Well, good morning, everybody. It's nice to see you all and thank you for coming along today. My name is Dr. Mira Savaratnam, and I am the undergraduate admissions tutor for the Politics Department. With me is Dr. Tolger St. Musnamiro, who is my colleague who is the BA Politics and joint degrees convener. And we've also been joined, I believe, by our head of department, Dr. Felix Berinskota. So I am going to just ask my colleagues to briefly introduce themselves and let's start with Tolger. Say a bit about yourself and your background and why you became an academic. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this virtual open day. We are very happy to have you with us today. My name is Tolger St. Musnamiro. I'm a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies. I did my PhD at New York University and I joined SOAS in 2019 and before coming to SOAS I worked at LSE. Most of my teaching in the department is about modules that focus on research methods and political minorities. My research is about mostly political conflict and especially about certain consequences of conflict and specifically forced migration. Most of my recent research is about the Syrian Civil War and the Syrian refugees. I work these topics by doing public opinion surveys both among Syrian refugees as well as amongst the host populations that are currently hosting Syrian refugees. Why did I become an academic? Well, my decision was very early on even when I was in high school. I was pretty sure that I'm going to become an academic because I simply wanted to. I was fascinated by the political world and I really wanted to spend most of my adult life, professional life on trying to understand policies in various different contexts. And especially how sort of political power works. I guess that's a very quick summary of my past and present as an academic. Thank you Tolger. That's fascinating. Felix. Good morning colleagues and prospective applicants. Can you see me? I don't know if there's a video. Yeah, great. So my name is Felix beyond because I'm the head of department of politics and international studies. I've been at source and in the department for 12 years. I'm originally from Germany but did my studies in the US and my PhD in London. I am an expert in international relations international politics broadly speaking but for the last two years I've been the head of department. Which basically means that I'm less involved in teaching although I do try to teach every year. Simply because it's the most fun part of the job. In many ways. All I want to say is that this this department is one that is that is special is particular in many ways and and the reason why I ended up here well there's number one because you know they offered an opening in in London and I lived in London at the time. It's also because it offers a perspective on the world that no other politics department offers to you the the expertise in Asia, Africa and the Middle East is unrivaled and you know moving from a non western or looking at global issues from a non western perspective is really is really what what what we excel in and I think that is that is really what what attracts me. to this place and which is why I'm really thrilled to you know to work with my colleagues and try to try to encourage you and convince you to apply to this to our programs. I don't want to say much more other than the diversity of our perspectives is mirrored by the diversity of our staff. They come from all kinds of backgrounds. They come from all over the world that they speak multiple languages. But so our students our student body is is you know is not one that I mean you would expect in London to have, you know, a plural multicultural environment in any case, but I think so as you know tops this even more. So the diversity of our students is what I think makes this most exciting and inspiring to both teach and to research. And yeah, so I hope you will be convinced at the end of this hour. Thanks. Thanks Felix, and I'll just add a bit more about myself so I'm also a specialist in international relations. I didn't actually think I was going to be an academic I thought I was going to be a music journalist for the majority of my undergraduate days. I missed studying actually when I finished and I liked thinking about politics and the more I learned about it and more fascinated I was also having family who are from Sri Lanka I was particularly interested in war and violence and conflict and peace building. And I ended up writing my PhD about peace building in Mozambique. And in fact many of the ways in which international aid wasn't that helpful in terms of solving the country's problems. So what I work on now is a combination of theories and concepts, particularly around coloniality and race. And I'm currently working on a new project about the impact of global debt in how we shape international politics. So this is a fascinating environment in which to work and study and I would echo what Felix said about the exciting nature of so as a community. Before we get into all of that let's take a step back and think about what it means to study politics. Many of you might have been looking at it at a level, but I thought I'd give you a flavor of maybe how we approach it at undergraduate level and also in a sort of academic setting. I mean what we're talking about is the organization of power in society. This is a massively important question obviously affects all of us from the wealthiest to the least wealthy from the most powerful to the least powerful, and everywhere in between. Now we look at this in several different ways. I think one of the ways in which we think about it is through what we might call formalized systems that is formal institutions of government, parliament selections, cabinets, the laws and treaties that are formalized as part of the political world. Everybody kind of understands that that is the stuff of politics. However, we also go beyond that to think about ideas, the world of ideas, the values, the norms that shape not only the way we contest politics but also the way we think about politics. The frames of reference or the identities or the locations in which you place people have an enormous impact on the distribution of political power in society. Finally, we also think about what I would call social structures and forces so these are the big things that impact our lives such as gender race capitalism. There are large impersonal structures that nonetheless reproduce themselves over time, and in ways which greatly impact the distribution of power. We can also think about grand processes such as the ecological destruction climate change, and the organization of the economy and corporate power. All of these different layers to the political world and how power is organized in society. What we do when we study politics is that we try to develop the methodologies and the tools and the concepts to help us study these systematically. Not just saying oh that looks a bit weird and that looks a bit weird, but actually looking at them comparatively trying to define what's going on trying to understand the mechanisms and the dynamics. And we hope this gives us better ways of asking questions about politics, and also ways of testing the answers. What we're really trying to do with a politics degree or an international relations degree is train your brain to see the workings of power in society and to see it in ways which are clear and analytical and focused and rigorous. Let's actually bring you into the conversation now and let's think about how we might approach some of these issues. So I would like some suggestions from yourselves, you can either unmute yourself and speak or put the answers in the chat. So in your view what are some of the big political issues of the present like what is it that gets you kind of motivated or makes you think or makes you cross or makes you try interested. Climate change from an India and got Charlie saying inequality that isn't really key issues.  Obviously there is a huge issue that affects basically everybody on the globe, but as a political scientist you would say well it's affecting people very unequally right and so there are those with lots of power in terms of how things are organized in order to be able to change these things but these are not the same people who are being affected necessarily immediately by the impacts of climate change. So immediately we can see that the different locations of the power, the power holders and those who are affected is part of the problem here as part of the political order, and then we can loop in questions like ideology we can loop in questions like the structures of capitalism that help us make sense of how and why climate change kind of continues to be a problem. Tolga there's some other points in the chat did you want to pick one up. We won't be able to answer all of them necessarily. Sure absolutely. Let's follow in the list, inequality right so Charlene is mentioning inequality. That's certainly a topic that you would be interested in as political science scholars, and perhaps one advantage of looking at inequality as a political science rather than right as a scholar of economics right, we would actually try to understand inequality in its various facets, including right so the political factors behind the quality right we wouldn't suppose we are interested in causes of income inequality or wealth inequality right, while it's standard economists would try to explain this only with reference economic factors, right. As a political science scholar, you would have the opportunity to go a little deeper, right, you would know that many economic processes, including those who produce these inequalities these vast differences in income and wealth are not only right, explicable by reference to to to economics to market to market forces so to speak, but certainly to political actors as well like the state for instance right or or or sort of strong interest groups. So that would be one way you would actually approach the topic of inequality, specifically from a politics angle right, and then in addition to that as political science scholars right, we would have the sort of the opportunity right or the capacity right to look at various manifestations of inequality across different context and try to understand why inequality levels change why the nature of inequality is different across different countries, so on and so forth so that is some of the ways in which I believe via political scientists with approach a topic like inequality. Thank you. I can see Felix Felix did you want to come in on one of these otherwise I might tackle the Israel Palestine conflict. Yeah, I would have just picked this up but I can I can leave it to you but I would. What I would do is to say that conflict is of course one of the big themes that that we study, and whether it is a specific conflict such as that one. There is a broader question of why, why do wars happen why why over and over again, or how has the nature of war and violence changed. Where do we see the causes for these, you know, for for these conflicts and it isn't just about looking at one conflict in isolation you would also ask, you know, how is a particular conflict linked to broader dynamics in world politics for instance or to domestic politics.  You would have to go, you know beyond and you have to think about implications, you know let's take the region of the Middle East as a whole, over war, such as the one in Syria, you know the implications in terms of for instance, refugees and streams of migration, the shifting forces of power the involvement of other actors such as, you know Iran, Russia, the United States, and so forth so I think they're really important questions about conflicts that we tackle that are both about conflicts, a very particular conflict but also the broader context in which these occur both the international domestic and the historical dynamics. I mean yes and just to pick up and kind of illustrate what Felix was saying with regard to the Israel Palestine conflict. I mean one of the things that you would become aware of when reading the literature about the conflict is that there are at least three models for understanding what is going on in Israel and Palestine. And what is interesting about the scholarship is that it also is affected by the political struggle itself. So one model would be to see Israel Palestine as a security issue defined by terrorism and its effects on the Israeli state and to look at it in that particular framework. Another framework would see it as an ethnic conflict driven by identity driven by religion or belief or the sheer identification of people as being from different groups and backgrounds. And a third framework would look at it as a, as a colonial or anti colonial conflict about settlement about dispossession and about the kinds of violence and resistance that that entails. And I think something like the Israel Palestine conflict is that both what is happening on the ground and the explanations themselves become sites of contestation, because particular explanations you can see a lie themselves to particular political outcomes. And one of our jobs as scholars is to try and disentangle or distinguish the good arguments from the bad in order to understand with most precision and robustness what is actually going on. Thank you so much for your wonderful answers we don't have time to tackle more of them now unfortunately but these are exactly the kinds of things that we would be looking at in the degree and that you'd have the opportunity to explore. I think a couple of other questions just in case you were quiet but that would not necessarily have happened with the so as groups so we've already discussed climate change I'll leave that one there. I'll briefly talk about this one though because I think this is a key issue in politics at the moment how do social media and other surveillance technologies shape what it means to be a citizen.  And it gives you a relationship to the other people who are part of your political order. Now the traditional view of citizenship or at least the liberal kind of view of citizenship is that citizens are rational individuals who come together, both for their personal good and also for the collective good. The notion of citizenship is about participating in a transparent political order that's what democracy is, and having one's voice heard. Now what social media does of course is totally change the way in which you experience the world, the way in which you understand what arguments are being put out there, the way in which algorithms shape what information you're presented with the way in which particular it becomes more prominent, particularly information which is kind of counter counter hegemonic or counter cultural. And that radically changes not just, let's say your rationality but it works at the level of your emotions right social media is actively working on your emotions all the time to make you engage with it. And what does that mean for how we understand our relationships to each other as citizens, and the way in which democracy works. There are lots of big questions to ask about this. And that's one of the key things that we would like to look at in study politics today. Tolga I think we have a question here. A last question for you to answer. Another question right that you might be interested in as students of politics, right. If you look at around the world right if you look around the world to countries that are large exporters of oil right for which oil is a very significant share of their exports. If you look at their sort of political regimes political systems right most of the time these countries are not necessarily the most democratic right so then that brings the question how actually does oil well shaped the likelihood of democracy in different countries to think about Saudi Arabia think about Russia think about in Israel I think about Nigeria. So then we as students of politics would want to answer this question and one way in which we can think about answering this question would be, well, what are the channels right through which oil wealth might perhaps influence right the kinds of political systems that that they wander. And then when we asked that question, we would start thinking about sort of different causal mechanisms that can link oil wealth to political regimes. We might for us to say well in countries with significant amount of natural resources and oil wealth right states are less likely or do need less to tax their citizens as a result of which they feel less obliged to listen to the views of their citizens, which leads to less chances of proper democratic representation, which then increases the chances of a authoritarian regime. Right, so that's one way we can think about this question as students of politics. Now in addition to that, we can also look at this relationship again across different context. We can look at this relationship in places like as I told you Saudi Arabia or Russia or Venezuela, but then there's also a Norway, right, where despite significant amount of oil wealth. Norway seems to have a pretty strong democratic regime so then we would start comparing, right, we will start looking for similarities and differences between these cases, and then perhaps you will say, Well, if the country is relatively underdeveloped or poor to begin with, then perhaps oil wealth is detrimental to democracy but otherwise it's perhaps not right. So this is just another way in which we as students and scholars of politics would approach the question of oil wealth, shaping regimes around the world and this is not going anywhere. Right, so despite predictions in the past that you know oil will become less important as a source of energy that doesn't seem to be the case. So, questions of these type, you'll certainly continue to keep us busy as students and scholars of politics. Thank you Tolga. Okay, well that brings us nicely onto the question of what do we do here at so as and how do we teach and study politics here in the department. I just wanted to give you a bit of background about our department. We're very highly ranked, which is a nice thing rankings on everything. But we've been recently ranked as the fifth best department in the UK and the seventh in Europe and the 21st in the world, which is a nice thing to hear and that's to do with our academic reputation, how well we teach and the value added we have for our students. We have award winning and impactful research as measured by the national research excellent framework, excellence framework, and our national students survey scores show that we have consistently excellent teaching and that's one of the nice things about being in this department. As Felix already mentioned, we have a very active and diverse body of staff and students I think we have amongst our sort of 30 something staff at least kind of 12 or 13 nationalities amongst our student body. I did account a couple of years ago about our undergraduate student body and I counted 60 nationalities so it's really a very exciting place to work and be. And I think uniquely we have a breadth and a depth of regional and subject specializations. We don't just have one person working on Africa we've got several people with different layers of expertise that really gives you that depth, which you wouldn't necessarily get elsewhere. So here's a quick look at our faces and this is us politics faculty, and you'll see that we're a very mixed group in terms of age and gender and ethnicity and background. And it makes it a really exciting and fun place to work and hopefully you'll get to study with lots of these exciting people in the future years. So let's move on to talking about our undergraduate degrees now and our undergraduate degrees are basically organized around four core elements. So these are first disciplines and concepts so even though we do things differently we still make sure that you get all of the bread and butter basic material that you need to study politics and international relations. And that to have been developed in these fields over time so you will get a good grounding in where the discipline is what are the key concepts what are the terms that you're going to encounter over and over again. Second, we are very strong on particularly the regions of Asia Africa and the Middle East, but we see them in a global context and a global perspective. We see them in their historic relations, not just with the former imperial powers but also with each other. And we also think about the wider world including the West, as it relates to different parts. So we have a strong regional emphasis again that is a very unique feature. The area in which we organize our degrees is around is around global issues so particularly in your third year you would get to study specific issues in depth. Those that you've already mentioned such as climate change such as security, also migration also technology, and so on. So we want to make sure that you have very different ways of cutting up the cake with disciplines and concepts with regions and with issues, so that you can really think about those and around them. And the final element which I think is in all of our modules is this idea that we need to study from multiple perspectives or standpoints. So that is to say we don't just say look this is knowledge and then you learn it, we say, Okay, this is knowledge from this perspective, but you also have this other way of thinking about this thing from this other perspective, and we need to look at how those things can see that interaction also as a political process. And that's one of the things that I think we emphasize and I think that's one of the things that makes our study of politics richer. In terms of overall in the UK obviously you'll be thinking about other universities, I would say what makes our programs very distinctive is that regional contact content and that multi, multi-perspectival content. And that focuses on thinking from below and I think that's one of the key things that has, you know, in a way constrained the study of politics historically it's always been from above it's always been from this kind of elite point of view, whereas many of the scholars not just in our department but across so I'm very committed to thinking about things from below. So you heard Tolga talking about his work like he's surveying refugees about what they think not just what other people think about refugees they understand their own situations. My work as well is about international aid has been and not just what the donors think about international aid but what the people who are receiving the aid think about international aid. Okay, so that takes you on to our specific degrees I'm going to run we're going to run through the programs a little bit now, and then we'll talk a little bit about how you might choose between them. So we've got a new program which I wanted to front load which is the BSE in politics philosophy and economics. And this is a collaboration between the departments of politics, religions and philosophy and economics at SOAS. And it is a very interdisciplinary degree and it gives you a grounding in these very different ways of thinking about the world, but which in some way speak to each other and common problems. So something like inequality, you have to understand it from a political angle in terms of rights and obligations and power, you need to understand it from an economic angle in terms of how income inequalities work and how economists think about them. You also need to think about it from a philosophical level. What are the philosophies that analyze or justify or reject inequality and how do they organize themselves. So you'd have the opportunity to think about let's say how Indian philosophies have justified caste inequalities, how that interacts with income inequality in India, and also the political inequalities between India and its neighbors or between India and the wider world.  As I've mentioned, we emphasize the global nature of these problems and the need to understand both the Western and the non-Western approaches. What is key I think about this degree about all our degrees really is that we really make sure that you apply the knowledge so you do learn theory you do learn concepts, but you learn why they matter, right and how they act in the world. You learn why the use of different languages or different frameworks affects how we understand things. And overall this degree in particular has something which is very attractive to employers which is the ability to work in different modes, different analyses, different kind of ways of thinking, and that connects different analytical positions. So it's like training for the triathlon instead of just the marathon right you are learning lots of different skills you're becoming agile in lots of different ways, and that gives you a particular kind of package. Okay, I'm going to hand over to Tolga now to talk about our BA politics and joint degrees of which he's convener. Thank you, Mira. Why don't you run the whole slide perhaps so that all the three bullet points. So, yeah, our politics degree has certain unique features. And I'm not going to talk about particular modules that you take if you do a politics degree so sorry if you do a politics degree together with another degree, but I will rather tell you about what I believe are the unique features of our politics degree. So first, right as a broad sort of message to you, our politics degree does not only focus on sort of formalized systems of politics, as Mira put it right we do not just study governments we do not study just constitutions or electoral systems, but we do also study ideologies, norms, social structures. Anything basically that happens within the borders of countries, anything that happens as part of what we call domestic politics is the subject matter of our degree so as such, we will have the opportunity to study a very popular topic nowadays or a violent conflict that happens within countries such as civil wars, right, protest movements, right, so all these topics are very much part of our politics degree. Now, how do we do this right how do we study and teach you these these topics, right. So first thing that we do is that we cover both sort of mainstream but also critical approaches to politics. So what does that mean that means that in every topic that we cover we do not only read sort of classic text or sort of typical mainstream scholars that have worked on these topics but we also study the scholars who have a problematized right we have adopted a critical approach to the sort of mainstream classic text and scholarly works scholars who have problematized right so the relationship between these mainstream scholars and power hierarchies that are very much part of the political world for instance. In addition to that, right, the second unique feature of our degree is that you will have the opportunity to acquire a really deep knowledge in one of the regions that saw has been specializing for for for a very long time. Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and when I say that I do not only mean that my colleagues have deep knowledge of these areas that they will share with you. But in addition to that, my colleagues in the department do research themselves in these regions right so when they talk about different parts of Asia, Africa or the Middle East in their modules it's not just you know, conveying to you knowledge that others produce but actually conveying to you also knowledge that they themselves produce. And just to give you some examples right so I mentioned to you I for instance, specialized in parts of the Middle East, especially the question of Syrian civil war and Syrian refugees. Another colleague of mine Phil Clark has deep expertise on Rwanda for instance and especially post conflict justice proceeds procedures in Rwanda. In addition to sort of this opportunity to to to really learn about one or one region or more than one region around the world, you can do this together with studying a particular language. Right, you can either take modules to study a language of your choice or you can actually combine the politics degree with a degree in a language like Arabic Chinese Japanese or Korean. And then finally, as we emphasize we certainly also emphasize in this degree, multiple perspectives on these key issues of domestic politics around the world. So, you might be interested in migration you might be interested in environmental justice you might be interested in politics of the ongoing quality time that you might be interested in either specific cases of conflict like Israel telephone conflict or conflict around the world in general right so as we study these topics. We adopt multiple perspectives and what I mean by that is that we do not approach these topics only from the point of view of policymakers right the power holders, but also from the point of view of what I would call policy disruptors those who are to be subject to certain policy decisions but who themselves may actually respond on front challenge those policies, which would certainly give you the ability to to to and the skills to approach each of these topics from multiple angles, which I believe will be very helpful to you, whatever career choice you make, after you finish your your degree. Thank you so from my own mirror back to you. Thank you. And I'll just run quickly through the international relations and joint degrees. So again, I mean, I think you've probably got the message by now that the how we study international relations is also from beyond the traditional perspective. International relations as a field to some extent is even more has historically been even more Western than a lot of other fields because it's been about how to manage power relations and how to manage global order. We cover those mainstream ideas and debates within the program, but then we go beyond it we even from our first year start to think about how to challenge that and how to get away from this smaller view of what the world is into this bigger one into this more global or worldly approach. So at the beginning we're very interested in thinking about how where you stand shapes your perspectives. How does international relations look from Beijing or Tehran or Johannesburg. How do we think about world order when understood from those locations elite or non elite right from the masses. One of the things that our international relations degree does those emphasize the interconnected nature of world order so we're not just kind of in little countries, all separate, but for various structural and historical reasons we are in meshed we are entangled, and we want to give you a sense of how that affects how world order works. Okay, so just to move quickly then on to choosing a program. Some of you might be thinking about which of these programs is most interesting to you. I would say, by and large, people are pretty happy with the choices that they make, even though all of the choices are in some sense attractive. As mentioned, the politics and joint politics degrees are mostly emphasizing politics within borders so what we would understand as domestic politics that gives you a bit more depth into sort of the nature of political systems or comparative analyses. And it also gives you scope to study political theory and a bit more depth with international relations we're looking more at politics across borders, thinking about forms of global inequality war violence. There are many kinds of issues that we can see as kind of grand, largely transnational phenomena but of course we see how they connect and a very popular combination is of course politics and international relations together where you get a fair degree of both. Now these two traditions politics and international relations, as I said can be combined with each other, or with any of these other combinations listed on the slide. And as I mentioned in those other areas we'd also encourage you to go to the open days for those departments as well.  So you might do disciplines in less depth but you'll have lots more perspectives from which to understand the world. Coming towards the last bit in a little bit I'm going to talk about what you can do after your degrees. But before that I just wanted to give you a sense of our students who have been through the programs what they ended up doing for their final dissertation so I've listed some titles here from this year's lot of dissertations. Some of these were my students, I supervised the dissertation about land dispossession in South Africa, and students gone on to be able to place your masters at St Andrews. The student who worked on AI powered surveillance has gone off to do a masters in data science in Carnegie Mellon University. I've got a student who wrote the view to the sea dissertation about the UK's response to the rise of China, who's now working in the Scottish Parliament thinking about health care and social care policy so you've got lots and lots of students here who are doing fascinating projects who are going on to do fascinating things who have really developed from you know where you are standing right now maybe at the end of your school time to becoming very advanced critical thinkers and able to do a range of a range of things. Tolga did you want to add anything about the final projects before we go into the discussion about life after uni. Just very briefly, I would say that this is really a fantastic opportunity for our students to work on a project of their own from beginning to the end. You start with a topic that you're interested in, you do some original research on the topic, and you work on it and then and then you finish it. So it will give you an opportunity to work on a topic in a slightly longer format than you would usually do in your assessment writing essay. And as such, based on my experience of teaching it from last year, our students have tremendously benefited from it. And some of which have even considered to use this project perhaps to try to publish it somewhere. So I think it's really a great opportunity for our students. Yeah, absolutely. And of course you'd be supervised by a member of staff who would give you support through that process. The last little section before the Q&A is going to be is going to be on what you can do afterwards, which many of you will be interested in. So, as with a lot of university degrees, we also emphasize the transferable skills that you can develop through our programs. As I mentioned, it's kind of like training for your brain to get you very smart, very analytical. And of course, the key skill, one of the key skills that you'll be developing from first year onwards is the ability to digest, organize and evaluate complex content, right? This is a key thing that employers need across a wide range of situations, whether you're analyzing stock markets doing financial things or you're working for the government. She's a diplomat, a British diplomat when we're talking about what her job is. She said she basically just has to digest and analyze and organize content and present it to political figures so that they can make decisions. So this is a really critical skill and it's one that you'd get through our programs. You'd have experience with qualitative and quantitative methods for handling data. We've got modules that would train you on that and you can take additional modules if that's of interest to you. With all of this, you would be encouraged to develop clear and professional presentation of your content, both in writing and orally. So there'll be of course the opportunity to get feedback on essays and other forms of written content, but also to deliver presentations orally, which is an absolutely key skill, both in person, I suppose, increasingly online. With our marking rubrics and with the way we assess you, we encourage you very much to think creatively and laterally and it's often that creative and lateral thinking that would get you the most marks, not just being able to repeat what the information has said, but to be able to put it together in an original way, or to be able to challenge it, or to be able to connect things which are not necessarily obvious. Of course with something, especially something like the final year project, you'd be learning a lot about managing yourself, managing the project and managing your time. University is not like school, things are not given to you in terms of every hour of your day being accounted for. You have to organize yourself, you have to put together your weekly schedule, you have to put together in a way how you deliver your project. We will support you with that, but part of what we're encouraging you to do is to become an independent kind of adult in that respect. Working in groups and with a lot of the extracurricular work that you will do will encourage teamwork and leadership. Students societies are great for this. We have a politics society in the department that students have really used to develop themselves and to develop themselves as a group. And finally, I think this is so important, particularly in the contemporary world. We will encourage you and you will develop cultural and what we call political competence, how to talk to people with sensitivity, respect and intelligence, who are from very different backgrounds, who have very different beliefs to you, what kinds of things they will find useful, how to respectfully disagree, how to think about how to frame what you're saying to make it intelligible to others. This is a key thing, particularly if you want to work in an international context, particularly if you're meeting different kinds of people all the time, how do you carry yourself, how do you talk to people, how do you respectfully engage with and respond to them. To give you a flavor of some of the recent roles that our graduates have gone into, I've just listed a few here. You can see that there's a wide range of jobs that people go on to. Of course, many people also go on to further study and master's programs. As I said, some have gone on to this year on to the States and to St Andrews had students go to Cambridge and Oxford and LSE and so on. And people either deepening their knowledge of politics or developing in a more applied field. But these are some of the jobs that students have gone into and hopefully you'll get to see more of our alumni over time. We also have a careers service, which gives really great personalized support, so it'll help you find vacancies, it'll help you find internships, and it'll help set up meetings with employers and alumni so you can hear more about what they're looking for. Then there's also the individual support in terms of careers advice, aptitude testing, CV building and interview and assessment center practice. So by the time you're ready to hit the job market, you're really well supported with a wide range of skills and all of this tailored support in terms of your employability. Okay, so that is the end of our presentation in terms of what we had to say to you. And we've got time now for question and answer, and you can either pop these in the chat or you can put your hand up and or unmute yourselves. I'm going to take the questions that have already been put into the chat to give people a chance to get their thoughts together. And so we've got a question asking other politics and international relations degrees itself, more research oriented. I mean I would say they are research oriented and lots of particular final year modules give you the opportunity to define the research question yourself right this is a key skill in terms of research oriented learning. So you can define your own question choose your own question, and then choose how you are going to go about answering it and that is the key to research. For those that prefer to have different kinds of assessment there are also modules with very different kinds of assessment so one third year module might be assessed with a long essay that you put together the rubric for yourself. So another third year module that I've been teaching on recently has assessment through detailed engagement with the reading so you don't have to write a lot. But it's based on your weekly reading and like writing questions which respond to that so they're very short answers, but the skill that we're testing there is your analytics skills have you understood what's being taught, what you, what the question is, and can you respond to it in a critical kind of way. So there's lots of different ways in which we would cultivate your skills in the degree. And as me asks, she's from Spain but for the last two years she's been studying in England her a levels does she still have to answer an English language test that I do not know I don't think so but that is something you would have to check with our undergraduate admissions team. So I'm going to ask our colleague, I'm only to put the email address in the chat, but you will be able to get an answer from them. What do we look for for a personal statement in IR this is a good question, and you don't take politics at a level with respect to your application from Masami. Personal statements are really interesting. I think people have tried to pack them with as much kind of extracurricular stuff as possible. I think from my point of view as an admissions tutor who reads personal statements, I just want to see that you're interested in the subject and that you've thought about it. So, tell me about a book that you've read or tell me about an issue that you're interested in or tell me about an experience that you've been involved with. And show me that you are interested in thinking about that in a more serious way. So for IR, I mean tell me about an issue that you're interested in a book that you've read or thought about it or maybe even a film or a documentary. Talk to me about why you want to do this subject what we really want to see in the personal statement is passion and also some way of showing us your analytic or intellectual engagement with the area. So this curricular stuff is fine, it's great. We encourage people to do it because it makes you more rounded it gives you more skills, and that will always benefit you. You don't take politics at a level does this affect your application. No, not really. We do like people to have got related subjects so history is great English is great geography is great sociology or psychology, other kinds of social sciences subjects are all fine. If you are taking predominantly science a levels we get a few applicants like this every year. Really make sure your personal statement explains why you're kind of switching course and explains and shows us a bit your engagement with ways of thinking analytically about these issues. So I'm just doing mainly languages for a levels and that's also that's also fine I mean with languages you're doing a lot of textual work as well, but again emphasizing the personal statement how and why you're interested in in this area. What kinds of extracurricular activities are offered in the degrees. I would say the majority of extracurricular activities that students in terms of student societies are offered via the students union so there's hundreds of student societies on every interest you could possibly think about from sports groups to political groups to cultural groups music dance hobbies all kinds of things within the politics department itself. I would say that we have the politics society which is a student group of which has been closely allied to the department, and that puts on politics related talks maybe career talks maybe networking events. The department of course also puts on social activities, but some regular seminars and events that everybody's welcome to attend. We focus more on the academic side of things and somewhat the social side of things at the level of the department, and then beyond that students union and other kinds of societies around so as would do that. So I'd encourage you to go to the students union page, which is I think so as union.org to have a look at that. If you're retaking a levels that will not affect your application we know that a lot of people, particularly over the last couple of years for circumstances or almost completely outside everyone's control have not ended up with the a level grades that they either wanted or deserved and so we understand that a lot of people will be doing retakes we will not look. I would applaud the students for wanting to to improve their grades in that way. What are the entry requirements to study at so as so they differ from program to program for our programs the standard offer would be a AB. We do, and we are able to take different contextual circumstances into account. So if you think you might qualify, because maybe you're first in the family to go to university, you've been on free school meals, you know, not many people from your neighborhood go to uni, then do inquire because we do try to adjust our office to take unequal circumstances in the world into account. So I think that applications from an IB student has done a couple of high levels in different settings. Yeah, so I mean, the point of the admissions process is to check that you're interested in the subject and that you can do it. If you showed that ability across different settings rather than all at the same time, that's, that's fine we're just interested to know that you can actually do the work, because it's unfair for us to take you in, if you are going to be right for you. And, you know, you should also think about, if you are trying to get into a uni where the entry or grades are far above what you're actually achieving, is that going to be a good experience for you overall. So I would say, you know, think about that match but of course if we think you can do it if there's evidence in your academic record that you can achieve at the level that we need you to, then we will take that very seriously. Do I have any recommended readings to read for starting the IR course? Well, there's a lot. I would, I'm going to type a couple of things into the chat. There's a website called eir.info, which is pretty interesting because it's a student run collective that does lots and lots of coverage of international relations as a subject. They have interviews, talks, podcasts, essays, all kinds of things on there. And you can really look around at what you're interested in. I think that's pretty good.  Otherwise, I would say reading the essays on eir.info will give you a really good feel for the subject. Great. Tolga, did you want to add anything? And of course, feel free to ask questions. We'll be ending in a couple of minutes. Maybe just one sort of general and perhaps maybe easy advice in terms of what we look for in person statements and Mira knows better than me. But, you know, Mira, how many applications do you read? I have read lots and lots and lots. Yeah. And people go through applications quickly. So, you know, so as you write your statements, think about this. Think about the fact that Mira is going to read a lot of them.  So I think that type of sort of approach would help you in writing your statements in the right way. That's my advice. There's a question in the chat. Do any alumni go into media? So, yes, definitely. We've had quite a few journalists come out of the program. I'm trying to think. So one of the ones that I knew recently went into work for the BBC Africa team and he kind of greatly benefited from his OS training in terms of the Africa Specialism. What are the seminar sizes? So, most of our undergraduate modules are taught with a large lecture for the whole group and then a seminar of up to 15 students. That is the general format. So you'll have both large group kind of sessions and small group ones. And then of course you've got one to one office hours and so on with your tutors. Some of our seminars are taught as a two hour block, we'd say 20, 25 students in them. And those are more the advanced sessions. So you've got more interactive time, more engagement with the lecture, different kinds of group work. So partly the seminar size depends on the format but for the majority of the time it's up to 15. Yeah. Any other final questions before we have to draw things to a close? Yeah. Let's stop sharing the screen now. And if you've got any final questions, I suppose, please do drop us a line either to study at so as dot ac dot UK, or if you want to, if you want to do the politics department. So if you can go to UG politics at so as to, sorry, UG politics admissions at so as to AC dot UK. I'm just putting that in the chat. And that will come to me and I will be able to answer your questions. Okay, I'm going to close it there and hand it over back to Armani. Thanks so much for joining and thank you to Mira Tolga and Felix for all the information they've given today. Again, like she said, if you have any sort of general admissions questions, feel free to contact study at so as to AC dot UK. And then mirrors also put the politics departments email in there. So yeah, thank you for joining today. Thank you. Hope to see some of you next year. Thank you. Bye.


I'm a G in my ends, CB in the ends I'm a G in my, I'm a G in my ends Oi, my cat CC in the ends, yeah, Bangalore 2 CDs in the ends Okay, never been no G on the ends, don't lie, that's not a key, it's a bend Take the key to your bends, gone, not even seen in my ends Bye bye, I am not even known in my ends, that weren't me, there was a clone in my ends Oi, phone a friend, you alone in my ends, there's a buzz in the air, that's a drone in my ends Shut up, cause you're moaning again, next opponent I get, gets left in a hole in my ends I got a call from the godsets, stand back, these new rats crawling along You're scared, that's the difference, you're not bad in your area, isn't G in my ends, I might have a G for your friend, if you don't know me it depends Okay, we're back here with Bible number 7, one of the main events of the day It is the beat battle of the day, the only one we got on the card, I fucking love these We've got three rounds, non-judge, you know the score Make sure you leave a comment on the YouTube and a comment on the Viewpoint forum as well We've got two MCs that've been making some ill music the past few years We're gonna put them in the class, see what happens here for Manchester in venue MC on my right, hand side from Leeds, Don't Flop Veteran, my man Matta, make some noise Let's go! MC on my left hand side, another Don't Flop Vet, my man Press 1, make some noise As I said, we've got DJ Briggs on the decks up here, we're doing an old school No microphones, Matta's gonna go first We've got two 16s each per beat, is that what I'm guessing?


So, I have a very simple question that probably requires a complex answer. What's your personal prediction, expectation about this winter, the next few months when it comes to coronavirus, when it comes to both, you're your best guess of how hard it's going to hit us and what the political ramifications are going to be in the short term. Well, I mean, in terms of cases, it's already hitting hard. So, we're already seeing that. I don't see any reason why it gets better. Winter months are good for viruses. That's why we get the flu in the winter. It just makes sense that this is going to keep going through the winter. I think that once you start vaccinating, things will get significantly better. And I will also note that death rates are not spiking.  So, death rates are quite significantly lower than what they were in March and April. And it does seem like doctors know how to treat this better, medication is better, just a whole way of handling it once you get into hospital. So, the hospitals are full right now, but I'm not seeing the spike in deaths that you would expect if you extrapolate from the spring, but it would be a mistake to extrapolate from the spring because we know a lot more about the virus now.  You know, there's a, I hear this, they're talking about stay-at-home orders in LA. I mean, no, I don't, you know, like Pasadena, which is part of LA County is like, no, we're not going to, we're not going to pay any attention to that. And Pasadena City Council said, no, we're still doing dining and everything. So, there's definitely a backlash, but some places are going to shut down, some places are going to close down, other places will be open. And, you know, the general trend is not good. The general trend is because the lessons learned are not good. The lessons are, you know, mistakenly, people are learning from it. Oh, we need more state intervention. We need more state control. You know, capitalism can deal with these things. Freedom can deal with these things. Individuals are irresponsible. They can't deal with these things. So, we need more, you know, authoritarian control of our lives, not less. So, that's my fears that that is growing. I do think once we get the vaccines out and people start getting vaccinated, there'll be a significant decline because, you know, if you vaccinate susceptible people, then fewer people go to the hospitals, fewer people end up in ICUs. And that will relieve the pressure on the hospitals. And then you start vaccinating other people and then you get just the numbers, right? So, if you vaccinate even 10% of the population, well, that's 10% that are not going to get it. So, just the numbers start shrinking as you vaccinate more people. So, I think the turnaround could be fairly quick if they can vaccinate quickly. And you have to admire kind of the logistic challenge of doing all these vaccinations. And, you know, people like Pfizer rising to the challenge. So, what you're seeing is Pfizer's basically leasing all of United's airplanes for cargo shipments of dry ice. You know, their thing has to be kept at minus 80 degrees Celsius. So, it's very difficult to transport. UPS has invested heavily in dry ice. And so, there's going to be this big logistical push to get these out. To pharmacies, they're going to have to vaccinate quickly because it can only be away from freezing cold like that for a few days or like three days, I think. Still has to be frozen, but not at those levels. So, they're going to have to vaccinate quickly. It'll be interesting to see where the vaccination happens, who does them. But hopefully they can use the infrastructure built for flu vaccines to get this done. Doctors offices, CVSs, Walgreens and places like that. So, once the vaccine's out, I'm fairly optimistic. That is a big cat. Is that not a big cat? Or is that just the distortion of the camera? For a second, they looked like a mountain lion was walking into Jennifer's room. All right, that's my take. You know, I don't know, I'm constantly overly optimistic about these things. I never thought we'd get this third wave because I thought suddenly they'd get the act together by now. There was an interesting article today in the Boston Globe actually about universities in Massachusetts. So, university in Massachusetts are open. And guess what universities in Massachusetts are doing? They've hooked up with some local labs. And what they're doing is, you know, brace yourselves. They're testing, tracing, isolating. Basically, students are getting tested every week. They get results within 24 hours. They isolate the people who are infected. They trace who they've been with and try to isolate or test them. But they're testing huge quantities. So while Massachusetts cases are spiking, the cases within the universities are pretty low. Everything's fine. And whereas the other universities are seeing cases spiked because people are partying and there's no testing and everything. Again, Massachusetts in the Boston area, things are very stable. So I would have thought months ago that state governments would have figured out and built up the infrastructure to test, trace, isolate.  What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impedance and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. All right. Before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show.  But at least the people who are liking it, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there. Help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share. And you can support the show at your own book show. Dot com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals. And show your support for all for the work, for the value. Hopefully you're receiving from this. And of course, don't forget if you're not a subscriber, even if you even if you just come here to troll, or even if you're here like Matthew to defend Marx, then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up. You'll know what shows are on, when they're on. You'll get notified. So, yes, like, share, subscribe, support, like, share, subscribe, support. There you go. Easy. Do one or all of those, please.


The Ministry of Youth Development and Sports is collaborating with a major player in the sport of basketball to heighten and sharpen skills here on Ireland. We have Ryan O'Brien with the report. An initiative to develop the sport of basketball in St. Lucia came up for discussion here recently as the Vice President of Organization, Culture and Inclusion of the Toronto Raptors. John Wiggins, met with a number of officials to look into the requirements that will be needed to allow this to happen. Wiggins, whose parents were born and raised in Grosele, said the discussion was a follow-up on an initiative started five years ago to see how young enthusiasts can get more interested in the sport and to bring more basketball exposure, teaching and development to the island. The crucial to achieving this is the aspect of infrastructure and that includes the possibility of covering the VG Malibu Sports Complex and to bring it up to NBA standards. The meeting was to find out where we are with laying the groundwork and how we figure out a way forward, how people are going to come together, both the Ministry, the Federation, myself, how we can set a foundation for the NBA to come in here and bring programming and enhance the infrastructure of basketball. It's a great sport. The kids love it here and St. Lucia, the West Indies and the Caribbean are being targeted as the next hub for basketball to grow throughout the world, especially by the NBA. So this was a follow-up to see where we're at and how do we move forward. Kofi Dovo is the Director of Tropical Studio Designs Architects. He was present for the discussions, which took place at a conference room at the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports. It's very possible to cover the VG multipurpose court. The option that has been explored right now is to use a steel frame, almost like a factory shed to make it simpler. The alternative of using the steel frame, for the trust covering, is to be able to gain large spans, so it's suitable for sports arena. Where we are now is that based on what the Vice President, Mr. John Wiggins, discussed in the meeting, is that that may not necessarily meet the standards of NBA. So now what we want to do is revisit and look at how we can create a more desirable setting that will be okay with NBA. And it's a process that probably cannot be done in one go, so it has to be a phase approach. So what we're going to do is go back to the drain board and look at how we can face that and make it in a parcel. Dovor said all things being equal, the covering of the courts can be completed within 8-12 months from commencement of works. From the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports, I'm Ryan O'Brien.


Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for being here. It's always a pleasure to be back in Washington, D.C., working alongside our American partners on ways to better support the middle class. And it's great to be joined by our Canadian delegation, including Minister Freeland and Parliamentary Secretary Leslie, who are, as usual, hard at work. I've had a very productive time here, beginning with Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit. There, I had an excellent conversation with Patti Sellers about the economic empowerment of women. Before and during that event, I met with some incredibly influential women business leaders to discuss some of our most pressing challenges and had an opportunity to talk with amazing, inspiring young high school students who are focused on how they can be leaders of tomorrow and leaders today. We know that the success of any society depends on the full socio-economic participation of women, because women succeed, we all succeed. And whether it's flexible hours, parental leave, affordable childcare, diversity training, equal pay, or any other number of initiatives, it's incumbent on all of us across the public and private spheres to be proud agents for change. Following that theme this morning, I had a productive roundtable with Women One, where we discussed the current barriers to global gender equality and marked the International Day of the Girl. I also met with the Committee on Ways and Means, and we had a great conversation about the importance of the Canada-U.S. partnership. And I just wrapped up a very good meeting with President Trump where we talked about trade, security, and economic growth. As we know, the fourth round of NAFTA negotiations is underway here in Washington, and the President and I reiterated our commitment to working together in good faith to give this deal a much needed upgrade. NAFTA has benefited millions of people and can benefit millions more. We're pleased to have the opportunity to modernize this trade agreement for the current economy, a modernization that acknowledges the importance of gender, the environment, and indigenous and labor rights. We know that there are millions of jobs on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border that rely on trade and investment. In fact, Canada is among the top export markets for the majority of U.S. states. And so it's imperative that we get a fair deal for Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans alike. That's what our teams at all orders of government are working hard towards. In general, our journey to Washington is very productive. During each of my meetings, the question I had in mind was always the same. That is to say, how can we work together, Americans and Canadians, to better serve the middle class and those who work hard to do so? Because at the end of the day, we want to do what is best for our citizens. And we know that we will get better results working together. That's what defines us as Canadians and Americans. That's what makes us close friends and allies resilient. Indeed, I've said it before and I'll say it again. There is no relationship in the entire world quite like that between Canada and the United States. We can and we will continue to achieve great things together.


Hi, my name is Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute and today we're talking about harvesting wheat and other grains by hand. This is part two of maybe a three or maybe a four-part series on homescale grain and flour production. It's probably a week before harvest because I'm out here to assess whether or not it's ready for harvesting. And so industrial wheat, wheat that you probably get from the grocery store that you see out in the fields that are harvested by machines, they're harvested when it's called dead ripe. That means 14% moisture in the kernel and they can put it right into a silo. If I do that, I have two problems. Number one, when I go to cut this, all the grain will fall off the head onto the ground and it's hard for me to save. Number two, brand production. I want to grind this out for bread and I want to waste as little of it as possible and so I want the brand production to be minimal. If it gets dead ripe, that means there's a lot more brand. If you think about a kernel like an M&M, an M&M has a candy coating with chocolate in the middle. Right now, these are in what's called milk stage, which I'll talk about in a minute. They have very, very, very little candy coating and almost all chocolate. Over time, the candy coating gets thicker and as a proportion of the head, the chocolate gets less. So the brand is the outer covering of the wheat berry and if the riper this gets on the stem in the ground, the more brand there is and the more brand I have to sift out of my flour, the more energy I use, the more I waste. And so what I want to do is I want to harvest this at what's called soft dough stage or if you're an agronomist and use the FEEX scale, F-W-E-K-E-S, which is a more technical scale. I'm going at 11.3 instead of 11.4. And so kernels and I'll pull these out and come over and show you in my hand. They go from four stages. There's milk stage, mealy stage, soft dough stage, hard dough stage, and then I guess there's dead ripe, so maybe five. And I want to harvest during soft dough, maybe tending towards hard dough, but I aim for soft dough, but then I'm usually late because of other things. I'm also looking at the stem and I want to see when is it yellow, straw yellow, for two to four inches below the head. That's when I want to harvest. So let me grab a couple grains and I'll pop over here and you can look at them a little more closely. Okay, so here I have some wheat berries and I'm just getting the husk or the chaff off of it so we can look at the actual berry inside, come on you. At this stage they're very clingy, so you can see it's got that little bifurcation. That's your wheat berry. It's very green. Now, soft dough, if I were to push with my nail, it would leave a nail mark. It's not doing that. Instead, when I squeeze it with my finger, watch what happens. You can see this right? Milk tending towards mealy, those little chunks in there, that's starting to be a little more mealy stage. When it's milk, it just gushes out like, well, milk. So I'll try a couple of these, that's mealy and soft dough will not squish out moisture like that. Yeah, so that's more like a little more milk tending to mealy. So I know I probably have about a week depending on conditions until I harvest. And this is my barley and my oats. You can see the barley behind me a little better because here the deer browsed it, but here I'm also checking for what stage is it in. When I crush one of the heads here on my oats, they are definitely in milk stage. They are very, very wet, much more so than the oats, excuse me, much more so than the wheat and the rye, meaning these might be a week behind for harvest. Again, I'm going to look for that yellow two to four inches at the top and a good soft dough stage at least. Same thing with the barley, which is also at soft dough, excuse me, at milk stage. So this is also going to wait. This was browsed by deer, so it's so short here, it's a little better farther on. These are much shorter because they've only been growing since the spring. They spend less energy growing a significant amount of green underneath and put more energy into their heads earlier and quicker because they're a spring planted crop. And here we see a chart from the University of Nebraska, and this shows that it needs a little bit of water in the fall to establish the winter wheat, and then the primary water needs are during heading out. That's when a lot of the yield is produced, so we're getting up to two inches of water per week, and if you're not getting enough rain, excess irrigation through pipes like I'm about to show you would be really helpful. Now we can have a quick look at what makes up this taller field sprinkler. So we've got the regular normal head up here, screwed into that half inch coupler, so there's a half inch thread here, and then glued here for half inch, and this is of course that gray PVC pipe that's actually used for conduit because this is UV resistant whereas the white stuff isn't as much, and this goes down to a coupler. Down here it's an L that has the slip fitting into the pipe, and then a threaded half inch out that's hose clamped onto a hose that goes off from the distribution system, so the water comes up, flows right up the pipe, and out to the sprinkler, and obviously it's attached here to a U post, not a T post, I guess you could do a T post, and I just use zip ties, maybe I could do something more formal, but that way I can set up the post nice and sturdy, and then attach this to it. Well it's a few days later now and I am going to begin to harvest this, since I'm kind of wall-to-wall here I'm gonna start with a sickle, I'll show you how I do that, and then I'm gonna move on to a side when I have a little more room, but first, the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna walk through, I'm gonna pick out the tallest, the tallest strands here, and I'm gonna individually harvest them and set them aside for seed next year. I am trying to grow taller wheat because I use it for thatch, but if you are just growing for wheat for flower, don't worry about collecting the tallest, maybe then you'd want to find the seed hedge with the most wheat on them, maybe selectively picking out some of the best to give you some good seed stock for next year, and I wouldn't do everything like that, I maybe pick like half of my seed stock for next year individually by hand, and then take a variety for the other half just so you get a bit of genetic variety in there, you don't want to put all your eggs in one genetic basket, so I'm gonna walk through now and pick out some of the tallest wheat and save that aside. One of the easiest ways to harvest, especially when you're starting out, is with a sickle. Here, assuming we have a nice stand of wheat, the way that I do it is I get an armful of wheat, I don't know about a yard, maybe two feet, and then I just go through and cut it at ground level, you don't have to cut it at ground level, I'm cutting at ground level because I want this for thatch, and then I lay it carefully so the heads are in one spot, the butts are in another, and then I take another two feet, bend down, and there we go. Now notice when I bend, I don't bend my back because that will hurt by the end of the day, I bend at my hips pretending like I have a tail or something like that, and I should feel a stretch in my hamstrings, believe me you got to do it this way, or it will hurt by the end of the day. If you see paintings or depictions of people doing this in the past, you'll notice they're bending the same way. It's called a hip hinge and it's essential. See those weeds in the bottom here? I can just pull them out because they're shorter. So now I'll do a little more, I'll get a bigger sheath, and then I'll show you how to bind it. Okay so now I have a bundle, and I'm going to make a sheath binding it with itself with its own straw, and so what I do is I take a handful of straw, which I'm going to knock it on its head to get the heads kind of near the bottom, then what I do is I hold the head side in one hand, and I give it one, two, three twists, and then I bend it and split it. It's hard to demonstrate this, it's easier to do it when I'm not demonstrating. You get the hang of it eventually, and I bend it and split it so it kind of makes a bit of a knot, right? So I've got the twist bent over with the heads down, and then these going out to either side. Then I lay it on the ground with the with the heads on top, right? Then I take what's going to be my sheath, my bundle, and I butt it so the bottom is somewhat flat, and I lay it down right on top of the knot, then I bring the two ends, and tighten it up by twisting, and I twist it more, and then tuck that twist underneath the band, so that it holds itself, and you got to do it as tight as you can, because this is going to dehydrate all week when it's standing up, and it'll lose some some of its mass, or some of its its thickness, and so it'll shrink a little bit, and there is one one sheaf, and you see here the twisted heads, and the twisted bottom. So here's a good example of weeds and wheat together, and why the sickle in some cases is better than a side. I can grab, you can see 90% of the wheat is above here, and all the weeds are below here, and so now when I cut here, I can pull out weeds real easy, and get them out of my straw, and I don't have to bother threshing them, they don't get in the way, and I'm left with just wheat above. Okay, so now I'm going to mow with a scythe, and in every video where I've done wheat harvest online, I get people in the comments saying, that's not how you use a scythe, you need to sharpen your scythe, all kinds of comments. Fine, that's okay. Please leave comments, or leave links videos showing, you know, how you want to use a scythe, that's great, but I will note that cutting wheat is very different than mowing hay, or mowing your lawn, or cutting weeds.  There's one guy, Botan Anderson, from One Scythe Revolution, you should check out their YouTube page. He does windrow gardening, where he does his bed six feet apart, and then he just mows fresh vegetation on top of them to build up the soil, and to mulch them, great idea. I am not mowing, I am gathering. I want to gather this in an orderly fashion, unlike mowing, unlike anything else, so what I'm not only doing, yeah, I'm cutting at the bottom, but I'm also scooping. I'm scooping this entire thing, and then dumping it out, and that is different than mowing a scythe normally. Everyone says, oh, big, smooth arc, dah, dah, dah, dah. You got to keep your heel, the heel of the blade. This is the heel of the blade. You got to keep the heel of the blade on the ground. This is not true for wheat. This is not true for rye. There, traditionally, if you wanted to reduce the amount of straw you were collecting, instead of mowing down here low, people would mow up high, and they would mow all the way up here to only reap the top half of the straw, because all they wanted was this. They didn't care about the straw, the straw was extra, or they could come by and mow the rest of the straw later, very quickly. So, this is not scything like you're used to seeing it, or maybe you're used to doing. This is harvesting. Now, what am I trying to do? I'm trying to knock this entire swath into one clean pile on the ground. And if you notice, the rows go this way. I'm facing, I'm going perpendicular to the rows. If I go with the rows, so if I stand here and mow this way across the rows, it will jumble much easier. Whereas if I mow here, I can slot my scythe in between the rows and run the blade down here, catching all of this in the cradle. This is the cradle of the scythe, right? So, there's the blade, and then I put this cradle on it. This is basically a finger or an arm to catch all the grain. So, what I'm going to do is instead of making a circular motion, I'm going to make a straight motion and catch and dump the grain. So, the first one might be a little funky as I get my groove going, but after that, it should pick up smoothly. So, I catch and dump, catch and dump. It's a little different motion than mowing. I actually slot my, slot it in and then, and you have to have a little bit of momentum or you miss the end of your row. If you're slowing down here, ugh, you miss it and sometimes you have to clean it up with a sickle. So, slip in and see how I'm dumping it, all the butts together, all the heads together. This takes a knack. It's not easy. So, don't be disappointed if the first time you do this, you make a big mess of it. I certainly did. There you go. Even with experience, it's making a mess. And see all the weeds in here? This is going to be kind of a nightmare to put apart, but for the purpose of the video, I'll continue on. I usually would switch to a side at this point, or a sickle. Again, this is too weedy to really be siding, but for demonstration purposes, I will side it. Slip that in. Drop. Slip it in. Drop. Slip it in. Drop. And see, I miss the end of it. I'm missing the end because I'm having to mow all this extra vegetation in the form of this weed. And you can see how I mow it and drop it into a bundle and I try and make each bundle about the size of what I would bind. And it's best if you make a false throw, see how these heads turn down to stop and put them right. So now this bundle may not be the best example because of all the weeds in here. Doesn't make it as easy to just do this, but if I do a really good job, I toss all these bundles together with the butts more or less in the same location. I can actually just pick up a whole thing. I'm picking up weeds underneath here. And there's my sheath. I just have to bind it. So that saves a heck of a lot of time.  So this would have been a good sickle job. So bottom line, a side is a much faster tool, but it also takes a lot more skill. I've been doing this now. This is my third year harvesting wheat. My fifth or sixth year using a side. So I have worked on, you know, I have this, I have a very specific set of skills that is kind of pointless. No, that's not true. It takes a while. So don't be upset with yourself if it doesn't come out smoothly like this. It takes practice. Even if you're good with a side, if you've done a lot with a side, but you haven't mowed, excuse me, harvested wheat or rye, there's a bit of a learning curve. But if you have a good familiarity with the side, it will go easier for you. This is like stunt driving where, and if you're just learning to drive a car, you don't want to do stunt driving or dangerous driving. This, so this is not how you would learn to side, learn to side on a lawn, learn to side with weeds, learn to side with hay and then convert that skill set to harvesting wheat. Do not start with this. It's very, very difficult. So I did a quick study and I can do, if it's weed free, if it's weed free, I can do a bundle, both cutting it and binding it in about four, four minutes. With a sickle, it takes me six. But if there's weeds, the sickle still takes me six.  So if there are weeds, best my recommendation is using a sickle. If it is clean, unlike this yuck, if it's clean, you're willing to learn how to use it. A side is much faster. There's a reason that people in Europe used it. And usually how they would have it set up is they would have one reaper followed by two binders, meaning I could, if I'm reaping, I could buy, I could reap twice as fast as people could bind. And the nicer you could drop it in a bundle, the more people like to bind for you. Because binding was a thankless, taskless jar, usually done by the women and the men would do the reaping, not always, but that was the usual gender division. This is not a how to video about siding. If you want to learn how to side, search up one side revolution, one side revolution on YouTube, I'll link to their page. They have all kinds of instructional videos. This is slightly different. So this is a half inch copper tube. I've soldered a 90 and then two teas. And then I curbed it here with heat and a bender. And I've attached it as a cradle. You could take these apart. It doesn't need the fingers. And I'm still prototyping it each year. I changed it a little bit. But for this so far, this year, this has worked really well. You have to get the teeth. You have to get the teeth and the fingers lined up. Otherwise, if they're this way, you cut, and then you're grabbing things over here that are not cut. And if they're this way, you cut things that fall off the side. So they have to be perfectly aligned for when you're cutting. That's another reason that mowing down the rows like I did makes it easier. I have more wiggle room because there's wheat here and wheat here. It's a lot easier to catch it all. Another option for a grain cradle is something called a turkey wing. This is based on an American design. And it basically is three sets of wood that are shaped like the blade itself in good alignment with it. So that again, I can smoothly go down the row. This is more of a historical design than the copper tubing one, which honestly isn't as strong as this. But this is a lot more work to build. I'm prototyping this one. This one's just made out of plywood. But I'm going to make one out of ash. And I will glue laminate it to make it very light and very strong. You can see instructions for that at a place called Anarchy Acres. If you Google Anarchy Acres grain cradle, you can find instructions how to build one that way. And I highly recommend that. So this works just like the other one. But because it's so heavy, the center point of the weight is here. And I'd like to put an upright handle here. But right now, I'm going to hold it with my hand here and then use a slightly wider grip than I usually do for mowing. Usually I'm here. But because of the excess weight, for more control, I'm holding it at the pivot point. This gives me a lot more control. And if I'm holding it down here and trying to muscle it around, it is heavier. So it will take more work. But it is overall better. And now this is too short to use for rye. If I mow rye with this, half of the weight is above this point. And it will tip off and make a mess. So I have an extension, which is just another set of these that comes up here for when I'm mowing my rye. So it has to be variable depending on what you're mowing. Let's talk about stooking. Stooking is when you take your sheaves and you lean them up against one another to make this stook. There are a couple reasons that we do this. Number one, if you leave your your sheaves laying on the ground, they get dirty. And also you get a lot of mice and other critters. This at least makes it slightly more difficult for the critters to get to it. It also lets them dry out when we harvest, right? We're a little bit before a full dead rye. And we don't want to thresh it until it's dead rye. This keeps everything up off the ground. It lets air flow through it. It lets the sun beat on it. It dries it out in a way. If you pack these too tight, or if you have too many weeds in there, you can get mold inside. So you don't want to make them too tight. But you also want to make them too loose and they fall apart.  So you can use netting, like a deer netting, and put it over there. That'll help keep the birds off. And today it actually looks like it's going to rain. So I've gone ahead and I've covered some of these with with with plastic. And as long as you keep it loose and so the air can flow up and underneath, it's not going to mold. Do you want to cover with plastic? You don't have to. There are some really great diagrams in Steven's Book of the Farm, which you can find online. I'll link to hopefully in the show notes here. Where there are ways to basically make a roof and you can patch up a large stook and then you put a couple of bundles on top and that sheds the water off a little better. Those are the ways to do it before plastic sheeting was available. Let me show you what I did with plastic sheeting. So here I've just used some old plastic sheeting from a different project, some scrap. And I used twine to keep it from blowing away off of this. And this is my wheat that I harvested the other day. And it will just there's plenty of room for air to flow up and through here. But it will keep most of the rain off, which will help it dry out. So one question is how long do you leave it in the stooks? You'll leave it here until it's dead ripe. That's it. But you can leave it longer. The longer you leave it though the more critters are going to eat it. So once it's dead ripe there are a couple options. One of them, which I'll show you in a minute, is taking the heads off and then you can thresh them at your leisure. But then really what you need to do is you need to move on to threshing kind of as soon as possible. In the olden days they would store these stacked up in haystacks, or sorry not haystacks I guess, stooked up on rodent resistant piles where they had mushroom shaped stones on which they would place boards and then they would stack all these and then throughout the winter they would take them and thresh them as they need to. But now since we have a lot quicker methods to thresh it's better just to thresh them as soon as you can and store the grain itself. Try not to store it like this. It just gets contaminated with pest problems. So this is a dry bundle. These have been drying for a week or two so they're dead ripe. And so what I can do now, so you can thresh directly from here. You can lay this down on a tarp and beat it with a flail. You'll see a couple different options for threshing here in a minute. But the way I harvest this because I want this for thatch, I measure where 30 inches is which is just above this band and in this case I used twine because yes you can do a bundle or you can do a binding out of the straw itself and that's perfectly fine and traditional. I used this because I'm going to use this for thatch and I found that when I bundled it with itself when I bound it with straw it tended to come loose and then I ended up with a huge mess up on my roof and I didn't want to deal with that. So I've been binding it with twine lately. So what I do, I have a trash bucket that I use just for this. This is a food trash bucket.   And yes internet, I know this looks dangerous for anatomical reason. Make the comment. It's pretty safe as you can see I'm cutting from here. I have pants on and this is a family show so yeah obviously I'm not going to be cutting anything that I wouldn't want to cut. Now for me because I'm using this for thatch I throw another binding on here just to keep it tidy. This is extra superfluous step that 99 percent of you don't need to do but for me this just makes a tidier bundle for me to get up on my roof for thatching later. Absolutely superfluous and not necessary. Now I have my thatching bundle and I'll set that aside and then I'll just repeat and I will fill this bucket with heads and this what this does is it reduces the amount of straw that goes through the thresher. The more straw you put through the thresher the smaller of a percentage the heads are and that's where your grain is coming out of right.  I could even just the way my thresher works one tip to make it a little better on you a little easier on you is to take your bundle put it up here and then do a couple of cuts. This will reduce the length of the straw the longer your straw the more likely it is to get tangled up in the thresher so I'm cutting here maybe eight inch bunches and this will make my life easier in the next stage as you'll see. It's really important if you're gonna put a lid on this that this stuff is dry and I mean dead ripe so it should be as hard and dry as it's going to get because if there's a lot of moisture in here and it's still drying out you will get mold so yeah here's a kernel oh it's like a rock okay so this is hard enough I can't make an impression with my fingernail that's dry enough it can be stored in here pretty much indefinitely if I have critter safe storage if I have enough of these tubs I could cut all of my grain and pop it right in here no problem and then I can thresh it when I need it I wouldn't recommend it I just thresh it all at once because it's a big messy job get it done with if you can but I understand that's not always possible so there we go all right after harvesting and drying I am now threshing threshing basically involves beating the seeds out of the heads and this is rye and I will say I really like threshing rye rye leaves the head intact and knocks all the seeds right out so you can see here a lot of seeds falling from the bottom this though is probably overkill for what you're doing when you're starting to do home scale wheat rye or other grains this thresher was based on a design on farmhack.org for a bicycle-powered thresher and winnowar threshing of course is removing the grain from the heads and this uses flails this is good if you're doing anywhere from five to 20 bushels a year after that maybe you'd want to upgrade or bring it somewhere else because that would be a lot of time I can do a bushel in an hour or so here a bushel is about eight gallons of of of wheat or rye and so how it works is I put sorry I wear a dust mask no matter what flailing method or threshing method you're doing but want to wear some sort of dust protection and ear protection potentially so I put in the heads that I've cut off put in these heads one more handful might be too much we'll see close it up turn on a motor over here and it's going to get loud up to in the bottom but if you notice the fan is blowing a lot of the chaff the chaff is the little little bits that fall out not the heads just a little waste material I guess not waste material but material that's not seed it gets blown away in the first course of winnowing winnowing you probably know the term winnowing chaff winnowing the chaff means to remove the unwanted portion in colloquial speech and here and here it means literally separating the chaff the little bits from the seed another option is using a mortar mixer with a tub method because I have a big mixer but if you don't this is one option some people attach little flails to the end of this and use a bigger bucket that'd be fine yet another option is to flail with a wooden flail or a stick I use this it's got more weight on this end than this end really just for this it might be better to leave the stocks together leave the heads on the stocks but I've already separated them so I'm doing it this way some people will even take just and hold the the heads like this and they will just just beat the head I can actually feel the weight decrease each time I do that beat the heads inside and look at that all the all the grain is basically the grains come right off another way so that's three ways for you four ways for you you can beat these with a stick you can put them in with a mortar mixer you can step just against the side of a tub this is probably the most effective and easy way that I found okay now comes winnowing winnowing is when we separate the grain from the chaff the chaff is heavier uh the grain is or excuse me the grain is denser and so when the wind hits it it blows the straw and the chaff away leaving just the clean grain behind you can totally use um the traditional thing to use is a is a shallow pan that you toss in the air and the wind blows the chaff away it's this beautiful process um with the volume that I'm doing I use uh a fan I could build I built a winnowing tower but it didn't work so well for me um so I just go this way route keep this multiple times until it's clean um until it's just clean grain um other people I've seen use leaf blowers like an electric electric leaf blower I wouldn't use my a gas-powered leaf blower because that would might leave a gassy exhaust flavor but if you have um if you have an electric leaf blower you can put them in a drum or a a trash can and blow and agitate and blow uh batches of this at a time and it will blow the chaff out and if you're careful it won't blow the seeds out that's another good option I don't have a leaf blower I I used to and I've done it that way and it's it works fine um so yeah it's just blowing down here and blowing up everything that's not green all right one more pass one thing you're going to want to do is check on the moisture content of your seeds and now you can buy a hundred dollar meter that you stick into your your seed uh into your into your um pail of wheat berries uh when you've harvested everything to see what the moisture content is but there's a more accurate way that is probably uh more cost-effective to you as a home grower and what that is is basically um measuring the weight of the seeds as you have them in storage or about to be stored um dehydrating the seeds and then measuring them again to see how much moisture was let off because you want to have your seeds down below 20 really in the area of 15 16 17 percent moisture um otherwise you're going to get mold um or other things growing uh in your seed containers and that's a real disappointment when you open up your your five gallon bucket of seeds that you painstakingly grew and they're full of mold uh so why don't we go through that process real quick it's real straightforward and simple so first i'm going to take some of my harvested seeds now the official iso way to do this is to measure out five grams but i don't have measuring equipment that does five grams so i'm going to do 50 grams now i'm going to grind this up into a fine powder then i'm going to put it in an oven safe container one of these white ramekins works perfectly now this is going in the toaster oven uh for two hours at 300 degrees okay it's now in two hours i'm going to grab my samples out of the toaster oven and uh we'll see how much they weigh smells nice toasted grain whoo don't want to spill too much okay what the originally weighed 50 grams now weigh 35 grams so what i do and i'll put this on the on the screen here i divide what it weighs now 35 grams by 50 grams um i subtract one so i get the uh so i can multiply that by 100 30 30 is the percent of moisture that my original sample had and this is my rye 30 percent moisture way too high and i will tell you when i held that grain i could tell it was moisture heavy it felt too heavy it felt a little um almost oily as it slid between my fingers that means the temp the moisture uh is too high so is that 30 percent i want to see that down closer to 20 percent so um so we got a wild weight on that so that's my rye now let's try my weight 40 grams so what what weighed 40 grams now weighs or what weighed 50 grams now is 40 grams so i take that 40 i divide it by 50 what it started with um minus one times 120 so i'm at 20 percent moisture with my wheat which is the absolute bare minimum of dryness that you would consider storing it and even then that's that's pushing it so what am i going to do i'm going to try a couple things um i have some screens outside um where the air can pass around and dry out the the seeds putting another screen you could also just unroll some window screen over it that would work too um although you know if your humidity is high that's not going to work so well i also have um seeds or i also have berries on a flat tray in my oven at with the pilot light on so it's just at you know 90 degrees almost no humidity and that works as a dehydrator um so just a couple of days in there and then and then i can retest um it's also possible to measure a finite volume and the weight at getting a proper cement moisture amount although that isn't necessarily as accurate or safe um as this method here so i'll probably do another assay in a few days once i feel like my grains have dried out sufficiently so that's how you test


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