and cultural aspects of medicine. 

This team-taught module will bring together different scholars from across the arts and humanities to consider at an advanced level the impact of digital technologies, such as digitisation, translation or artificial intelligence, on various aspects of human life when they are digitised: language, translation, arts, memory, history and its preservation, authenticity and “fakeness”, religion, pilgrimage, archives, structures of knowledge and information management, and others. Drawing a strong humanities foundation, the module will enable students to consider the impact of digitality on the human in a sophisticated way, without reducing/overlooking the implications of digital transition or falling foul of digital exceptionalism.

This School of Arts unit combines curatorial training with an exploration of key debates in the theory, history and practice of curating art, music and media in a global context. The course includes a series of off-site visits in galleries and arts institutions during which students will meet curators and engage with current perspectives on curating in London. Students will study the histories and debates of curating through a close reading of seminal exhibitions, manifestos and texts, and will cover themes including collecting and display, postcolonial exhibition practice, representation and the ‘other’, curatorial initiatives in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, curating sound and music, and the use of archives and digital technologies in curating. Throughout the course, students will work on group projects to develop practical and conceptual skills for curatorial research, and will end the course by producing an exhibition proposal. The course will appeal especially to students interested in pursuing a career in the arts sector.

This module provides theoretical, practical and historical training in decolonising the study of the arts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It equips students with decolonising tools and perspectives needed to establish and articulate their intellectual position within the study of the arts.

This module is concerned with the ways the mind and mental illness are understood in different cultural contexts. We explore the cultural and historical shaping of Western psychiatry and its interaction with other diagnostic and healing traditions. Are psychiatric diagnostic categories like depression or PTSD universal or culturally and historically specific, bound to particular notions of mind, body or spirit? Is Western psychiatric knowledge imposed on other societies through Global Mental Health, or does the expansion of evidence-based treatments address a critical ‘treatment gap’? Is the globally rising diagnosis of mental disorders a consequence of new stressors, undiagnosed conditions or the medicalisation of ordinary sadness and coping responses? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions. It will probe the universality of psychiatric knowledge, and examine how illness classifications are the result of political and epistemological struggles, both on local and global scales.

This course explores the intersection and social construction of race" and gender through an anthropological lense. The course emphasises the lived realities of race and gender and how these have been shaped by cultural, historical and economic power relations. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. A special focus is given to the ways in which anthropology has contributed to and been complicit in histories and experiences of oppression, empire and colonialism. By looking at whiteness as a system of power that undergirds gendered ideologies and privileges, the course critically analyses knowledge practices and the representation of race and gender in science and media."

Historical Linguistics.

This module traces the history and politics of Palestine and the Zionist movement, within a regional and international context, from the late nineteenth century to the present. It examines Palestinian and Israeli understandings of the past and present through primary sources, scholarship, and cultural production. The module seeks to understand how and at what costs Israeli and Palestinian political institutions and nationalisms have been constructed and analyzes British and US involvement in the conflict. Key themes to be introduced and explored include imperialism, settler colonialism, nationalism, Orientalism, violence, anticolonialism, and revolution, all as understood by a variety of actors involved in the region.

This course is about the economic structures, institutions and policy challenges in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The course starts with a broad economic history of the region and goes on to address the emergence of the economic structures, resource endowments, and political economy institutions of the modern Middle East. The course highlights the specificities of the political economy of the region in a global cotext and covers selected aspects of economic policy in the contemporary period in these countries. The contemporary nature of the problems facing the MENA countries are addressed throughout the course.

The climate crisis is clearly one of the primary existential threats facing the human species. But how we understand the roots of the climate crisis, its current and future impacts on world politics, and its possible solutions, is inherently contested terrain. Nothing less than the future of life on earth, and competing conceptions of the ‘good life’ and how we should organize our societies, is at stake. This course will investigate the global politics of the climate crisis, starting with scientific debates regarding the possible severity of climate change (how bad could it get?), and then moving through questions about climate governance, the political economy of climate change, the energy and food system transitions, migration, geoengineering, possible global futures, and activism. We can hardly hope to exhaust such a complex topic in the span of 10 weeks. Instead, we will cover some key topics and hear from a wide range of perspectives. The goal will be to give students a basic grounding in the science, politics, and economics of climate change; to enable them to critically engage with a multiple perspectives on the key causes and possible solutions to the climate crisis; and to help them think through its implications for their own lives and futures.

This module is about cultural and social change in Africa in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It covers the entire continent, north and south of the Sahara, as well as considering the cultures of the African diaspora. The aim to is explore African cultures and societies across the established divide in the continent's modern history between the era of colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century and that of renewed African sovereignty from around the 1960s. A range of social changes are examined, but the focus will be on the history of popular and visual cultures, including artistic production in the fields of music, dance, theatre, film and plastic art. A central concern is to think about the historical processes that have shaped contemporary society and culture today.

This module introduces students to the history and legacy of the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa from Senegambia down to Angola from ca. 1500 to the present. It gives a political and economic understanding of key developments and of social and cultural change and continuity. Students will explore the causes of the transatlantic slave trade, and the consequences of involvement in the trade for West African societies. The consequences of the abolition of slavery and local and global legacies of the slave trade will also be considered.

This course examines the histories of nationalist and imperial politics that are held to account for the partition of British India. It examines the ‘experience’ of partition beyond its politics along with with the historiography of colonialism, nationalism and gain an understanding of cultural, political issues involved in the politics of governing diverse groups.

The course focuses on Mughal rule in north India within the context of the Muslim World. Using the political developments in India from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as guiding lines for the discussion, the course will examine some of the main political, social, and religious institutions and processes in the Mughal Empire and their role in shaping state and society in South Asia.

Arts of the African Diaspora addresses an important and, in many ways, an emerging field of study, long forsaken in chronicles of (art) history but now critical to its understanding, as well as those legacies borne of Atlantic slavery, turmoil, and global migration. Taking the twentieth century as its primary focus and spanning the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean and the African continent, this module considers the enduring impact and influence such histories have had on artistic practices assembled here under the rubric Arts of the African Diaspora.

This module aims to introduce students to the many ways in which law and society interact in the subcontinent. We seek to do so by using, as far as possible, authors from the region, and focus on issues that continue to hold contemporary relevance.

This course will focus on urban musical practices and soundscapes, including theoretical approaches drawn from contemporary literature in ethnomusicology and associated disciplines, and will enable students to put classroom learning into practice via a guided individual field study.

The module gives students a good general introduction to Contemporary African Literature(s) and to demonstrate to them some of the ways in which creative writing in the form of prose narratives, the novel, poetry, drama, etc help create an understanding of the socio-cultural, economic and political issues that define life and existence on the African continent and its diaspora. The module is also meant to help encourage students develop critical and analytical skills that move away from dominant Eurocentric and Western perspectives and to present the teaching, researching, understanding and analysis of Africa from African-centred perspectives.

The module is intended to complement modules such as ‘History and Culture of Korea to the Late 19th Century’ and ‘Culture and Society in 20th Century Korea’ (which focuses on South Korea) to provide BA Korean students with a more comprehensive overview and understanding of the Korean peninsula and how it has developed, especially since the Pacific War.

This module focuses on Choson (1392-1910), the last dynasty of traditional Korea, and covers in depth aspects of society and culture that are of crucial importance for our understanding of not only traditional Korea but also developments on the Korean peninsula in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The objective of this module is to provide students with a firm understanding of financial global markets. The module will focus on topics including the role of finance in economic development, the relevance of different financial system structures, and the European Monetary and Economic Union.

Focusing primarily on the Asia-Pacific War, this module critically explores the multiple ways in which memories have been created, circulated, and consumed in Japan, the Koreas, and the Sinophone area.

This module aims to provide students with a broad knowledge base to understand Taiwan's culture and society. Because of its multifaceted cultural and ethnic mix and the complex colonial history, the module looks at Taiwan’s contemporary culture, unpicks the various dimensions of the complicated social change, and considers the colonial legacy and the impact of globalization.  The focus of the module is placed on the highly contentious issue of identity politics of the post-war era. By exploring contemporary Taiwanese cultural change and social development, this course facilitates a solid understanding of the complexity of this place, offers an interesting reference point to think about China and Japan, and provides a better understanding of the greater East Asian society. Because most courses cover China, Japan and Korea, this module can connect the dotted line to form a more complete picture of East Asia.

The course will offer a survey of films from the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and Israel, as well as an overview of the historical development of film in the region and a grounding in the socio-cultural contexts in which films have been produced. Films will be analysed aesthetically, with an awareness of multiple aspects of film technique, and meanings will be interrogated through a number of interdisciplinary and theoretical prisms.

There are multiple ways of thinking about resistance. Simply writing about oneself and the space one is not allowed to occupy can be a mode of resistance. Writing about past or present oppression, stirring protest, and imagining alternative futures can also be read as resistance. Cultures of resistance makes us think about what literature, film and other media seeks to do and the silences or censorship it challenges. It directs our attention to forms of injustice, but also to its mode of address, and to its intended and non-intended audiences, as well as it effects. Through narrative, poetic technique, political inclination, subject matter and authorial position, texts highlights the often intersectional dynamics of everyday living and the power structures that shape it. The module will examine an array of examples and forms of cultural texts from South Asia, and may include anticolonial, Dalit, feminist and LGBTQ narratives, political satire in prose, poetry, film, drama, dance and other such forms. 

This team-taught module will bring together different scholars from across the arts and humanities to consider at an advanced level the impact of digital technologies, such as digitisation, translation or artificial intelligence, on various aspects of human life when they are digitised: language, translation, arts, memory, history and its preservation, authenticity and “fakeness”, religion, pilgrimage, archives, structures of knowledge and information management, and others. Drawing a strong humanities foundation, the module will enable students to consider the impact of digitality on the human in a sophisticated way, without reducing/overlooking the implications of digital transition or falling foul of digital exceptionalism.

This School of Arts unit combines curatorial training with an exploration of key debates in the theory, history and practice of curating art, music and media in a global context. The course includes a series of off-site visits in galleries and arts institutions during which students will meet curators and engage with current perspectives on curating in London. Students will study the histories and debates of curating through a close reading of seminal exhibitions, manifestos and texts, and will cover themes including collecting and display, postcolonial exhibition practice, representation and the ‘other’, curatorial initiatives in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, curating sound and music, and the use of archives and digital technologies in curating. Throughout the course, students will work on group projects to develop practical and conceptual skills for curatorial research, and will end the course by producing an exhibition proposal. The course will appeal especially to students interested in pursuing a career in the arts sector.

This module is concerned with the ways the mind and mental illness are understood in different cultural contexts. We explore the cultural and historical shaping of Western psychiatry and its interaction with other diagnostic and healing traditions. Are psychiatric diagnostic categories like depression or PTSD universal or culturally and historically specific, bound to particular notions of mind, body or spirit? Is Western psychiatric knowledge imposed on other societies through Global Mental Health, or does the expansion of evidence-based treatments address a critical ‘treatment gap’? Is the globally rising diagnosis of mental disorders a consequence of new stressors, undiagnosed conditions or the medicalisation of ordinary sadness and coping responses? The module uses ethnographic research, cultural psychiatry and anthropological theory to explore such questions. It will probe the universality of psychiatric knowledge, and examine how illness classifications are the result of political and epistemological struggles, both on local and global scales.

This course explores the intersection and social construction of race" and gender through an anthropological lense. The course emphasises the lived realities of race and gender and how these have been shaped by cultural, historical and economic power relations. At the same time, we explore how the categories of race and gender have been the object of scientific discourses and technologies of control. A special focus is given to the ways in which anthropology has contributed to and been complicit in histories and experiences of oppression, empire and colonialism. By looking at whiteness as a system of power that undergirds gendered ideologies and privileges, the course critically analyses knowledge practices and the representation of race and gender in science and media."

Historical Linguistics.

The climate crisis is clearly one of the primary existential threats facing the human species. But how we understand the roots of the climate crisis, its current and future impacts on world politics, and its possible solutions, is inherently contested terrain. Nothing less than the future of life on earth, and competing conceptions of the ‘good life’ and how we should organize our societies, is at stake. This course will investigate the global politics of the climate crisis, starting with scientific debates regarding the possible severity of climate change (how bad could it get?), and then moving through questions about climate governance, the political economy of climate change, the energy and food system transitions, migration, geoengineering, possible global futures, and activism. We can hardly hope to exhaust such a complex topic in the span of 10 weeks. Instead, we will cover some key topics and hear from a wide range of perspectives. The goal will be to give students a basic grounding in the science, politics, and economics of climate change; to enable them to critically engage with a multiple perspectives on the key causes and possible solutions to the climate crisis; and to help them think through its implications for their own lives and futures.

Arts of the African Diaspora addresses an important and, in many ways, an emerging field of study, long forsaken in chronicles of (art) history but now critical to its understanding, as well as those legacies borne of Atlantic slavery, turmoil, and global migration. Taking the twentieth century as its primary focus and spanning the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean and the African continent, this module considers the enduring impact and influence such histories have had on artistic practices assembled here under the rubric Arts of the African Diaspora.

This course will focus on urban musical practices and soundscapes, including theoretical approaches drawn from contemporary literature in ethnomusicology and associated disciplines, and will enable students to put classroom learning into practice via a guided individual field study.

The objective of this module is to provide students with a firm understanding of financial global markets. The module will focus on topics including the role of finance in economic development, the relevance of different financial system structures, and the European Monetary and Economic Union.

The course will offer a survey of films from the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and Israel, as well as an overview of the historical development of film in the region and a grounding in the socio-cultural contexts in which films have been produced. Films will be analysed aesthetically, with an awareness of multiple aspects of film technique, and meanings will be interrogated through a number of interdisciplinary and theoretical prisms.

This team-taught module will bring together different scholars from across the arts and humanities to consider at an advanced level the impact of digital technologies, such as digitisation, translation or artificial intelligence, on various aspects of human life when they are digitised: language, translation, arts, memory, history and its preservation, authenticity and “fakeness”, religion, pilgrimage, archives, structures of knowledge and information management, and others. Drawing a strong humanities foundation, the module will enable students to consider the impact of digitality on the human in a sophisticated way, without reducing/overlooking the implications of digital transition or falling foul of digital exceptionalism.

This School of Arts unit combines curatorial training with an exploration of key debates in the theory, history and practice of curating art, music and media in a global context. The course includes a series of off-site visits in galleries and arts institutions during which students will meet curators and engage with current perspectives on curating in London. Students will study the histories and debates of curating through a close reading of seminal exhibitions, manifestos and texts, and will cover themes including collecting and display, postcolonial exhibition practice, representation and the ‘other’, curatorial initiatives in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, curating sound and music, and the use of archives and digital technologies in curating. Throughout the course, students will work on group projects to develop practical and conceptual skills for curatorial research, and will end the course by producing an exhibition proposal. The course will appeal especially to students interested in pursuing a career in the arts sector.