Okay, I'm back cough drop in my mouth All right, let's do this one first. We're gonna sew in a start here in the center about between the two inside flaps I'm gonna do about Five eighths of an inch seam half and a half an inch seam somewhere in there and pull my pinout before I get to the corner Stop with my needle down Near the corner about a you know about a half an inch away from the edge of the fabric and turn Take that next pin out. I'm pushing the edges of the pockets and flaps down So I can make sure that they get sewn down flat and nothing gets sewn down curled and pukery unevenness going on down here, so I'm gonna Just give it a little bit of a trim so I can see what I'm doing got the next pin Don't be in a rush. Take your time This is the one with the small pocket in it. So I may have to go a little closer to the edge than I'd like There's a lot of layers of fabric here because we've got all of the inside pockets. We've got the outside pocket So we're gonna go slow take out the pin Up to the camera again Okay, so the one thing we want to do before we do any cutting or trimming is making sure we have you know a decent Seam it doesn't have to be perfect This one certainly isn't but you don't want to have missed any parts or missed the fabric or sona pucker and it or anything like that And you can see we have lots of trimming to do once we do the trimming. It's gonna look beautiful So let's do the next one this one we're gonna do from the outside in Not that it really matters actually. I think I like doing it from the other side. Let's do that one Let's do that Pin removal turn the corner always turn the corner with your needle in the down position so you don't lose your place And end up with a big hole in your stitching You want nice long dress makers pins for working with these thick fabrics like the denim and the canvas And no not all sewing pins are made the same Before one of you even asked me that So look for a nice long pin. These are about an inch and a half long and they're actually probably a little short It would be nicer to have one that's two inches. So but these are these work But some of them are really tiny. So don't pick those Don't be afraid either of having to do some seam ripping Shoot we all have to seam rip every now and then that's just pulling out the stitches when you've sewn in the wrong place Or you've sewn something There's a special little tool for that. That's not bad either Cool. I didn't mean to do that Whoops, that's where all my little press extra presser feet are kept now, you know, and we're not gonna even get into what all these are for because That will just confuse you all There's presser feet for just about everything. I was trying to grab it this way. This is the hand. I have some numbness in so I am not surprised. I missed that All right So now we need to trim away some of this stiffener and even up some of our edges a bit So we're gonna pull our fabric back And we're gonna just get the scissors in here and trim some of this white stuff away Now if you have applique scissors and you know what those are of course use them and I do have them But I don't feel like getting them out right now But you don't have to have them just pull the front and back fabric back hold it down And then run your scissors along The edge and cut that off next one Do this all the way around before you do any other trimming because it'll be easier Now you could do the trimming All the trimming of the stiffener and the fabric and then you could If you know how to do Like um zigzag on your machine you could zigzag around the edge.  I really didn't cut these already square I'm gonna blame it on the full moon. I did um use Sharpie to Mark my pattern pieces out and I don't mind if a little bit of it shows but some of it's not attractive So we're gonna cut The unattractive bits off and we're just kind of squaring it up. Look at that Just need some rivets All right, I mean rivets eyelets. Holy cow. Let's do this one Then we'll get the eyelets out. Whoo I'm going to make some more of the plain canvas ones today And by the time that you all see this video All of them will be in my Etsy shop Listed for sale There'll be a limited number of them First come first serve I'll do hope you all try making them and I hope that you share what you make I would like to see the fabric And things that you make out of them and how you decorate them These denim ones would take paint very well just like the canvas um And you could denim comes in lots of different colors if you're going to buy new denim Sorry above the camera again to do this with Um It comes in a natural color like the canvas else comes in, you know other colors too Dark colors light colors. So look at your fabric store and see what they have We have to do the same thing and we're going to even up Some of our edges. I don't want them to be perfect if I wanted it to be perfect. I wouldn't leave them raw but I don't want it to be too sloppy First I'm going to Do it around the outside and everything up I do have a pair of scissors that are specifically for cutting denim and they're made for cutting Um, thick multiple layers of thick fabric. So Um, I just I'm lazy about getting them out So if you're going to do a lot of this you might want to invest in a pair of them That I think that's really cute. All right, so I'm going to reset the table a little bit And I'm going to get my eyelets out and I'll be right back Okay, so to prevent what happened last time where we had one eyelet Come out crooked We're going to line up our outer edge And then I'm going to find out where the center fold is And I'm going to mark It with a pin At each end and I'm going to open it up Straighten out the pin if needed. I know the pin head is Where I need it to be All right So I'm going to I know that point The straight line between the two pin heads is where the center is Move this up a little bit. So there you go So I know along this edge of the ruler is where the center is and that's where I need all of my marks and holes to be So I'm going to do one inch In from the top and I'm going to mark my mark right on that straight line And then we're going to do Slide the ruler just a little bit and do one inch from the bottom And then we're going to do halfway between those two points So it's about Here and that's where we want our three eyelets to be So let's mark the other one before we do any eyelet setting ouch I need a pin cushion That's like that fifth time today. I've poked myself with my pin my own pins I've got pin cushions around here somewhere. I don't know. I put them away. I don't know where the away place is It's a way away. I don't know. I don't know I know I didn't purge them that I know for sure Okay, so we're going to line our ruler up again. We're going to mark You may have to move your pins around There we go mark An inch from the top about an inch from the bottom And then halfway between the two About there doesn't have to be perfect, but We don't want it to be all wonky At least at least if they're in a straight line. All right So once you have that done, um, I like to leave the pins in Um to the very top So that when I'm punching my holes with my crocodile If I lose track of the little marks I can at least see the pins It just helps me keep it straight So I just move the pin so that I can punch the hole without hitting the pin I'm going to line it up in my crocodile and I'm going to use the larger of the two hole punchers To punch right over the black dot a little of the black dot and A little bit to the side To just to enlarge the hole Okay, so I'm going to do the same thing to the center hole You basically want to do a cluster of like three punches Before you take any of your mark pins out Make sure that your eyelets will fit so I use the dritz large It just says large eyelets On the package And you can get the package that has the setting tools in it. I already have them So I didn't get that but you can get them that way or you can just get them like this So I want to make sure that my eyelet is going to fit in that hole that I made And it fits in that one good I'll check each one of the holes This one I think needs another punch that one. I don't think it's big enough I don't think it's big enough If you don't have a hole puncher that you can do this with It's tough because you have to get in there with a little pair of scissors Which is a pain in the neck. Trust me. I've done it Okay, now that I know my eyelets fit and they're all straight in a row Not that if they weren't straight I could do much about it because I couldn't Do much about it at this point. I'd be screwed I need to get the other half of the eyelet on here Get my little setting Bits out Have a bunch of these in different sizes for different sized eyelets Put the black piece on the bottom the steel piece on the top And you might need to give it an extra, you know Bit of hammering to get it to attach through all those thick layers of fabric Things are falling All right, look at that. It's so cute. See this is what happens. I'm gonna have trouble keeping it not keeping it It is going to be in my anti-shopper swear Holy moly, it's going to be a problem I can't keep keeping journals that I make. I don't have enough room. Okay So the first thing we have to do is move our pins So that we have our pin heads for a guide But the little end of the pin is not underneath where I need to punch with the crocodile Because punching through the pin would not be good. All right If you happen to have leather punches Um in different sizes circle shaped ones then that would work for this I do have them actually. I just refound them the other day When I was cleaning and purging Some stuff filling mystery boxes I did not purge them. I kept them because I love those things and I was Looking for them in my metal snips the other day and I found both of them when I was cleaning. Yay So there we go Take our pins out. I'm pretty sure those are going to be big enough Find some more eyelets and then we're done. Whoo. I should really organize this box better But you know what? I'm not going to Just I kind of like digging in the box Need another short one Oh TV turned itself on I'll be right back. Okay. I'm going to edit that little bit out But what you guys aren't going to hear who are watching the videos my tv was on pause and it turned itself on it was decided I guess Okay, I had to go pause and turn something off But here we're going to Finish our other denim Notebook cover Fit all our eyelets in our holes Please take all caution when working with eyelets setting that you Don't whack your fingers With the hammer I have this little small hammer that was given to me by my father-in-law who's no longer with us And I love this hammer. I say that I just whack myself with it. All right There we go. How cute is that? That is so cute So you definitely could go all the way around the edge and you could cut slits in it up to the stitching You could even do this part of the pocket here and then toss the whole thing in the washer and the whole It's going to unravel. I'm not going to do that But you definitely could but here they are. They're ready to go They'll be listed in my etsy shop shortly and I hope it gives you some ideas of what you can do with old blue jeans watch the other video and have some fun and Let me know if you have any questions comments or concerns put something down it below and I do we'll get back to them ASAP I promise and uh, don't forget the most important thing Go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. I'll see you later. Bye


So basically, this is just a shout out, like it's not like a full extro, so thanks for giving me the opportunity here to be here, and so I'm one of the members of the First Asia community, and some of you might know, we are also making hardware, so we run events, we make software, we also make hardware, so for example this one, this is a pocket science lab that we made recently, and we're always on the lookout for new cool projects. So we just talked here about the Google pad, the Google box, right, for the Google voice project, and I also got it, right. I had to look at it, some of you already had to look at it as well, and basically I wonder what is it, what we can't do ourselves, right. So of course you can make a, get a pre-made box here from Google, and you can get like some information, you can get basically a microphone is on it, and a voice hat for the Raspberry PR, so basically we can get this ourselves, you can go online to like Aliexpress or somewhere, get it yourself and build it, but then we still have to connect our hardware to Google, or if we build it for Alexa or Siri or Cortana or whatever, so for me this is not really self-made, right, I mean like it's like okay, now I have to rescue you something and I put software on it that is closed source, yeah, or it's like the same thing as my computer, put like Windows on it, I don't want it, right, we want to be able to do things ourselves, so we put the Linux on it, or like even Windows, and we put open source software on it. So that's why we are developing Suzy AI, and I give some presentations about Suzy AI in general already in the past, so it's basically a chat framework that runs on different clients, so we have a web client, we have an iOS client, we have an Android client, and now of course we want to go on and have these devices, like this box, so that's what we are working on at the moment, and so you find our project here, for example on, Sebastian, can I see the internet off or something, so yeah, okay, so you can just type in for example here to in our first Asia GitHub Suzy, and you will find like tons of projects, tons of repositories of bots and so on, and one project is for example Suzy Linux where we build, like where we add like all kinds of like libraries and scripts and so on to make Suzy run as a headless device without user interface on boxes, so this is pretty cool, but there are lots of questions, like for example we realized we need to stop skill actually because if somebody plays a song and it's a really long song, how can we stop it, right, so things like that that's what we are working on and we're estimating that in around six to eight weeks and we'll have a good working version, so you can go to our repositories and check it out, and especially like if you're interested, right, you have these boxes and you can then run actually Suzy on these boxes, this is the goal, so if you have also like some expertise in this area, please talk to me, of course we are looking for people because we don't have so much expertise in like for example the microphones ourselves, I found on Seed Studio for example and re-speakers for example, they have four microphones and it costs 25 dollars, so that is the same price as the whole device, yeah, so we want to lower the price, so if you have like any ideas how we could lower the price or if the manufacturers work like suitable microphones things like that, I'm really happy to get your input and feedback and so basically we have the software like let's say we have 95% of what we need actually to make a headless client work and we also need the hardware, right, to make it work, so as much open source as possible. So that's basically it if you have questions please come to me afterwards, thank you very much. So if you have a question like for example you can go to chat to the AI and yeah say something and try it out, one thing that we realized is it's one thing to make a software yeah and you can deploy it, you can do it but it's another thing to run it, so basically like let's say for example all this time you need new API keys something or somebody changes the API or service that you're connected to things like that, so yeah we hope to also advance with this project as it like once we run it for somewhere cheap hardware it could also be like a hardware manufacturer that we cooperate with and that can sell more expensive hardware things like that and as an add-on and if I use Google I always get like things like oh this feature is not enabled in your country yeah and oh YouTube you're not allowed to access YouTube or and oh you're already forwarded to the next song you're not allowed to do that you need to get like a paid version or something right, so I was wondering why can I pay or play YouTube or Chinese services on my browser why am I not allowed to play them on the Google box, so I think there shouldn't be any difference here if my desktop or browser I can do everything I can't do it on the headless cloud so things like that we would solve it right so that's that's a good thing okay but I don't know not at all but is there a question is there a question okay yeah so yeah thanks a little bit


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Ogun State's governorship election petition tribunal today adjourned its sit-in after two expert witnesses failed to show up following the breakdown of their vehicles on their way to a belkuta at the state capitol. The unnamed witnesses were expected to give evidence in support of the petition filed by the People's Democratic Party and its governorship candidate to the governor, Dapo Abiodu. The lone witness who gave evidence today, Aide Ridwan Olameleka, alleged disruption of the March 8 election by political thugs. The main issue is this document. It's very voluminous. It's the report of the expert. The expert who had examined the ballot papers and found a lot of discrepancies. So it's quite voluminous. So we have to give them time to look at it so that they won't say they are taking on a waste and also for the tribunal itself to have the opportunity to look at this very voluminous report so that when we'll be calling the expert, the expert will be here in person tomorrow to speak to this report, highlight the very vital areas. So it is very important that the court takes a little time off now to go and look at the report, the lawyers as well, to look at the report. We thought we would take more witnesses, but quite unexpectedly after one witness they sort out a domain because their witnesses are not available and also they just serve us some documents which we need to go through between now and tomorrow. But for us it went all well but we'll have wanted us to have more witnesses and spend quality time taking these witnesses. They brought a report of what they call an expert report that we'll be taking tomorrow also. We had done basically to take some witnesses according to him and the expert report and the expert evidence for tomorrow. It has gone very well. We will go home to study the expert or the so-called expert evidence and then by tomorrow we will confront the expert and his evidence.


And welcome to everyone who's in the audience and I'm sorry that I can't see you and it's a very strange kind of experience still after a year of teaching online still feel strange sitting here in my living room talking to people that I can't see but anyway that's partly why culture matters I guess. I am a professor of Thai cultural studies so I work specifically on Thailand and I will be talking a little bit about Thailand in the presentation. I'm also chair of the Center for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies which we abbreviate to CCLPS and CCLPS is the sort of home of three of our MA programs, MA comparative literature, MA postcolonial studies and MA cultural studies. So I'm happy to take questions in particular about MA cultural studies which is the MA program that I convene. And I wanted to really talk more generally this evening about the broader question of why culture matters. So we've had a really fun year with the MA group this year I teach the kind of the two compulsory units, the two core units for the MA program which are on theory and methodologies and kind of broad concepts of cultural studies. But I wanted to broaden that out this evening to be thinking more, more widely really about what culture is and why it's so important and how it permeates really so much of what we do whether we're working on in the field of culture, arts and humanities or indeed in kind of other subject areas like the social sciences and the hard sciences. So let's see if I can make my PowerPoint slides work. Okay, so I wanted to think broadly actually because what you know one of the things that we're doing at SOAS because obviously this is SOAS's speciality to be is to be working on Asia Africa in the Middle East, and so much of the kind of field of cultural studies is thrown out of British cultural studies and the work of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, and out of the work that's done on culture in North America. So it's a very kind of, it's, it's a field that has a very kind of Western origin. So the kind of work that we're doing at SOAS on cultural studies is refocusing shifting the focus on to the study of Asia Africa in the Middle East and why, and how cultural studies relates to those areas. So, broadly speaking, that means that we're dealing with questions about knowledge production and knowledge of the other and I don't know how many of you have come across the work of Edward, the late Edward Said, and his kind of seminal work orientalism that he wrote in 1978. But a major thrust of Edward Said's argument was that in Western studies of the so-called Orient, that area of the world was othered, it was made other or different in a split of self as the West and other as the world beyond the West. And very much, I think part of the work that we do in terms of cultural studies at SOAS deals with the question of what I call global intercultural dialogue so it's looking at the interaction between self and other between the West, the Asia Africa in the Middle East and looking at it in terms of the need for understanding the significance and importance of intercultural dialogue of intercultural understanding. People do things differently in different parts of the world. We know we all know that. So, those differences are mediated through cultural difference. And that's why culture matters so much. So I'm going to be looking this evening at the role of intercultural understanding, the significance of culture, the dynamics of knowledge production, how all of those things are the processes of globalization and trying to unravel some of the kind of fantasies about globalization that it paints universalism as the solution to everything. And there's two strands to that thinking about the importance of empathy and the benefits of embodiment as ways of promoting better intercultural dialogue and better cultural understanding. And I know that you have the, you have a Q&A function so I won't be talking for the whole hour this evening obviously. I will try and wind up within 20 minutes or so from here and very happy to take questions about the kind of ideas that I'm talking about here. So, we've got some major global challenges at the moment in the world, not least of course the global pandemic that is COVID-19. The life-threatening inter-connected challenges that the world currently faces, not only COVID-19 and the global pandemic but also unsustainable development, climate change, mass migration, war and the enormous and growing gap between rich and poor, all of these things call for a united scholarly intervention. There are challenges that require engagement with cultural difference for urgent international cooperation. So, what I'm saying here is that any of the major challenges that we now face, such as climate change, such as a global pandemic, can only be engaged with through the lens of cultural understanding. Without cultural understanding, we are incapable of working collectively towards global solutions for the kind of international and world quippling problems that we currently face. The notion that all human beings would end up sharing the same values and norms was prevalent before the turn of the millennium, so there was a thrust in cultural studies and in the arts and humanities in general, that globalization would mean a kind of flattening out of the world where everything would essentially be the same and we would all automatically be able to understand each other better because we would all be more or less the same as a result of the process of globalization. Other cultures were thought by the West to be safely en route to the same end destination where the West was impatiently waiting for them. So a kind of idea that development followed one particular kind of line or trajectory and that the West was in the vanguard of that trajectory and that everyone else would sort of catch up sooner or later. But in reality, globalization has actually made differences between people more prevalent, recognizable and significant. So in fact, the effects of globalization have been in a sense to heighten our awareness of difference rather than to flatten everything out into sameness. We are now more acutely aware of difference and we can look at issues like international migration to point up the kind of issues that that produces at the local level in terms of the kind of fractiousness of the experience of cultural difference. So one of the ways of countering this is to foster better intercultural dialogue through intercultural understanding. We can't do that without an understanding of the other. However, we define the other. Acknowledging cultural difference. So rather than trying to erase it through a flattening of globalization, actually embracing the fact that people across the world are different. So that's one of the main things that I think we sign up to at SOAS and I've been working at SOAS for the whole of my career since the end of the 1980s and was an undergraduate student learning Thai language and Southeast Asian history at SOAS in the early 80s. So I know that the institution is absolutely dedicated to the study of different cultures and the appreciation of the tremendous things that an awareness of a different culture and knowledge of a different culture can bring to us. What we're trying to avoid at all costs is what Samuel Huntington famously referred to as a clash of civilizations. Since that notion of clash leads to animosities and conflict and gets in the way of working collaboratively across cultures and across disciplines. To build a creative and egalitarian East West dialogue or South South North dialogue. Cultural difference then from a cultural studies perspective and indeed from an anthropological and sociological perspective is at the foundation of societal variations. And it's important to recognize that culture is embedded in all forms of human behavior. I always start off my cultural studies MA year by asking people to define what their own national culture is or how they see their own relationship to a specific form of cultural belonging. And it always produces a range of really, really interesting answers and ideas. It's imperative that we acknowledge contrasting cultural perspectives and champion the value of seeing the world as relational. And that's another sort of key point here that the world is not made up of isolated countries, isolated nations, isolated groups of people. But instead, as this kind of illustration fails to show, they're all very much interlocking. They all relate to each other and don't and can't be separated out. It's really important then through because of this relationality to be able to understand and respect the, the various kind of interlocking features of the way in which we relate to each other across the world. So part of the problem that we have to deal with that Edward Said kind of points up to us as well very much in work such as Orientalism and which are fundamental to postcolonial studies is that what's called universalism is not really universal. It's actually very often Western and knowledge production is also driven by dominant Western forces and tends to kind of undermine what can be offered in terms of knowledge production from different parts of the world. Knowledge production has been dominated by Western thought and intellectual traditions on the basis of arguing that those traditions are universal when in fact they're not they're very culturally specific. Institutions in Asia Africa and the Middle East often do so from a Western model of knowledge production. There's a slight error on my slide that I haven't edited often produce knowledge based on a Western knowledge Western model of knowledge production. And this is problematic for studies that focus on Asia Africa and the Middle East, because in the quest for understanding these regions, a Western understanding of them is produced. It's strange that an institution based in the heart of London might be so wedded to producing knowledge of the world which is trying to become attuned to an aware of Western forms of knowledge production but that's very much what the colonization of knowledge agenda so as is aiming to do and we've worked a lot this year on thinking through how one can decolonize the field of cultural studies. You just keep an eye on the time so I don't speak for too long. Okay. The linchpins really of Western knowledge and Western knowledge production comes from the Cartesian hypothesis from Renee Descartes. I think therefore I am this very much lies at the West at the root of Western thought and the root of Western knowledge production the idea of knowing the world coming from a thinking position knowledge comes from the brain from the head. Other parts of the world in other cultures across the world. This is not necessarily the soul or only root of knowing knowing can come from different parts of the body different experiences and cultural studies can explore alternatives to dominant Western notions of the mind body divide prioritizing core non Western values of connectedness and interrelationships could promote new approaches to learning about and engaging with different others. So one of the things that I'm interested in exploring in my own cultural studies work and my own research that goes beyond the kind of teaching that we do on the MA cultural studies program is around the questions of empathy and embodiment which I see as being really central to knowledge production. Cultural studies must take into account discoveries not only in its traditional fields of the humanities and the social sciences, but also in the natural sciences. The findings of neuroscience and cognitive psychology point to a need for recognizing the role of emotions and embodiment. These are things that are much more readily recognized in other cultural spheres than they are in the Western sphere. Culture affects memory, attention, perception, and the ways in which human beings feel think and speak. In short, culture is not only an intellectual add on, but it's rooted in the brain, guts, heart, DNA, and every part of the human body emotion and being. So what I want to do next at this point is give you a case study about the way in which I've been using my own kind of knowledge and training in cultural studies to address a particular issue, a particular research issue, which is connected up with what we call trans disciplinarity or pan disciplinarity, running across disciplines, including the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. And given that I work on Thailand, you won't be surprised to hear that my case study comes from Thailand, perhaps. So just in case you don't know much about Thailand and a lot of Southeast Asianists, this is where we are on the map. The work that I've actually been doing is around this particular area here. So the Mekong River runs down here. And the research work that I've been doing is in the area around the Mekong River. And the reason for that is because the Mekong River is a source of fish for local people. Other peoples around this Mekong area have a heavy diet in fish, which they eat with with rice. And why am I telling you this? Because I've been doing work with a huge interdisciplinary team of scientists, biochemists, surgeons, medical doctors, parasitologists, geographers, anthropologists, ecologists, environmentalists, and people working in the field of religious studies, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, what else, and art and literature, bringing all those people together over the discussions of this particular fish dish, which is eaten in Northeast Thailand, Lao PDR and parts of Cambodia. It's raw fish salad, locally referred to as guai pla, and it's a raw fish dish made with ciprinid fish, that's white fish with scaly fish that are prolific in the Mekong River and the river areas around the Mekong. And the problem with this dish is that although people have been eating it and it's great sort of cultural delicacy and has been so for, you know, the last five or 600 years in this area, it actually poses a health problem, because the fish is infested with liver fluke and the liver fluke. If you eat the fish raw, the liver fluke is ingested and can sit in part of the liver, the bile duct, and produce bile duct cancer 20 or 30 years after the dish is ingested. So here's a case where doctors are kind of tearing their hair out because they have a cancer which they, they're aware of a cancer which has been produced by what the World Health Organization has classified as a class 1 carcinogen, the liver fluke. I get that the proliferation of bile duct cancer in this region of Southeast Asia, doctors know comes from cultural practice, it comes from the cultural practice of eating raw fish, which is why cultural studies and awareness of cultural culture, can play a role in trying to understand questions of public health and questions of people's behavior. It's one of the ways in which, in which I can demonstrate that culture matters because with an understanding of people's cultural practices. We can bring about changes in a whole wide range of, or we can aspire to bring about changes in a whole wide range of problems and practices. So this has received quite a lot of coverage in the press, in the BBC, the New York Times, as a cancer producing dish, produced by the liver fluke present in the fish which lodges in the liver and produces scarring that in the end can lead to cancer. Let me relate that finally to the question of culture of culture again, through a reference to the Sukkotai inscription, an early inscription discovered in 1833, but dated back to 1292. It was found in the early Thai kingdom of Sukkotai, which was active in the 12th and 13th centuries, and which was the source of the earliest example of Thai script. And one of the famous things which is said in the Sukkotai inscription is this famous two liner, in the water there is fish, in the fields there is rice. It's an indication from this early inscription that Thailand or this part of what is now Thailand was abundant. There was no lack of food, there was no lack of a source of protein, there was always fish in the water and rice in the fields. And this kind of cultural artifact allows us to understand just why it's so important, if you date it this far back, just why it's so important for people to continue the cultural practices that they do through eating particular forms of food, so that it's much more complicated than doctors unfortunately would have it, that you can simply tell people not to do something that is an embedded cultural practice, that it relates to their identity, their well-being, their sense of community, and their kind of social cohesion. So culture is so much more important than simply kind of things that we can dictate around or mitigate against or kind of legislate against. That's why in the work that I was doing with this team of medics to try to resolve questions of a particular cultural practice that had health risks, we brought in questions of the arts. So we had a community art project which allowed people to explore their own questions of health and well-being and diet and food and community and so on through the arts. And we brought in the work of a very famous Thai film director who won the palm door at Cannes in 2010. Apichad Pongwira Setekun whose nickname is Joe, luckily for most people who are not Thai speakers, who won the palm door in Cannes in 2010 for his film Uncle Boon Me, who can recall his past lives. There's my cat involved in the presentation as well. So I just wanted to end up really with talking about the way in which culture kind of seeps through everything. It may seem to be invisible and not kind of immediately noticeable, but actually culture is so important to so many of the things that we do and so many of the ways in which we relate to each other. And I hope that's given you a kind of a taster of the ways in which I think culture really matters. Okay. Thank you for your for listening to me and I'm going to come out of the slideshow now. Stop sharing my screen and open up the floor for questions. Brilliant. Thank you so much. Like I said earlier, if you do have any questions, feel free to pop them in the Q&A box and we'll start answering them. We've got one that's come through. That said, do you plan to teach the course remotely again next year? That's an excellent question. I don't know whether I'm the right person to answer that. I wish I knew that COVID-19 was going to go away and we'd all be vaccinated and everything will be safe. Our aspiration, I think, is to teach face to face as much as possible. And I have to say that I know me and my colleagues are missing it so much because there's so much that goes on in a classroom, you know, in terms of face to face interaction. Here I am talking about culture and embodiment, but we're not embodied when we're sitting, you know, in our own separate spaces speaking over a screen. But unfortunately, I can't answer that question. It really depends on what is happening in terms of government advice. So I don't know, there may be somebody who can give you a clearer answer than me, but I can say I hope so. Yeah, I'm just going to echo what Rachel said. Unfortunately, we don't. There's no clear answer at the minute with all the government regulations changing. Like Rachel said, we do hope to teach face to face in September, but obviously this is subject to change based off of what happens with COVID. But we've had a question that says, does the cultural studies may allow you to select modules from other disciplines? Yes, absolutely. Yes. Yes, if you if you go online and look at what the list of options are. I think we have 15 credit modules in, now I can't remember the name of them, a theory and methodology of cultural studies in term one, a new horizons, a case studies in term two. And from that, you're picking your modules from a variety of different disciplines. For example, in politics, in anthropology, in media studies, you can do modules in literature and post colonial studies but you're not constrained or confined to doing only modules available through the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. So yes, absolutely. I see it very much as an interdisciplinary degree. And I think, you know, with the work that we do in the core courses for thinking through what cultural studies and its various methodologies, you then apply that to the different kind of credit modules that you want to take, either normally 15 credit modules, but sometimes taught through the year as 30 credit modules. And I think it's very interesting as well, that quite a number of people are also considered taking a language as part of that, because one of the best ways in which we can really understand what, what cultural difference is and how people constitute their own kind of awareness of language is absolutely through language. And that was the way that I came to cultural studies, Thai cultural studies through doing a degree in Thai language, first of all, and that really helps you to absolutely understand how things are differently experienced, what different priorities there are in different cultures, and they're all expressed through different kind of language, different forms of using language. And the next question is how big is the course expected to be this year. I can say that this, this year in the, in the core course I had 20 students in in term one and slightly fewer in term two so you can take the core units without actually doing the MA in cultural studies. So I mean we'd, I'd hope for a slightly larger group than that. But I think 20 to 25. Lovely. Someone's asked what career paths or endeavors outside of academia, would you say cultural studies lends itself to. That's a really good question, because I think you can use cultural studies in, in anything you do actually, because I think that one of the things we don't really realize is, and that's what I was trying to get across in the presentation is just how important cultural studies is to every encounter that we have, even, even if it's a monocultural encounter. Because so much of what we talk about in cultural studies is engagement with difference engagement with otherness, and whether we're working within our own cultures or across cultures. Those kinds of ideas and skills that we learn can actually translate into any field of work so I mean, when I started off talking I was talking about really kind of international diplomacy in a sense and international politics and climate change and environmental work and, you know, work as, as for example with non government organizations and so on. But obviously, people go into cultural studies also with an interest in very specific things like arts management and, you know, film curating and museum curating and so on. So I think there's a huge range of things that you can do with a degree in cultural studies that, you know, are there at the level of kind of transferable skills that come from the very issues that we're talking about. Lovely. We've had a question come in that says, what are the main differences between cultural studies and anthropological? He's definitely messed up, anthropological ones. Yes. Yeah, well they're interrelated, but we have a different methodological approach. So anthropologists do things like ethnography and fieldwork and they go and sort of, you know, sit in villages and do a year of fieldwork and observing how villagers behave and relate to each other and so forth. Cultural studies doesn't really use that methodology. We're doing a lot of text based methodology. So we're doing close readings of things like, you know, film posters, cultural artifacts. Yeah, we do use a lot of film for looking at the ways in which different cultures kind of prioritise certain issues. We look at, last week we did in the cultural studies class, a lecture on street protest in Myanmar and Thailand and the kind of iconography that people use in terms of street protest and so on. You could have an anthropological approach to that, I guess, but it would be more about the ways in which people are sort of speaking to each other and relating to each other than the actual kind of cultural material that they're using. So one of the things that we looked at last week, for example, was why protesters in central Bangkok in 2010 protested using baguettes when nobody in Thailand actually eats baguettes and it was an illusion to the Arab Spring and the way that the Tunisians had protested at the time. And so, you know, we're looking at intercultural connections in that sense, which is much more cultural studies than it is anthropology. But there are interrelationships, there are kind of cross similarities in some senses between the two, and part of the cultural studies MA would certainly allow you to take courses in anthropology. There's a methodological difference, which is around the kind of material that we're looking at. Lovely. Someone said, do you recommend doing the MA cultural program for someone who wants to focus on critical dance studies? Yes, very much so, because dance is something that we would certainly kind of be interested in. It's dance and performance would be part of the kind of the cultural framework that we would be looking at. So yes, and certainly because it's got that element of embodiment as well, I think it would fit really well with a cultural studies program. Brilliant. And the last question that's come up for now is, how flexible is the MA course in terms of doing it part time and working part time? Yeah, so some people do it over two years and some people do it over three. We just split the kind of components differently depending on the number of years. Three is the maximum. And one of the key components of the MA program, of any MA program, so as is to write a 10,000 word dissertation, and whether you're part time or full time, that's always done in the last three to four months of the degree. That aside, the rest of the degree is made up of taught modules. And if you're taking the program over two years, you'll do sort of half the modules in one year and half modules in the next. And the split is slightly more awkward over three years, but basically it's absolutely possible to work and do the degree part time and I've got some students doing that this year. And we try and be as flexible as we can and give as much support as we can to working to doing to doing work and and studying. So I think it's, yeah, it's an important, important. It's important to have that ability to do it part time for sure. Lovely. Oh, we have had some come up before we go to the questions I do want to give a little bit of time to the student ambassador that's joined on this call. If you don't mind. Yeah, I was actually going to jump in. This question because I'm actually doing part time this year. I'm on my first year so obviously I haven't had any experience with balancing a job and in person lectures and tutorials. But in terms of my teaching is actually been quite manageable. I mean, a lot more than I thought it would be, especially with recorded pre recorded lectures. It's so much more simple if you're working so I work in a cafe. And I do, I mean I do this is obviously, but if there's a shift that comes up and I have a lecture I can just be like I can just watch it tomorrow or late to the evening so as both of you said, we don't know if it's going to be online or in person next year, but if you're working part time and doing it part time yeah it's, it's definitely very manageable yeah. So even if we're teaching face to face to be honest now we're so used to recording that I think we'll record everything and so people who can't come to class will still be able to catch up on things they miss which is much more useful for for part time students if there if there's a clash. Brilliant. We've had a follow up question from the student asked about critical dance studies they said are there any faculty specialized with dance studies by any chance. No, not that I know of unless there are in ethnomusicology but I don't think so. But the nearest I can think to that is we do have people working in yoga studies which is not I know it's not dance but it's but you know, but nobody, nobody specifically in dance studies as far as not that I can think of anyway, So have a look at the ethnomusicology department, the music department see what their speciality is a certain there are certainly a team of ethnomusicologists. Brilliant. And then question is coming that says, do cultural studies students do fieldwork. If so, what is the difference between this course and social anthropology that focuses on the fieldwork. Yeah, so no cultural studies students don't do fieldwork at the moment, unless you do it as part of your dissertation. So when it comes to the end of the year, if you're doing it part, sorry if you're doing the course full time. The teaching comes comes to an end at the end of the end of term two which is the end of March normally. The fieldwork is completed and exams are taken if there are any in May, June, and by early June it's time to start working on the dissertation and you have up until mid September to do that. Some people do decide that they want to do what we call primary research for their dissertation. So there's no requirement to do that. But if you wanted to do fieldwork as part of the dissertation you could do. And the way we manage the dissertations is around about this time of year. Everybody kind of has a think about what kind of topic they'd like to work on and we we appoint a supervisor with with kind of specialist knowledge of that area. And then you work with your supervisor to see how you want to go about doing that topic. And if you want to include as part of that one or two months of fieldwork, then that's absolutely fine. So the answer is yes you can do it and no you don't have to do it. I just want to see if our student ambassador if you want to talk a little bit about what your experience has been like so far as a student and sort of what your degree has been like what you're specialising in anything like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, so I started this year I moved to London. Initially because I thought things were going to get normal similarly they're having yeah. But it's been, yeah it's been great. In terms of, I guess I'll speak first about online teaching, which is been a bit different from having in person, definitely. It has made things a lot more flexible in terms of, you know, life work. I want to say fun as well balance but there hasn't actually been any fun in terms of socialising and stuff. But yeah it's been it's been it's been really good, especially tutorials. We usually have quite small groups like between 10 and 15 people and doing breakout rooms and discussing the readings and then going back into a big room and just sharing different perspectives and you know criticisms that, you know, what we discussed in smaller groups has been, has actually been quite, I mean for me it has been, you know, very very fulfilling in terms of knowledge more than I thought it would be I was a bit skeptical at first of online teaching I was like oh, it's going to be quite different from in person. It was it was it was really nice. Because I've moved to London I've actually gone to the library quite a lot. I've actually met quite a few of my course mates. So it's been actually has actually been quite nice. Sometimes we have lunch together. I'm outside in a social distancing. And yeah, we're actually doing two group projects at the moment, and the ones of us they've moved to London is actually quite lucky because we've worked in those projects together. Obviously the people that abroad didn't have that chance. I know people are also working in group projects online and it's been, it's been easy. I did that for first time for one and it was, it was, it was quite easy. Yeah, it's been, it's been good. I think it's been nice of being in London as well hasn't been. I don't feel like I've experienced London at all. Yeah, apart from saw us obviously going in and walking around a lot, which in itself has already been quite, quite nice just walking around London, empty London, which is probably a site I won't see for much longer and probably won't see for a long time again. Does anyone have any questions regarding moving to London, living in London online lectures. Yeah, feel free to pop them in the Q&A box. Oh yeah, I didn't talk about yeah I didn't talk about my what I'm specialising in so I did, I did Japanese studies for my undergrad. So I want to focus. I'm only doing my dissertation next year, but I've already spoken to who I want to be my supervisor because I came to saw us with a very clear direction what I want to my research in because I want to progress into a PhD afterwards. I'm focusing on post Black Lives Matter racial awareness in Japan, and I'm focusing on subculture groups that have appropriated African American culture and racial tropes like hip hop break dancing. There's really small subculture called Ganguro where people see the black face nowadays, and it's kind of socially acceptable so I'm focusing on that and seeing all those subculture groups and navigating. Yeah, racial and cultural awareness in this post Black Lives Matter reality in Japan. Yeah, so if someone has any questions regarding Japan or stuff like that I'm also happy to answer them yeah. Brilliant thank you so much. I haven't, I don't see any questions in here right now, but we can maybe give it a couple of minutes to see if any come through this one. Oh, there we go. They're asking, what did you do your dissertation and for your undergrad. Okay, so for my undergraduate dissertation. I, I did. So I focus on Afro Japanese cultural interaction and synthesis in contemporary samurai anime. So I, my, some of my material that I focused on was to different Japanese animation series and I analyzed how Afro Japanese cultural racial social realms intertwined and formed a sort of new identity to overcome racialized problems of white hegemony. And, yeah, basically it's, it's, I'm trying to apply my undergrad research into real life through. I actually do social anthropology for Miami I don't do cultural studies. But I believe that quite similar, apart from the ethnography that Richard's talking about because I looked at the structure and it's actually quite similar. Yeah. Lovely, thank you. Um, that's the only more questions I've come through, maybe give it a moment. I also think that this is just an add on, even though I'm doing the next year. I think one of the big things if you're, if you want to focus on a specific region, whether it's Japan, or another Asian country or African country and you want to progress on to, you know, an M res or a PhD, or something like that afterwards. One is one of the big advantages of those is that you have an exceptional range of academics that can teach you languages that you can. Some of them, I don't think you can, you can learn them pretty much anywhere else, at least in Europe that I know of really, really small, you know, African and Asian language. I mean, it's an easy, you can't in other places. But, you know, it's, it's, it's a really, really, really big advantage that, you know, you can't have in many other universities. Yeah. Lovely. We've got one more come through it says as someone who didn't do a dissertation in their undergrad, how does it differ from a master's is it more pressured or more focused. Let me think. Yeah, I can, I can say something to that. We do have undergraduate level we have something called an independent study project, which is 10,000 words. And, and you get a bit of supervision for it but you're basically on your own is the, and the master's thesis is also 10,000 words. And you get about the same amount of supervision and you do it on your own. The only thing is it's the, the only difference is that the master's thesis is reflecting the kind of things that you have learned during your master's level course. So, quite often for coursework you're, you're being asked to write essays of three sometimes 4000 words in length. And I think the fact that the dissertation comes at the end of the taught element of the course stands you in good stead to do the dissertation so the fact that you haven't done a dissertation undergraduate level shouldn't matter, because you'll be learning the skills that you need to do the MA dissertation during the MA year. Lovely. Another question says, how often do students do small discussion group style seminars. It's an integral part of the way that we teach so most, most courses are taught to for two hours a week over a period of 20 weeks. And the first hour would be would normally be a lecture and the second hour would be a seminar slash tutorial. What I've been doing, since I've been doing it on zoom is using breakout groups for small group discussions, and, and actually they, they work really well and you can drop into them, virtually, as a, as a teacher, or sometimes we have a teaching assistant, helping with that as well. And I think it's really important for me to be able to provide my own PhD students to join and they'll sort of help facilitate the small breakout groups as well. But it's an important point, I think, is an important aspect, and then we get together after the breakout and sort of pull ideas together in class but the for me the important thing is really to facilitate an environment where people feel safe enough to explore ideas it's not about having to get everything right all the time or show how much you've read and you know, sort of show that you know everything about everything it's really for us to collectively explore ideas and things that are interesting so even the opening session that we have about thinking through what is culture and what does it mean to us is all about kind of breaking down those hierarchical barriers so that we kind of learning together. Thank you so much. And it doesn't look like there's any more questions in the Q&A so I just want to say a massive thank you to Rachel and to our student ambassador for joining, and for helping to answer all of the questions. And thank you to everyone that's joined us tonight. I hope you all have a lovely evening. Like I said this is recording it recorded and will be on our website soon. So yeah, thank you all so much. Maybe I can just add one thing if it's not clear already that if you've got, if you go away from this and you've got extra questions that you didn't think of at the time, please do feel free to email me. My email address is rh6 at psoas.ac.uk or just go on to the psoas website and key in my name you'll find my contact details. It's Rachel Harrison. I'm really happy to kind of take questions. Whenever you feel that you've got, you know, something that you want to ask about the course then please do drop me a line. Okay, thanks. I've dropped my email as well and goes to guys that have any non-course related questions, whether it's about London or accommodation or anything like that that I can be helpful. Lovely. Thank you so much and I hope everyone has a good evening. Bye.


What's the worst thing that the British government is doing right now? Well believe it or not it isn't austerity and it isn't Brexit. Now putting aside the failure to deal with climate change which is so bad it belongs in a separate category altogether, the worst thing that the British government is doing today is supporting the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen's civil war. Now here Britain's given crucial material support to a bombing campaign that's indiscriminately killed thousands of civilians and has now triggered humanitarian catastrophe that threatens the lives of millions of people. It should be a national scandal but at the moment it isn't even an election issue. Now I've just completed a PhD on Britain's relationship with Saudi Arabia in the smaller Gulf states and in the next few minutes I'm going to try and explain what's happening in Yemen and how our government is directly complicit. So in March 2015 a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen's civil war to restore the former President Hadi. Now Hadi had been overfroamed by rebels known as the Houthis who were acting in alliance with forces loyal to the former President Saleh. Now the coup against Hadi was a legitimate but leading scholars on Yemen warned when the Saudis intervened that this would only escalate the conflict and have a devastating humanitarian impact. The last two years have proven them 100% right. Well over 10,000 people have been killed since the Saudis intervened and this includes a bare minimum of 4,600 civilians. 60% of those civilians have been killed in Saudi bombing and those bombs have hit schools, have hit hospitals, double tap strikes have been reported and the double tap strike is where a second bomb drops when the emergency services arrive. A panel of experts reporting to the UN Security Council accused the coalition of the quote widespread and systematic use of indiscriminate airstrikes and quote of targeting civilians and civilian objects and that reflects a consensus amongst all the humanitarian and human rights NGOs reporting from Yemen on how the Saudis are behaving. Now the humanitarian situation in Yemen was very bad even before the war began but it's now become perhaps the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world including Syria. Both sides are accused of preventing aid getting to the people who need it but given that Yemen is massively import dependent it's the Saudis aerial and naval blockade that's having really bad effects. 17 million out of 27 million Yemenis are food insecure, 14.4 million people don't have access to safe drinking water and sanitation, nearly half a million children under the age of five are severely malnourished and almost 7 million people now reportedly teetering on the brink of famine. And notwithstanding the underlying problems that Yemen has this is fundamentally, as Oxfam have said, a man-made catastrophe. Now often when authoritarian regimes in the Middle East bomb civilians indiscriminately, trigger humanitarian catastrophes and fuel the kind of chaos on which jihadi groups flourish there are calls for the West to intervene and in the way the British and the Americans have intervened by providing crucial material support to the Saudi campaign. British arms sales to the Saudis have dramatically increased since the war began with the government licensing £3.3 billion worth of arms transfers in the last 18 months compared to 147 million over the preceding period and we're talking here about the replenishment of Saudi stocks of bombs of missiles and other supplies for their air force and all this is part of two of the biggest arms deals in history signed by the Tory government in the 80s and labor in the 2000s under which Britain has not only equipped the Saudis with fleets of tornado and typhoon military jets but has also committed to provide maintenance, training, components, ammunition on an ongoing basis. As the Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond the then Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said at the start of the intervention we have a significant infrastructure supporting the Saudi air force and will support the Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in combat. Now US support for the Saudi coalition under Obama and under Trump has been highly important as well but make no mistake the British role here is not trivial. If the considerable assistance that our government is providing to the Saudis were to be removed it would seriously impede the Saudi war effort. And that's why Amnesty International Human Rights Watch Oxfam saved the children one leading NGO after another as called for the British government to stop harming the Saudis and they've been completely ignored by David Cameron's government but Theresa May's government. The Labour leadership has joined these calls for Britain to stop harming Saudi but when the Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Formbury brought a motion to the House of Commons to that effect a large number of her own back benches either abstained or stayed away. The Guardian reported at the time and I quote it is understood some Labour MPs who opposed the motion were orchestrating deliberate abstentions and discussions with some conservatives about the chances of defeating it. So what can be done about all of this? Well one thing you can do is support the many NGOs that I've said have tried to raise the alarm about this issue Amnesty, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch saved the children and the group that I'm involved with campaign against arms trade. A campaign against arms trade believes that the arms sales are not only immoral they're also illegal and that's why we brought a judicial review against the government's decision to continue harming Saudi Arabia and that court case was heard in the higher court in February and we're awaiting the verdict. According to emails that were disclosed as part of the court case even the government's senior civil servant in charge of arms export controls told ministers that these arms sales should not be going ahead while the conflict was going on in Yemen but we can't wait for the court to reach its verdict and because this isn't just a narrow legal issue it's a moral issue and it's a political issue. We're in the middle of an election campaign there's no better time to put pressure on politicians of all parties ask them what their stance is on Britain's role in the bombing of Yemen ask them what they've done about it in parliament don't take platitudes for an answer and ask newspapers and broadcast news channels why they haven't given this story the prominence that it clearly deserves given the severity of the situation in the country and given our government's role importantly. Take encouragement from this 62% of people in this country according to one recent poll think arming Saudi Arabia is unacceptable 71% think that arming a promoting arms sales to any state that's violating international humanitarian law is unacceptable. The problem is that only 49% of the British public have even heard of the conflict in Yemen as opposed to 84% of the public with regards to Syria and that number drops to 37% when we're talking about people aged 18 to 24 so the real issue is raising awareness.  This should be a national scandal at the moment it's not even an election issue but we can make it one.


the best halloween products to upload to your dropshipping store this year 2020 we have q4 coming up it's the best time to be in e-commerce guys so if you have a dropshipping store start getting ready because in this video i'm going to share with you the 7 best product ideas that you should upload to your store this season to really make a killing and profit way more than you did any year before so quick intro guys let's begin hello everyone now before we start talking about the products themselves i want to talk to you guys for just one minute about numbers because i really want you guys to understand what goes on around this time of the year when it comes to americans spending money on halloween products because they sure do spend a lot of money so check out this graph for example you can see here how much americans spend each year on halloween products and the numbers that you're seeing here are in millions so for example in 2006 americans spent just about five billion dollars on halloween products and in the last few years 2019 18 and 17 you can see that americans spend just about nine billion dollars on halloween products guys that is crazy i don't know if you can even grasp these numbers but now let's get to the money time which products do we want to upload for halloween to really make a killing this year so the first product that i recommend uploading for halloween this season are halloween costumes now i know what you're thinking of course we need to upload halloween costumes i mean the question is which halloween costume is gonna sell more this year which costumes do we want to upload the trick here guys is to think about all kinds of famous movies and tv shows that came out this year think about the characters that are rising stars this year and search for their costumes okay so you can search google you can search imdb for the best movies and tv shows that came out go on to your supplier site search for halloween costumes micro niche it to whatever popular character came out and that's how you're gonna find really hot trending halloween costumes this year so that's the first product that i recommend to upload of course it is a product niche we're talking about product niches and not just single products so my first recommendation is halloween costumes now my second product recommendation to upload to your stores this halloween season is halloween makeup now halloween makeup is usually a cheap item for example search your supply for halloween makeup it's usually a relatively cheap item so you can upload more than a quantity of one some customers are gonna buy two or three each now you can't really micro niche halloween makeup so just upload new releases upload best sellers upload 30 40 50 listings if you can't even more because halloween makeup is one of the items that sell more before halloween so this is my second recommendation the third product niche that i recommend to upload for your halloween stores this halloween season is halloween decorations now halloween decorations can be indoor or outdoor they can be spider webs they can be anything around the halloween theme for example halloween decorations now my first tip is if you're searching your supplier for a certain product and they don't have it search another supplier and if you're still working with only one supplier i really recommend that you up it to three because three suppliers is really the optimal number to be working with if one doesn't have any products the second or third will if the second has any problems fulfilling orders or anything that might happen the first and the third will still work so work with three suppliers this is the optimal number to be working with so add halloween decorations to your list upload a whole bunch of them always check out the new releases and bestsellers these two categories will always give you the highest chance of making a sale and making some good profit so halloween decorations is the third item that i'm going to recommend to upload to your stores this halloween season now the fourth item that i recommend to upload to your halloween stores this holiday season to really make a killing is halloween candy yes you can even drop ship candy so for example let's search up one of our suppliers for halloween candy now my recommendation here is to not upload just like a five or a ten pack try to get the biggest bundles that you can find because that's what the americans are looking for they don't want to buy a small box of candy because they know how much candy they will need to distribute on halloween night so find the biggest bundle packs and sell as much candy as you can because this is one of halloween's bestsellers so halloween candy is my fourth recommendation now my fifth halloween product recommendation for this halloween season is halloween baskets trick or treat everybody needs baskets right but nobody wants to walk around with a basket that they have laying around the house so halloween baskets are really going to help them get into the halloween vibe let's check out halloween baskets and like i said before if you're not happy with one supplier's results you can always check out other suppliers it makes your whole job easier it differentiates you from your competition so halloween baskets is my fifth product recommendation for this halloween season the sixth product recommendation that i recommend that you upload to your halloween stores this halloween season are halloween party supplies everybody likes to party and halloween is one of the best reasons to go out and party now so let's check our suppliers for halloween party supplies now this can range from plastic plates and plastic cups and all the things that you need to get the party started you can even go with led lights anything that really helps to create a party and to keep it going so halloween party supplies is one of the things that people search for most before halloween so check that out the seventh product that i recommend that you upload to halloween are halloween greeting cards americans love sending greeting cards to their beloved on halloween they love wishing them a happy halloween happy holidays this is holiday season coming up right so halloween greeting cards you'll see a whole bunch of them and once again concentrate on new releases concentrate on best sellers upload a whole bunch because this is what people are searching for right now so we got halloween greeting cards on the list and that is the last product niche that i recommend to upload this halloween season once again we're talking about product niches not single products you're gonna have to use your head a little bit go inside these products and and find all of the micro niches that can really sell well this is the work that you have to do as a drop shipper i can only give you the tools that you need to get started so those are the seven product recommendations that i recommend for this halloween season to really make the killing guys so we got halloween costumes we got halloween makeup we got halloween decorations we got halloween candy we got halloween baskets halloween party supplies and halloween greeting cards now right before we wrap up this video and let you start preparing your stores for halloween there's something really cool that i want to talk to you guys about so anyone who signs up for the or's auto deus mastermind class will receive a free halloween template to use on your drop shipping stores this season for halloween it's a really cool looking template it will make you look unique and stand out from everybody else so let's take a little sneak peek and see how that template looks let's just grab any item that we see over here like the greeting cards that we talked about copy the url or the product id go into the uploader section of auto deus and here we're going to choose the template halloween which is what you're going to get when you sign up for the or's mastermind class paste it all over here and grab details give it a second to grab all the details here we go we did it really quick so first as you know you have your product's title you can do whatever you want with it change it up edit the variation settings the price the additional profit in percentage or in fixed dollars amount your break even and so forth you have your suggested category your item specifics down below you have your product photos which you can make cool collages three image collages four image collages make watermarks and so forth but here is the main event scrolling down will show you the cool halloween template that you're going to get here is how it looks so you have your upper banner happy halloween less than 24 hours response time our dedicated staff is here to help check out these cool skeletons high quality it looks really really cool over here you have your cool hover link options so when you just hover your mouse over the links you're going to have the cool hover effect the colors are really nice and clean and modern looking here you have your trust badges fast shipping 30 days refund customer support 100 satisfaction everything that you need to get the customer to look and say hey this looks like a real business in a real store i can trust buying from these guys further down you'll see the product's title the description the image which is on the left side product dimensions and so forth scrolling down further below you'll have the about us the payment policy the shipping policy and the returns now you can edit these templates and change the text up and do whatever you want with it but this is the overall look look how cool it looks this will be your template if you want it all you have to do is sign up for the mastermind class it will really take your stores to the next level it's really where you want to be so here is how the template looks sign up for the masterclass get it use it on your stores and take your drop shipping stores to the next level it also looks really really cool in the mobile view as you can see down here it's perfect and just so you know there are much more mobile shoppers than there are pc or tablet shoppers or any other platform most of the world's population today prefer to make their online shopping through their mobile phones so with autodesk every product that you upload will be 100 mobile friendly and this is a very very important feature to understand next you have your policies set your item policies and the tag is something really important that i want to talk about and really guys it's the last thing that i want to talk about item tagging is really really important every product that you upload for halloween create a tag you only have to create it once right so you add a halloween tag and every product that you upload for halloween use the halloween tag for it after the halloween season is over you can filter the tag in your active listings to see exactly which halloween products performed well and which didn't keep the ones that performed well because next year you're going to want them you're going to use the ones that went well last year plus you're going to start searching for new discovering new product niches for the next year so every year you're going to get bigger and bigger and better because you're going to use all of the items that went well for you so you're going to have a bunch of bestsellers plus trying to add more so go with 80% bestsellers and 20% discovering more items with this method you will definitely see the increase every single year there will never be a year where you'll make less than you did the year before if you follow these methods so those are the product recommendations i truly recommend that you sign up for liors masterclass to get this template it looks really really cool i definitely recommend you guys to do it so that sums up this halloween video for you guys i really hope that you're going to learn from it i really hope that you're going to implement it in your stores i promise that you will start seeing positive results once you start doing so sign up for liors mastermind class to get that free cool-looking halloween template and please guys subscribe to our youtube channel so you can always stay up to date on all the coolest stuff that we have going on in the dropshipping world and of all the cool features that are going to come out on the autodesk platform so until the next holiday guys best of luck happy profiting bye bye