Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >> Hi folks we're so excited to have you here for our Offer Holder Open Day. We're going to be doing a student-led session here so we'll introduce ourselves in a second. This will be a real student-facing opportunity for you to hear from our current and former students about what life is really like in the Liberal Arts at Warwick.

Let's introduce ourselves, my name is Gavin Schwartz-Leeper, I'm the Deputy Head of the School for Cross-faculty sStudies and the Director of Student Experience for Liberal Arts. Arya, do you want to say hello?

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Hi I'm Arya I'm a third-year Liberal Arts student I'm studying on an Economics route. Emily?

Emily, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Hi my name is Emily, I'm also a third-year Liberal Arts student. My pathway is in 'Culture and Identity' and I'm from here in the UK (from Suffolk if you know it) so I'm one of the local students. Kornelia?

Kornelia, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Hi my name is Kornelia, I'm from Poland and Ireland and I'm also studying a pathway but I named it 'Social Anthropology and Media' and I'm a fourth year student having done my year abroad last year. Cym would you like to go next?

Cym, Liberal Arts alumna >> Hi my name is Cymroan, I'm known as Cym, I'm from Mumbai in India and I graduated in 2020 from Liberal Arts and my pathway was actually very complicated. It was 'Global Social Systems, Representations, Ideologies and Discourse'. Since graduating, I'm now working with a sustainable finance and ESG advisory firm here in Mumbai and I also volunteer with a non-profit organization called Million Meals Mission. We work towards food insecurities and I've been involved in that for the past about a year now as well.

Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >> Cool thanks so much. Like I said this is going to be a student-led session, so I'm just going to be a participant, I'll answer some questions as well and chime in at different points but I'll turn it over to Arya who's very kindly volunteered to be our chair. Arya take it away.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Hi everyone I'm so glad that you guys are here to hear about our experience at Liberal Arts. Just to kick us off, I'd just like to give you guys an idea of the kind of modules which you could expect at Liberal Arts, some of our favourite modules. One I really enjoyed was Consumption in second year. Emily do you want to tell us a bit about something which you really enjoyed from one of your core modules?

Emily, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah sure so the two core modules in second year are Consumption and Sustainability and I particularly enjoyed Sustainability. One thing that really surprised me first going into it was that, with the name Sustainability I just expected that it would be very environmentally focused and it did have an environmental focus to an extent, but it was a lot broader than I thought it was going to be. We kind of looked at economic sustainability and social sustainability and looked at the idea of being sustainable and sustainable practices from a wide variety of angles, but then we got to focus in on individual issues in every session. We still got to learn about really specific things but in a whole wide area of different topics. I found that it was really interesting. I think that the focus that we had on system maps I found quite difficult to grapple with at first. So this was an idea that you like physically map out a problem to see which different factors play into different results. It took a lot for me to get my head around to figure out what was going on and how to figure out what the different stocks were and what led into what and how you measure it, but actually, once I got the hang of it I found that it was a really useful way of thinking about problems because it makes you realize the wide scope of everything that you look at and you can't kind of focus in on one issue from a particular department for example, you really have to look at it from all angles to understand the depth of the problem. We particularly looked at this in regard to problems that self-perpetuate and we looked at 'why does this keep happening?' even though we tried to make interventions. By looking at it from all the different angles you start to see why an intervention in one part of the system doesn't affect the system as a whole. Even though I found it confusing to begin with, I think that it really helped to reshape my opinions on actually how I look at different issues. Although i did find that challenging to begin with, it was amazing.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> I completely agree I think one of the things about Sustainability which really challenged me was the way that it encouraged you to look at it from so many different perspectives and I'm really looking forward to telling you about my interest in sustainability later.

On that note, it also brings me into kind of thinking about the pathways which we've formed over the course of degree. For example, even though I'm doing an Economics Disciplinary pathway I did do a dissertation which is very much focused in sustainability issues. What would you guys want to tell us a bit more about your pathways? Kornelia how about that?

Kornelia, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah absolutely, so as I mentioned I'm on a Specialist Pathway which I ended up naming 'Social Anthropology and Media' but it didn't potentially start out that way. I kind of started out in my first year um grappling with different things, I thought I'd be really interested in film and took a module in Film and Television Studies but didn't end up doing very well in that! So in second year I just went around and really dug into the modules that I really would like to do ended up doing modules in Sociology, the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) and some Liberal Arts modules as well. I really enjoyed it all and it led me into naming it 'Social Anthropology and Media' because it kind of focused on all these different human aspects and I thought that it kind of went from culture and identity to my more specific field. Throughout this naming process I've been really fortunate to have the whole department help me and everyone was very pushing me towards making it my own. Your personal tutors are always there to talk through with any options that you have, if you have any um issues with choosing your modules as well you can go to them and they'll help you and ultimately it will become what you want it to be. I'm very happy with what it turned out to be now.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> That's really interesting and especially how you pointed out about how working with different departments, especially with IATL staff. I know working with the Economics Department, working with the Liberal Arts Department, it was very different but also that there was you know something very different about the teaching style in in our own Liberal Arts Department. Cym would you like to tell us a bit about how it differs - what is it about our about the style in the Liberal Arts Department?

Cym, Liberal Arts alumna >> I'm the same as Kornelia, I did modules in a lot of different departments and the seminars that I enjoyed most were 100% Liberal Arts seminars. A lot of times what happens in Liberal Arts seminars is that you're assigned a set reading before you come into class, that's your prep, you go and do that reading before class. Then you come in and it's really not that your tutor is going to stand there in front of the board and make notes and write something and give you a lecture or teach you something. The seminars are really focused on having group discussions and discussing ideas and opinions and thoughts. I wouldn't say very loose but they're not very structured either because they are just focused on talking about whatever the students are actually interested in. For example, I've had modules where we completely derailed the conversation from whatever the text was to just discuss an idea and really flesh it out, to talk about the problems or talk about the issues that emerge from the readings because what happens is that everyone's experience of reading something is very different, everyone brings a lot of different perspectives, so to really unpack everyone's ideas it's just it's it's a fun time, frankly. That's just how teaching at Liberal Arts really goes, so you can really take something and make it your own like Kornelia was saying, even in class discussions and even in expressing your views and opinions.

Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >> It's so encouraging to hear you all say that. One of the things that we tried to do when we set up this programme was to recognize that content knowledge - like the things, the facts, or the particular ideas, methodologies that you learn - you can pick up and put down those relatively easily in some ways. A system that only drills in that kind of knowledge into you and that you sort of rehearse that, you memorize that, you then deploy for a test or an exam. That's not really the kind of deep learning that we're interested in. We really took this idea and in some ways you can think of it as being like a productive tension, that education really exists in this space of constantly being pushed, constantly being pushed beyond what you thought you were capable of doing, not too hard so that it's not dramatic and frightening and overwhelming, but just enough positive tension so that you're always being nudged to think about different kinds of connections, how might different kinds of methodologies relate to new case studies that you haven't tried yet. When you're working in class in groups, if you're all historians you know you're all going to think in certain kinds of ways right, because you've been trained to do that. But, when you're drawing on modules from Sociology, from Global Sustainable Development, from Psychology, and you're sitting next to somebody who's had that training in Economics, in Philosophy, in whatever it might be, that kind of synthesis, that productive tension is really what drives our classes. So it's really exciting to hear y'all recognizing that and making the most of it.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> I definitely agree, I think one of the things which I found really interesting is that it's really gotten me to engage with issues in a whole different way. It comes out into your your entire Warwick experience because when you approach what you do outside of the department as well in terms of the societies you join, your approach is different. I think for me it brought out my confidence to find you know find problems that actually work on them as well. It's the problem-based approach which we take as well. On that note you know I would like to just kind of bring in a point where we talk about the different things, life beyond the classroom essentially.

For me personally, I was part of the hockey club I was part of the Liberal Arts Society, in first year I was part of a bunch of different societies. There's so many! Those have been really important parts of my experience at Warwick and melding into my experience with Liberal Arts as well. Also of course, beyond what we do with the department, I know many people also take years abroad, many people do intercalated work years, and these are also really interesting options. Personally I didn't I had certain constraints which didn't permit me to try and engage with these things but I know Kornelia and Cymroan you guys actually got to enjoy a year abroad. Would any of you like to tell us a bit about that?

Cym, Liberal Arts alumna >> I went to Australia. Warwick has a year abroad set up with Monash University which is in Melbourne. I was there for the year and it was a brilliant experience. Not only because Melbourne's a really good city, Monash is a great university, you know all of those are sort of givens, but the courses, the modules that I did at Monash a lot of times there were some of my most favourite courses in my entire time at university. I learned so much more in terms of depth and breadth of knowledge and that was really interesting as well. So what a year abroad really does... for me I was already an international student at Warwick but what it did was it did an extra layer of taking me out of my comfort zone which had slowly become you know our sweet little Leamington Spa and our Warwick University campus and it took me out into a completely different city at the edge of the world. It was just a fantastic experience I learned loads of things. Frankly, by the end of it I was really longing to come back to uni, come back to Warwick, like my home, and bring in all of the new things I learned, all of the new modules that studied, all the new exciting readings I wanted to show my friends and talk about them in class and things like that. I would highly encourage, if you if you're able to take a year abroad, definitely do it - it's a fantastic experience.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> I think one of the things I've heard from all my friends who've done year abroads is that the support which you get from the department on this year abroad, I mean I feel kind of jealous that I didn't get to to go now! I mean especially like this past year with with COVID, I know what I've heard about the support that you guys got on your year abroad, it's been amazing. Kornelia, do you want to say anything more about it?

Kornelia, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah absolutely so I do think Liberal Arts is kind of a small family of sorts. Everyone knows each other in such a small department and they really do reach out to you when you are off. So my year abroad was a bit ups and downs, a bit of turmoil as well. So I started out in Chile and happened to be there while the social revolution happened, but of course the whole department was very nice and got in touch and they made sure that I felt safe so when I when I didn't feel like I could continue there they arranged for a different placement for me as well so that I could continue with one of the Liberal Arts partnerships in Europe. I continued mine in the Netherlands. Then the pandemic hit so I unfortunately couldn't continue there, but again the department was the most reliable thing as well, helped me through my desperate move back to Poland and stuff like that. Despite all of those things, I think the contact with the department and all the different possibilities I was able to do during my year abroad, I was very happy that I took the decision. As Cym said, actually coming back to Warwick was something that I was really looking forward to, coming back to that little family that we formed as well. I would encourage anyone to at least consider it as an option because iit's something that you might not ever have as an option again. I really enjoyed it and there's so much support.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah and you that idea of the Warwick Liberal Arts family, I mean this is for me one of the reasons why I wanted to come to Warwick in the first place... the campus experience, the the kind of closeness, I felt like this would be the place where I could make lots of really good friends. Then when I found Liberal Arts, this close-knit department, I was settled. Was there any other different reasons that you guys chose Liberal Arts? For me it was very much this transdisciplinary approach. I've always wanted a very open-minded learning environment and that was important to me as well. What about you guys is there anything else which struck out to you about Liberal Arts at Warwick maybe?

Cym, Liberal Arts alumna >> For me in school I really struggled with the idea of having to choose one thing to do for your for college. Every week I went to my counsellor and I was like 'today I want to do this degree' and then tomorrow 'I want to do the other'. In just talking about it with my parents, my dad actually discovered Liberal Arts as a programme and not in the same way that it is in the US. I think back in 2016, there was only about a few, a handful of Liberal Arts programmes in the UK and we went through them, shortlisted them. I actually visited all the campuses I was applying to and I met with Gavin um and he walked me through, he walked my parents and I through the entire course, what it would broadly look like. Of course back then it was different to what it is now, it's evolved so much. But even in that first meeting I was floored by how interesting and integrated it was. A lot of the other programmes I looked at were Liberal Arts but that just means you can do all of these different but disparate modules and classes. Liberal Arts (at Warwick) was one of the only ones where they where they had a very clear sort of structure, like everything is transdisciplinary and it's it's that way for a specific reason. All of that was very strong and that was very attractive to somebody like me, where I really didn't ever just want to do one thing. It gave me the opportunity to do so many different modules, so I did modules in Sociology, in Politics and History and Film and so many Liberal Arts modules that aren't just Economics or History or Politics any of those, they're transdisciplinary. That was one of the really big and important reasons that I chose Liberal Arts and I was so, so happy i did.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah I think that's really interesting because I think one of the things that I found that I really liked in the end about Liberal Arts here at Warwick is that you don't feel lost and undirected because of the amount of support that you have. I've heard a lot of my friends talk about this as well. Emily or Kornelia do you want to expand, I think you guys have spoken about this before?

Kornelia, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah I can jump in. I particularly liked that at Warwick it seemed that the course was a bit more structured as well, that there were some core modules. A lot of the Liberal Arts degrees that I was seeing around were a bit like pick and choose and you can do it your own way. You get that at Warwick as well, that you can make it your own but there is a sense of structure. You're not just kind of flailing about and you have these core modules like Art and Revolution in first year and then Sustainability and Consumption in second year, and then your Dissertation in your third year as well, but make it your own and you have something to come back to make that discussion with different people that you have and so that you can form that kind of support bubble with your department which I really enjoyed. I didn't have the option to come into the UK when I was applying so I think that the kind of structure within the course was what ultimately made me choose Warwick, as well as you were saying Arya, the campus and making it all feel like a big family within the department and the option of meeting so many different people throughout the courses. I think that's what made me choose Warwick in the end.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> That's really interesting, is there is there anything different about how you found Warwick Emily because I know you're like our representative local student here?

Emily, third-year Liberal Arts student >> As the others have already said one thing that I noticed about Warwick was that it was much more structured. I remember when I went to the Open Day when I was applying, one thing that really stood out for Warwick compared to all the other Liberal Arts courses I was looking at in the UK was that Warwick actually has its own Liberal Arts Department. A lot of the time for other unis, at least at the time I was applying, it was true that you'd have a tutor for each module you were in, or each department you were part of, but there wasn't necessarily an overarching Liberal Arts Department or someone you could go to about all of your issues and it was really your own. Like your own work in trying to see the links in between all of your subjects and when you don't kind of have the support or you don't get encouraged by the core modules on how to start looking at things interdisciplinarily, then it's actually really difficult to figure that out for yourselves. Just looking at the the way that yeah it's a small department, but all four of the tutors are so friendly, so kind and I think that they've got a really good dynamic with the students as well. I think that it's smallness contributes to the positive vibes, it's kind of easier in a way because you don't feel overwhelmed on 'oh I've got this issue, who do I talk to, there are too many options?' or 'I don't feel close enough to anyone', I've never really experienced that myself. I think just the fact that there's actually a Liberal Arts department was the main thing that stood out to me and just I really got a feel for everybody's good relationships in the department and that just made me really optimistic to come along and be part of it.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> That's really great to hear. On that note um I think it's really interesting how you guys have been talking about how the department's kind of encouraged us also to find you know what matters to us, i think that has been a theme throughout the discussion. Ii think for me that was a particularly difficult thing to like discover. As I mentioned before, sustainability issues have become a really... I mean always have been a really important thing to me, but I've discovered that this is kind of at the center of where my interests lie. Emily would you like to start us off telling us about what matters to you and how it's been brought out at Warwick?

Emily, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah sure one thing that's always been my passion in life, like my main interest, has been music. I've had that just from a very young age. I've always done extracurriculars in music and that's always been my hobby and hopefully a career path, but I never really saw that as linking into my academic interests. I've kind of realized, as I've been studying at Warwick, especially because a lot of the modules we've done we're not just looking at academic sources but we've looked at like maybe analysing a film or analysing this piece of music, it's not all just essay-based which I guess takes us back into the assessment style. That way of actually looking at things in popular culture as having real impacts on society and looking at that from an academic critical perspective, that is something that I'd never really considered as an option before. For me, it was always very separate in my head and suddenly I realized that my interest in music as a as a communication method, as this kind of global platform of finding hope and comfort and support, that can actually then translate to the academic works that I'm doing at university. So I think for me I've specifically been looking at like how music can support marginalized groups, for example LGBTQ+ plus people. So when when I was looking at popular culture and its impacts on people's thoughts and lifestyles, I've started thinking about how actually popular culture and music specifically can spread awareness about human rights issues, and bringing that musical analysis into broader questions about equality. That's helped me feel like while I'm doing my academic work, I'm also doing something that's really worthwhile.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> I totally agree yeah. What do you guys find, do you guys find that you were able to bring in something that really matters to you into your academic work? Kornelia, why don't you tell us a bit about your experience?

Kornelia, third-year Liberal Arts student >> I've always been a massive overthinker and I don't know where that comes from but I kind of think it made me feel like I overthought where I belong, where I was needed, where I felt at home. With my dual nationalities as well I had these connections to different cultures. It was only through Liberal Arts in my final year now that I realized that in my previous assessments I always focused on things like identity and the sense of belonging. It's only looking back now that I've realized how much that's been a thing for me. It's just been an overarching theme for my degree as well, so it led me to writing my dissertation on the sense of belonging and how it can be fostered in diasporas in the UK, specifically focused on the Polish and Irish diasporas because they are important to me. I thought that I could see how they foster a sense of belonging, how they do that through performance of nationalism and such. Looking back, I could see themes of this in my IB years when in high school I was taking psychology because I thought that this would be the way that I could learn about how people feel at home, how could they find a sense of belonging. Specifically also taking things from across different departments I was able to approach this from so many different ways that I really think I made a new nuanced approach in my head to it. I really enjoyed it that way, but I never thought that it would be something that I would look into academically so I'm really happy that I did.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah that's really awesome, I completely relate. Cym what about you, what have you experienced?

Cym, Liberal Arts alumna >> So for me, like I said I sort of never knew what I wanted to do, right. People ask you when you're a kid 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' I had a big question mark, or five different answers for five different days. So coming into Liberal Arts and one of my one of my biggest passions in life, it's going sound really vague, but it is to make a social impact. A it's vague, B I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so how to get to that goal or how to achieve that goal was always a big... I really didn't know how I would ever get there, what that means, what I can do academically or professionally or anything like that. But coming into Liberal Arts, you're really encouraged which is quite at the root of the entire course, of the thought rather, is that you're really encouraged to not look at the world as distinct disciplines, as distinct bodies of work, but rather one complete complex system. That was really encouraging, so there was a lot of unlearning, I had unlearning and re-learning I had to do in the time of the course, because I had to start seeing the world as a much more complicated, intricate, connected, body rather than separate different things. That really has encouraged me or given me the confidence to realize that I don't have to ever do just one thing, or ever just have one approach. In my work now, I'm not a finance professional, but I work at a sustainable finance and ESG advisory firm and I am able to do that because I have the ability to access different types of knowledge and the confidence that I can do it. The skills that I've learned in Liberal Arts are very specifically taught to you, so you are able to access different types of knowledge.

My work with the non-profit I work with is very centered on raising awareness about food insecurity and providing meals to food insecure communities. I've never done any sort of fundraising, I don't know how to run a non-profit organization, but I feel a lot more confident in myself and my ability to be able to access these different types of knowledge, whether it's knowledge skills through research whatever it is. By learning these skills and just the fundamental reality of the world is a lot more complex than Economics and History and Politics and Psychology and all of these different disciplines we've created, it's really given me the ability to make even a small impact on the world through a non-profit organization, through an organization that is really focused towards directing capital towards sustainability or green projects. I hope that answers your question

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> That really sums it up really well and also it just gets me thinking how I was really interested in sustainability issues but I never would have imagined that I would become interested in the many different approaches to this. For example, thinking about electric cars. I really love electric cars, I really love Tesla's, I really love this kind of whole industry. It never really occurred to me why it took so long for something like electric cars to become such a big thing. It's only now that Tesla's come in that it's suddenly such a significant industry. I was always like it's the battery performance, it's all engineering factors, economic factors, it's too expensive, it's this, but I never ever would have considered that stuff like gender discourses, this became the kind of central point of my dissertation. It's just kind of opened my eyes up to the whole kind of variety of other issues which are actually really important and it's changed the way I look at problems. It's changed the way I've approached my interests. At this point I mean Gavin would you like to add anything?

Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >> Honestly what can I possibly say that's better than what y'all have just said?! I mean what good examples of exactly what we were building this programme for. Cym mentioned when she came to visit. Cym was in fact the very first person to come to visit us, the very first prospective Liberal Arts student, even before we had open days or anything before we had our offices, anything, when this was still a very new project. I remember being quite, I don't think nervous exactly, more excited, but this was going to be our first time and her parents were going to be there and I really wanted to connect with this student and it's such a joy and a pleasure to see your achievements and how you've developed and grown, I'll get emotional. It's not just Cym of course, it's all of our students. It's one of the reasons why we wanted to build this programme, both structurally and conceptually in the way that we did. Structurally we knew it needed to be small, so that we could build these kinds of relationships with our students, that we could get to know each other and recognize that you are not your degree, right? You are not just a set of methodologies or knowledges that you've picked up in particular classrooms. One of the reasons we put the degree together in the first place is because when we went out and talked to students in some of these really popular departments, really prestigious departments, a lot of the students said 'I didn't really want to do X discipline or Y degree, but I was told that this would help me with my career aspirations, or this is what my parents expected of me, or I just didn't know what else to do'. I thought those were really sad answers, right? Students were articulating so clearly that rather than being liberatory or exciting or energizing, so many degrees actually felt really limiting to students they felt like they were having to cut off so much of themselves. Like Kornelia's talking about, when learning is really deep and authentic it's about integrating not just your intellectual self but all of yourselves, all of the different parts and facets of your personality, your different goals, your dreams, your aspirations, your likes, like Emily's talking about. We really wanted to build a home where students could do that thing. I think you when we talk about Liberal Arts in the classroom, when we talk about you know the interactions that students have with all this group work, talking earlier about how we don't really do lectures and instead it's about students bringing up ideas and arguing and discussing and debating and working together, it was all driven to be part of this integrated approach to help students to recognize that they can make a difference, that they are not bit players in their own lives, that they can go out and make real change if they want to. That real change really does come from creativity, from energy, from making different cross connections to different kinds of knowledges, different kinds of lives. Rather than saying 'for the next three to four years you need to sit in a classroom and I'll give you the foundational knowledge that you need to know to get ready for life', one of the phrases that the students hear me say all the time is I really hate the phrase the 'real world', as in like the university degrees it's not the real world. It is real, it is definitely real, you have real sorrows and triumphs real learning real engagement. One of the things we really wanted to do was to help our students to see that they're not just observers at this stage, they really can make a difference.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> That's really great to hear from you Gavin. One more thing we just wanted to do just as a group of us is provide some ideas of things that we're interested in, things that we think that you might find interesting to read, to get an idea about what represents this department well and what can prepare you. Emily, would you like to tell us a bit about your text?

Emily, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah so the book that I thought I wanted to recommend to you is called How to Watch Television. So as I mentioned before, I've been really interested in popular culture, thinking about popular culture critically and how that can impact society more broadly. I feel like this book gives a really great overview of how to look at popular culture and specifically television much more critically, not just from an academic standpoint because that sounds quite restrictive, but looking at the real impact that different TV shows can have. I feel like the ideas in there are all really interesting but it's actually very easy to read like it's really straightforward, the writing style is quite conversational, there was one chapter on music which was of particular interest to me. That's the reason I actually found the book because I was looking at it for ideas for my dissertation, which I also focused on music consumption for facilitating social change. Each chapter deals with something slightly different, so there are different concepts and different TV series. I'm sure you'll find something in there that you're interested in. No pressure to read the whole thing, but if you want to get an idea for how we can take these popular culture notions and actually look at them more critically from different disciplinary standpoints, then I think that this is a really good place to start.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> That sounds really cool. Kornelia, would you like to tell us a bit about your your text as well?

Kornelia, third-year Liberal Arts student >> Yeah so I discovered this author Olivia Liang through the Underworlds module that I took in my second year and we were discussing alcohol addiction and [indistinct] as a personal underworld and we approached one of her texts where she mentions her own experience and how alcoholism is depicted in writer. The way she wrote really spoke to me so I looked into her different texts and I read her non-fiction book The Lonely City which deals with loneliness and the way it's represented through four different artists in New York City, including Andy Warhol, and she intercepts as well her own experience with loneliness in the city. The way she describes loneliness as a concept as just much more than just being lonely, was something that I never saw coming and the words that I never had for that kind of feeling. It was just enlightening to me and I would never have found that had I not found the author through Underworlds. If anyone has the time to read that or look into any of her work, I would really recommend that.

Kornelia, third-year Liberal Arts student >> That is really intriguing, I'm so glad that these suggestions are so diverse. The book which I thought would be a really good suggestion was The Handbook of Sustainable Literacy by Arran Stibbe. One of the reasons I decided this would be a good option is just because personally I'm very interested in sustainability issues and it is something we look at in Liberal Arts in our second year core module Sustainability. I think it's a really good introduction to this module and generally to Liberal Arts because it has a wide variety of approaches to sustainability issues and it captures them in a really simple and easy to follow kind of way to understand. I think I would have found it really interesting to look at before I came to university because it would have helped me understand that you know it's not this simple one-tracked approach to any given discipline. Gavin, it would be good to hear about a professor's suggestion about books which people can have a look at.

Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >> Yeah so the book I would suggest is Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. One of the reasons I chose this one is because growing up I was told 'you're not a math person'. I struggled quite a lot as a kid with math, I was really resistant. I was one of one of these school kids who if I was interested in the subject interested in the material I got excited, I'd get great grades, but if I wasn't then I didn't and math definitely fell into that. One of the things I've noticed when talking to prospective Liberal Arts students and current students is that very often that's actually quite a similar story, right? At some point you get told 'oh you're really good at the humanities' or 'you're good at math and science'. Then people start dividing up into these two cultures, when actually it's so often it's a case of having the right kind of exposure at the right time, with the right teacher, the right friends, the right environment, that helps you get excited about these kinds of things. I initially trained as a Renaissance Literature and History Specialist a 16th century person. I was never super satisfied with the way that those disciplines function, the way that they categorize knowledge in some ways. That's one of the reasons why I was so overjoyed to get this opportunity to help build this programme here here at Warwick. But I still have this lingering shadow of this almost total inability to to approach quantitative data and partially because of this history growing up. One of my areas of interest is in Apocalyptic Studies (Cym is nodding because she took one of my classes on it) so I'm really interested in these sort of ideas about the end of the world and the ways in which we construct identities linked to these fears and hopes and these aspirations connected to the end of the world. So one area I'm interested in is artificial intelligence. I think as a non-quantitative person I think very often we sort of worship at the altar of numbers sometimes. We're told that science is science and data like numerical data is objective and it's impossible to argue. But Cathy O'Neil, the author of Weapons of Math Destruction does an amazing job of showing how our kind of technophilia and our deferral to quantitative data can actually be really dangerous. Not that these aren't useful tools, they're incredibly useful tools but we need to think really critically about the stories and narratives that build up around collection of big data for example, or around uses of artificial intelligence. It really comes down to that central core question that exists at the heart of Jurassic Park, for example. Just because you can make dinosaurs, doesn't mean you should make dinosaurs, right? Just because we have certain capabilities doesn't mean that the actualization of those capabilities will save us. So for somebody like myself working in apocalyptic studies, looking at you know Arya mentioned Tesla and Elon Musk... Elon musk is such an interesting character to me and in part because Elon Musk also really embodies this duality. There is this is amazing vision for this technology-infused future, but then there's also real problems associated with some of those approaches, right? I think Weapons of Math Destruction does a really interesting job of highlighting some of these issues in a really accessible way even for non-math people like myself.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> I really like that suggestion because it gives you a really good approach to how people in Liberal Arts kind of take our approach at quantitative methods. We do have a module for Quantitative Methods and I'm sure like these are all the kinds of ideas which we have to be really aware of, especially when we approach any study with with quantitative methods. So Cymroan, I know you have a really interesting text, or rather object, which you want to tell us about?

Cym, Liberal Arts alumna >> Yeah cool, just to add on because what Gavin was talking about was really interesting because that's something we do right at the beginning of first year. In Science, Society, and the Media, one of the things we sort of talk about is really how science is a narrative and not really. We rely on it a lot of times to be hard and fast truth and all of that stuff. If you're interested in that type of thing, Science, Society, and the Media is the module for you. I was going to say a lot of what you were saying Gavin, I think another great example of that is Black Mirror. Any of the black mirror episodes, any of the the movie that they had, it really talks about these ideas and a lot of depth in a lot of different ways, so just to add on to that that's another thing if you're interested in something like what Gavin was saying that's something you can explore as well, so it's an extra suggestion.

But the one I sort of wanted to come in with - so this was not an assigned text it was something that I chose as something to analyse for one of my final assessments. It was for a module called Utopias where we talked about, surprise, utopias and the creation of these perfect worlds and what they look like and how they're created, what they constitute, all of these things. It was a really interesting module. The text I chose to do the final assessment on was the Weeknd's After Hours album. We have such a diverse range of texts that have come out from each of the participants here today. The reason I decided to choose this one is because a lot of times when you think of university and text and class and reading and work to do, you think of very academic-y or dense texts. So I just wanted to point out that something like an album which a) is really it's a very good album (that is my subjective view but it is it's a great album, so if you are interested in that type of music it's a great place to go), but I was listening to that album start to finish during quarantine last year when it first came out because that's what I was listening to while I was doing all of my work. I didn't realize how absorbed I was in it. It's a very complete body of work and for my assessment what I did was I explored music as an expression of utopia, the album as an expression of escapism and escapism as an expression of utopia. If you really look at the videos, or really analyze (like very English Lit style annotate the lyrics, which is what he had to do) you'll find that a lot of what he's singing about, rapping about, is very deep and dark subject matter in general. That was just something that was very interesting to me. I could take the idea of utopias and sort of twist it a little bit so that it wasn't necessarily the happy fairy lights type of thing that people think instantly when they hear the word. In general it connected with a lot of the work I was doing with utopias with Gavin's module that he just talked about which is the Apocalypse module, with some of Byran's modules (who is one of the other tutors) which was about underworlds and paradises. So there was a lot of different connections, a lot of different threads basically that I could connect with this album. What I thought was really interesting and cool was the fact that I could apply all of these really complex ideas, approaches to something that may not sound like the most academic-y thing. It's not the most traditional type of text for an assignment. I highly recommend listening to the album just anyway if you're interested, but specifically to highlight the fact that whatever we are learning in class, like Gavin said, there's no real world that's out there and ihere it's something different. Whatever it is we're learning and talking about in seminars and for readings, is really applicable in so many diverse ways, in so many different types of texts and objects. I highly recommend it.

Arya, third-year Liberal Arts student >> I really like that you've that you've brought these kind of different types of texts into for suggestions. The really good thing about having about mentioning these kind of texts to engage with before you come to university is that when we when we suggest reading texts, I think it's easy to just you know read it and say 'okay this is what I need to know from the text' but engaging when you have these more primary texts, film, song, it really gets you to engage with the issues which it brings out in a very different way, so I really like the suggestions you have Cym and it really is representative of things which we do analyze and look at in Liberal Arts. So all these kinds of material which we just suggested to you I think we will try and put it together in a bibliography and provide it to you if you're interested. Of course, you don't have to read everything and this is again just things that we as students and even Gavin's suggestion, it is just if there's something you do want to read or engage with, these are just some suggestions from us as students and a professor. so We hope you might enjoy them.

Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >> Great well thanks very much Arya and thank you everyone and for such a brilliant conversation, it's such a such a joy and a pleasure to hear you. Especially since we have Cym who graduated last year, but for your other three you're right at the end of your journey here with us (at least this part of the journey). So to hear you reflect back on the development that you've undergone, the you know the the journey, that you've undertaken it's just such a privilege, such a pleasure.

So for now we're going to say thank you very much, we've reached the end of our of our talk. We're on the different socials and whatnot, we're always happy to to chat. To say a little bit more than that, if you listening to this, we know that Liberal Arts is really diverse and when we talk about these kinds of ways of course everyone has given examples about their individual interpretation of our programme, their particular journey, and but if you have questions about yours and what you might be able to do (like Cym did all those years ago) please do give us a shout, we're always happy to chat on the phone, or on you know on the video chat or something like that, as soon as it's safe to do so obviously we would love to welcome you to campus as much as possible. You're always welcome to come sit in on classes you know and have a little bit of the experience of what it's like to be one of our students. As you can see we're a small friendly bunch so we're more than happy to facilitate you learning about our programme in any way that you find to be productive. But for now, thank you very much, stay safe everybody and take care.