Global Affairs and Politics - your questions answered! video transcript

My name's Alistair, Alistair Hodge. I'm currently Head of the School of Humanities and Journalism here at the University of Derby, and I've helped develop this fantastic new course; Global Affairs and Politics. This course really is designed from the bottom up for anyone who is interested in the world as it is and how it could be. It focuses on a incredibly broad range of content, whether it's the climate crisis, whether it's social injustices going on in the world or here in the UK. And it takes a unique approach. It's transdisciplinary. Now, what does that mean? It means that we approach the problems, the issues, the content, the lectures from many, many different angles. We take a journalistic approach, we take a political approach, we take a historical approach and that's all bound up into a broad humanities approach, that emphasises problem solving, critical thinking, analytical skills to a really high standard and the ability to come up with new solutions.

Graduates will find that they have the skillset that employers really want in a broad, broad range of careers, whether that's private industry in leadership and management roles, whether it's in government or the civil service or the diplomatic service, whether it's in charities. It's very, very difficult to predict where our graduates will go because they are equipped to go almost anywhere. Employers tell us constantly that what they require are graduates who can negotiate, who can analyse, who can look at things from new approaches and come up with new solutions, and that's exactly what this course is designed to do. Digital skills are vital for the future and so, as much learning as possible will involve students learning how to use those new technologies, technologies which may well form part of the solution to some of the problems that the world faces. When students arrive at first, they might well be surprised, they might well be surprised by the breadth of what we cover. There are modules in which students have the opportunity actually to come up with new solutions to things. They'll be able to go out into the region or engage with the world on a digital platform, actually to come up with real solutions to work with employers, government agencies, think tanks, charities, policy organisations, to analyse what's going on and actually to propose new solutions. One of the really exciting things about this course is that, our students will be taught by an incredibly broad range of people. Lecturers will come from journalism, from history, from political science and from other areas. Supplementing lecturers here at the university, we will also be having a broad range of guest speakers from industry, from government. If students are wondering whether they should study this course, they absolutely should study this course because of its breadth, its relevance to the world and the enormous range of interest that they will derive from the teaching.

Global Affairs and Politics - your questions answered! video

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