Everything on this page is a first draft of the work plan you agree with your supervisor in Term 2. That plan has three parts: a rationale for the topic, an outline of the chapters, and a list of the sources you need and where they are. You are drafting all three here.
Before you start
A Mode is the way of reading you have practised all term, the compact cue that tells you what counts as evidence. A Micro-Note is one of the sentences in your private log. Your dissertation question is what happens when you take one of those sentences seriously enough to spend three months on it.
From Micro-Note to topic
The research question
Write a question, not a topic. “Colonial language policy in Korea and Taiwan” is a topic. “Why did comparable assimilation policies produce different vernacular publishing markets in Korea and Taiwan?” is a question.
The three tests
Your group runs these on your question. Write down their answers, not yours.
Sources and method
Ethics
Where the threshold sits
Ethics approval at SOAS is a statutory requirement, with one exemption: taught postgraduate research that does not involve living and identifiable, or vulnerable, individuals or their personal data. Put simply, no interviews means no formal approval needed.
If your project does involve them: download the research ethics review and assessment form now, speak to your supervisor immediately rather than after you have designed the fieldwork, and complete the free online research integrity programme before you begin.
Chapter outline
One line each. This is a draft and it will change.
Your dates, and your word length
Word length is set by your own programme's dissertation module, not centrally, so it differs across MA Japanese Studies, MA Korean Studies and MA Chinese Studies. Look yours up rather than assuming a figure a classmate quoted.
What you practised
Tick what applies, then answer the question underneath honestly rather than in the language of job applications.
Comparative Reaction Paper
Make one clear comparative claim using any Mode or Modes from Weeks 2 to 5, with evidence from at least one primary and one scholarly source.
- Length
- 1,000 words ±10%
- Weight
- 20% of the module
- Due
- Week 5, Thursday
- Filename
- 15PJKH025_AS1
- Referencing
- Harvard
What a Mode is, and why we use the word
A Mode names a way of reading rather than a topic to cover or a method to execute. The word comes from modus, a manner or a measure, and as in grammar or music it signals how something is to be taken. In this module a Mode is a compact, portable cue that orients your attention. Historiography asks who is telling the story and with what archive. Category critique asks what a label includes, what it excludes, and to what end. Discourse analysis asks how language and images position an audience.
Calling these lenses Modes keeps them distinct from theory, which makes large claims about the world, from a framework, which is an architectural schema, and from a method, which is a stepwise protocol. A Mode is lighter than any of those. It helps you decide what counts as evidence, how to justify a move and which consequences to name, without pretending to settle the whole problem.
You are not restricted to the Modes you have seen in lectures. Use one, adapt one, or name a different analytic choice. What matters is that you state the choice, apply it consistently to evidence, and reach a clear claim.
Structure
| Section | Length | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | 2–4 sentences | Name your Mode or Modes from Weeks 2 to 5. State your one comparative claim. Name the two cases you will compare. |
| Comparison with evidence | 700–750 words | Case 1 with a short piece of primary evidence, explained through your Mode. Case 2 the same way. Then bring them together and explain the similarity or difference that proves your claim. |
| Methods paragraph | ~100 words | How your Mode shaped what you selected and how you interpreted it. |
| Terminology note | ~50 words | Clarify terms, names or romanisation choices. |
| Micro-Notes appendix | not counted | Three to six bullets linking the paper to a lecture or reading note from Weeks 2 to 5. |
| Reference list | not counted | Everything you cited, in Harvard. |
The test your paper has to survive
Take the claim you have written, exactly as you have written it, and remove the second case. Does the claim still stand?
If it does, you have made a claim about one case and attached a second one to it. That is the most common way a reaction paper loses marks under Thinking and analysis, and it is invisible from the inside because the paper is full of material about both cases.
One caution. A claim grammatically about a difference — “the difference between X and Y arises from Z” — cannot be stated from one case and so passes this test while meaning very little. The real question is whether you have shown a cause on both sides that only the pairing reveals.
What goes wrong at this length
- The two-panel paper. A paragraph on one case, a paragraph on the other, a closing sentence asserting they are similar. Two descriptions plus an assertion is not a claim spanning two cases.
- The Mode named and then abandoned. Naming it satisfies the requirement. Sustaining it earns the marks.
- The method stated but not justified. “This paper takes a historiographical approach” says what you did. The methods paragraph says why it suits this evidence.
- The second case as illustration. If it only supplies examples of something established from the first, it is not a second case.
- Micro-Notes cited as authority. They are your own scaffolding. Engagement is credited. Deference is not.
- Sources that do no work. Anything in the reference list that never appears in the paper costs marks under Engagement with literature.
One thing worth knowing about postgraduate marking
At Level 7 the literature criterion rewards evidence of searching beyond the module's core and recommended resources. This brief directs you to lecture content, readings and Micro-Notes, and using those well is full compliance with what you were asked to do. It is also, on the institutional descriptors, a Pass-level literature performance. If you can reach one source of your own that the module did not give you, and use it rather than list it, say so plainly and it will register.
Before you upload
Essay
Write an essay that uses comparison to make an argument you could not make otherwise. You are not describing two things side by side. You are using the friction or the resonance between them to generate something neither case alone would show.
- Length
- 2,500 words ±10%
- Weight
- 80% of the module
- Due
- Week 10, Thursday
- Filename
- 15PJKH025_AS2
- Referencing
- Harvard
The no-reuse rule
You may not reuse content or materials from AS1 or from any other assessment. AS2 requires a new question, new cases and new sources. Reusing your own submitted work without acknowledgement is a form of academic misconduct and the regulations treat it as such.
Choosing your comparison
Your essay must make clear which strategy it is running. You may combine them, but you must do at least one.
| Strategy | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| A · Two contexts, one discipline | How did Japan and Korea differently construct national language in the 1930s, read as history. How do Hong Kong and Taiwanese films represent urban alienation, read as film studies. How do the PRC and South Korea narrate industrialisation in their national museums, read as memory studies. How do Okinawan and Ainu activists frame sovereignty claims, read as political science. Two regions or communities within one state is a legitimate pairing. |
| B · Two disciplines, one context | Japanese wartime mobilisation through labour history and through literary representations of factory work. The Cultural Revolution through historical archives and through contemporary art that references it. South Korea's democratisation through political science and through the ethnography of church networks. Taiwan's indigenous land claims through legal history and through documentary film. |
Three theses to orient you
Not topics to take. They show what a thesis looks like when the comparison is carrying it.
- Narratives in Nanjing and Hiroshima stage civilian suffering through distinct temporal frames aligned with post-Cold War diplomacy.
- Combining translation studies and film history to analyse Taiwanese and Japanese co-productions clarifies how subtitling practices steer reception.
- Field reports and platform policy updates show how short-video affordances restructure protest memory across Seoul and Taipei.
- Chinese and Korean periodicals of the 1920s put the same graph, 民族, to different institutional work, and the divergence is legible in who is authorised to use it.
What counts as a primary source
Not scholarly books or journal articles. You need more than one, and you need to analyse them rather than mention them. A primary source quoted once in an epigraph is decoration, not evidence. Where you can, attend to the language of your sources: key terms, categories and official vocabularies in the original and in translation.
Making the comparison do work
Do not write: in the first case X happened, while in the second Y happened, and these are different.
Write: the first case's approach to X created a tension the second resolved differently, which reveals something specific about state formation, or cultural politics, or whatever your case is actually about.
Then run the test. Remove the second case, or one of the two lenses. If the thesis survives, you have an argument with a comparison attached. If both lenses produce the same readings, one is decorative and the strategy is nominal even though you declared it.
Required components
| Component | Specification |
|---|---|
| Comparative argument | Stated early and sustained. Modes named. A thesis that takes a position. |
| Primary sources | More than one, analysed closely. |
| Scholarly sources | Six to ten works, used analytically rather than listed. |
| Method integration | At least two approaches visibly in use, not merely announced. |
| Terminology section | 200–300 words |
| Ethics or positionality note | 100–150 words, tied to your case |
| Micro-Notes appendix | Three to five entries, original sentence plus expansion. Not counted. |
| Reference list | Harvard. |
One note on the positionality requirement. A paragraph that would sit unchanged in an essay on any topic has not been delivered even though it is present. Make it specific: “Working with police archives on minority surveillance, I am reading sources that systematically record the state's perspective and rarely the perspective of those recorded.”
Terminology
On first use give the romanisation, the original script and an English gloss, then keep one form consistently: citizenship (shimin 市民), ethnicity (minzu 民族), the people (minjung 민중). Use Modified Hepburn with macrons for Japanese, Pinyin without tone marks for Chinese, and Revised Romanisation for Korean.
Why this is more than a formatting rule
One graph, three states, three careers. A term that looks shared across the region is often the place where the comparison lives.
| Graph | Japanese | Chinese | Korean | What diverges |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 民族 | minzoku | minzu | minjok 민족 | Ethnicity, nation, and in the PRC an administratively enumerated category. The English word you choose commits you to one of these. |
| 市民 | shimin | shimin | simin 시민 | City resident, citizen, and the subject of postwar civic movements. The political charge differs by context and by decade. |
| 國家 / 国家 | kokka | guojia | gukga 국가 | State, nation-state, and country. Which one a source means is rarely stated and usually decidable. |
The consistency half of this rule is where most essays slip. Glossing correctly on first use and then drifting between forms costs marks under Presentation, and where the term carries your argument it costs more than that.
Methodological clarity
Make legible which cases or perspectives you chose and on what grounds, which sources you use and how you read them, which tools you deploy and with what limits. Then state what your evidence cannot show. “Further research is needed” is not a statement of limits — it says nothing about this evidence.
East Asia as a frame
Somewhere in the essay, address what it means to treat your topic as East Asian. Are you tracing transnational connections, such as Korean students in Tokyo? Examining parallel developments, such as simultaneous land reform? Analysing imperial entanglements across Japan, Taiwan and Manchuria? Or questioning whether the category is analytically useful at all? Weave it into the argument rather than sectioning it off. A strong comparison can still treat East Asia as a container it never opens.
Suggested shape
| Words | Section |
|---|---|
| ~250 | Problem and main argument. Name your Modes. Refine the Micro-Note. |
| ~1,300 | Two evidence-led comparative sections showing your Modes at work on primary material. |
| ~500 | Method integration and engagement with the literature: how each Mode works, what it misses, how the scholarship positions your move. |
| ~250 | Terminology and translation choices. |
| ~200 | Implications and limits. |
Before you upload
How your work is marked
Seven criteria, weighted differently at AS1 and AS2, judged against the SOAS Level 7 band descriptors. This is the instrument printed in your assessment briefs.
| Criterion | What we look for | AS1 | AS2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Response to task | Modes named, one clear comparative claim or sustained argument, all required components present. | 15% | 10% |
| Knowledge and skills | Command of the factual and theoretical terrain, and a Mode that fits the evidence. | 15% | 15% |
| Engagement with literature | Scholarship used critically and tied to the claim, positioning your move in a field rather than listing citations. | 20% | 20% |
| Thinking and analysis | Comparison producing insight rather than description, and honesty about where each Mode fails. | 20% | 20% |
| Argument | A through-line from the opening claim to the close, proportionate claims, limits addressed. | 15% | 20% |
| Presentation | Clear organisation, accurate Harvard citations, consistent handling of terminology and translation. | 10% | 10% |
| Research scope and method | Suitable primary material and a concise, explicit methods rationale. | 5% | 5% |
Bands
| Band | Range | What it means at Level 7 |
|---|---|---|
| Distinction | 70+ | Excellent or outstanding grasp. Critical evaluation of the literature with evidence of independent searching beyond core and recommended resources. Clearly developed points, all relevant. Excellent originality and independence of thought. |
| Merit | 60–69 | Very good response and understanding, with a few gaps. Some evidence of searching beyond core and recommended resources. Clear critical thinking and evaluation that would benefit from further development. |
| Pass | 50–59 | Basic response and understanding, with gaps. Ability to evaluate critically, but limited evidence of searching beyond core and recommended resources. More points could be developed. |
| Fail | below 50 | Inadequate response and understanding. Limited evidence of critical thinking. Descriptive. Incoherent argument, insufficient originality. |
No mark is given at 49, 59 or 69. Markers commit across the class boundary rather than splitting the difference.
Where “descriptive” sits
At Level 7 “descriptive” is the descriptor for the 40 to 49 range, which is a fail. A competent, clean, entirely descriptive postgraduate paper is failing, not passing weakly. This surprises people every year, so it is worth reading twice.
What separates the bands at postgraduate level
Three things change, and none of them is simply doing undergraduate work better.
- Evaluate, do not only analyse. Analysis takes something apart. Evaluation judges it, and says which reading is better supported and why.
- Read beyond the list. An essay resting on the module reading list, however well used, is describing a Pass on the literature criterion. The bibliography of the best article on the list is a better starting point than the list.
- Think independently. An essay can satisfy every requirement in a brief and still reproduce a reading someone else established. Say what you think, and defend it.