Posted on September 21, 2025September 21, 2025 by Ian Cook

Handbook: tactic page

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

TACTICS

Include emotion
Humanise things
Make it familiar
Start with a paradox
Bering people together
Show the violence
Embody exploitation
Re-design the commodity
Put a message in a bottle
Blame, shame & guilt

RESPONSES

Creeperific
So Beautiful
LOL capitalism
I just cried
This activism is exploitative
I gotta find out more
I gotta do something
It’s too much for me

IMPACTS

Now I know

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

B’eau pal water
Cries for help found in Primark clothes
Exchange values: images of invisible lives
Fugitive denim
Ghosts
‘I found this in a box of Halloween decorations’
Jamelia: whose hair is it anyway?
Manufactured landscapes
Phone story
The eternal embrace
Those with justice

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGES

INCLUDE HAUNTING & HORROR

Include haunting & horror

IN BRIEF

There’s the haunting presence of other people in our lives in our things, the people who made them for us, ghosts, spectres, present-absent people… whispering to us, helping us, not quite seen. And trade justice activism can hook into audiences’ grim fascinations with death, decay, disgust. Think Halloween, zombie fiction, ‘first person shooter’ video games. But might they enjoy this too much?

What’s this page?

This is a tactic page that tries to explain this tactic, illustrate it with reference to comments taken from relevant followthethings.com example pages, and gives a sense of the intentions, responses and impacts that go with it. Only a few of the handbook links work at the moment. The headings are included to give a sense of what’s to come.

This is the most basic tactic that’s used in trade justice activism. You try to create a visceral connection between the lives of consumers in your audience and those of the people who make the things they buy. You try to do this in a way that’s familiar to that audience (see Make it familiar), in this case via haunting (and sometimes horror). The spirits of supply chain workers remain in the commodities you buy. They’re with you when you use them. You can almost sense that.

Suppose you could pick things off the shelf, put them to your ear and listen to the people who had helped to get them there talking to you. What would they say and ask?

Ian Cook et al (2006, p.655).

When Rachel Louise Snyder looks at a pair of jeans, she sees faces and ghosts. She pictures Ganira Aliyev in red socks and ankle-high galoshes picking cotton in Azerbaijan. She recalls Cambodian Ry Muong, whose right hand has no fingers apart from her thumb, sewing belt loops onto jeans six days a week… It’s hard to tell who’s more haunted — the factory worker or Snyder.

Comment on Rachel Louise Snyder’s book ‘Fugitive Denim‘.

As a concept, haunting is easy to imagine. And there can be an enjoyment in that spooky feeling. While some may be frightened away from the issues you want to address, including haunting and horror can encourage engagement with trade justice activism’s shocking and distressing content (see Show capitalist evils).

That dilemma is our simultaneous need to exploit the natural world and preserve it. The dilemma becomes all the more complicated, as Burtynsky’s pictures attest, because that exploitation can lend itself to magnificence as well as horror.

Comment on ‘Manufactured Landscapes‘.

Ultimately, it is the spectres of corruption, racism and unchecked capitalism which haunt this deeply felt film.

It seemed so important to shoot [this film] in Morecambe Bay, which is this mix of the immensely beautiful and frightening.

Comments on ‘Ghosts‘.

Our favourite academic work on this topic is by the political scientist Timothy Luke. He brings together the theoretical writing about commodity fetishism from Karl Marx (see Humanise things) and about cyborg ontology from Donna Haraway (see Find lost relations) around the concept of ‘hauntology’.

Things in the capitalist mode of production possess spirits of someone other than those who use them, and, in turn, these things transfer those properties, share those energies, disclose an older intelligence to new users, possessing them with their spell.

Timothy Luke (2000, p.49).

This tactic is most directly applied by trade justice activists when there are supply chain horrors to report, like workers’ deaths in factory fires and collapses (like the Rana Plaza collapse, see The eternal embrace) or in drownings (see Ghosts).

We need to develop forms of critique that inspire hauntings, feed feelings, come alive, leap out and grab us, … that are not just about vital materiality, but are themselves vitally material.

Ian Cook & Tara Woodyer (2012, p.240).

This tactic is also used in commodity-centred activism, where a commodity is re-presented by activists as haunted by the lives and struggles of the people who made it (see ‘Re-design the commodity‘: Cook & Woodyer 2012): often speaking to their consumers through writing on their labels (see Cries for help found in Primark clothes), letters in their pockets and packaging (see ‘I found this in a box of Halloween decorations ‘): both ‘Message in a bottle‘ actvism), and voices that shoppers can listen to (see ‘Exchange values: images of invisible lives’: Cook et al 2006).

Sometimes this actvism can be touching, some kind of physical connection being make betrween the bodies of consumers and supply chain workers (see ‘Phone Story’, ‘Jamelia: whose hair is it anyway?‘, ‘Those with justice‘).

The english schoolgirls though, who said they didn’t really care if the hair came from dead people – ewww! I’d rather I knew it came from someone alive :/

Creeperific.

Comments on ‘Jamelia: whose hair is it anyway?‘

And sometimes trade justice activism can be focused on the people who make seasonal commodities with haunted and horrific content (see ‘I found this in a box of Halloween decorations ‘, ‘Those with justice‘). ‘Creeperific‘ is a good word, a jaunty combo of creepy and terrific, for audiences who might be drawn into trade justice activism by the promise of discomfort.

To finish, however, there’s some sobering writing on TV documentaries and news that shows human suffering that more critically discusses audiences’ enjoyment of the beauty and emotions of horror and disaster (see Dant 2012). The composition of a photograph of two seemingly-embracing factory workers crushed to death in the Rana Plaza factory complex collapse vividly raises this problem:

Thank you … for sharing such an amazing photo. Its beautiful!!! emotionally filled photo, I cried reflecting on a mans love.

Is it horrible to say that I find this beautiful?

Comments on ‘The eternal embrace‘

Therefore, just as much as this tactic can draw people in to trade justice activism, what does it risk in terms of the kind of poverty- or disaster- porn that audience could expect to follow on from horror framings, which critics of this work continually bring up (see the responses ‘So beautiful’, ‘Creeperific’, ‘LOL capitalism’, ‘This activism is exploitative’)?

SECTION: Tactics

by Ian Cook (September 2025)

Posted on September 16, 2025September 29, 2025 by Ian Cook

Xmas Unwrapped

followthethings.com
Gifts & Seasonal

2014

UNBRANDED

SANTA HAT

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

LIE TO TELL THE TRUTH

“Xmas Unwrapped“
A short film edited by Toby Smith and Unknown Fields Division with Tim Maughan.
Posted in YouTube, embedded above in full.

This short ‘Jingle Bells’ Chinese Christmas factory film comes from a larger initiative to rethink architecture. According to Unknown Fields Division co-founder Liam Young, ‘an architect’s skills are completely wasted on making buildings’. They should be turning their attention to the outsides that are inside them: i.e. the hidden geographies of infrastructure, logistics, commodities and connected landscapes. For ‘follow the thingers’ familiar with Geographer Doreen Massey’s concept of a ‘global sense of place’ [see this example], this extroverted sense of place may seem familiar. But there’s so much to learn from Unknown Fields’ architectural experiments. First, from the thoroughly collaborative and interdisciplinary studio practice of Unknown Fields Division. Second, from the long-running postgraduate course at the Architectural Association in London where Liam Young has taken students on infrastructural ‘expeditions’ for many years. Third, from the writers, filmmakers, data-visualisers and programmers who have accompanied these expeditions and produced its highly-professional and publicly eye-catching work. Xmas Unwrapped is one such output – a ‘Christmas card’ – from a 2014-15 expedition called A World Adrift. We’ve asked our ‘Geographies of material culture’ students to watch it before writing their coursework over the Christmas break. It doesn’t have a explicit message, but it’s catchy and thought-provoking. There’s observational footage of people working in a basic factory space in China making Christmas decorations and Santa hats by hand. Other people box these up, load them into a container, and the film finishes with a view from bridge of a container ship sailing out to sea, taking them to their consumer destinations. If you watch it with the sound down and the film footage is undramatic. People just work. Their tasks are repetitive. Their heads are down. They say nothing. The footage does not aim – it seems – to evoke any emotion in its audience. But turn up the volume and it’s accompanied by a choir of children singing ‘Jingle Bells’ in Cantonese. And it’s this combination of film footage and music that provokes a reaction. It’s catchy. This film is a gentle form of trade justice activism. You could call it an appetiser. It’s trying to ‘pop the bubble’ of Western consumption by ‘joining the dots’ to Chinese factory production. It does not explicitly address trade injustice, exploitation, labour rights or any consumer or producer activism relating to this. The factory and logistics workers it features don’t have a voice in their representation. Unknown Fields Division isn’t making this work because they want audiences to do anything. Just to know and to reflect on the fact that its audience member’s things are made by people elsewhere in the world. This film can be used as a brief and gently provocative spark for discussions of trade (in)justice in any classroom [like another example on our site, Handprint] but also – especially – around a Christmas dinner table. Because Unknown Field Division‘s expeditions have so many people on them, this film is the tip of an iceberg. The most noticeable impacts it has are not on its audiences [as far we can see] but on the expedition’s students and collaborators. They produce other work that brings attention to this Christmas story, and to the wider project on architecture’s dependence on supply chain logistics. Follow the arguments below.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Xmas Unwrapped. followthethings.com/xmas-unwrapped.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 39 minutes.

Posted on September 9, 2025October 9, 2025 by Ian Cook

Dissertation ideas

followthethings.com
Follow it yourself

HAVE A THEORY OF CHANGE

“Dissertation ideas”
Two ways for undergraduate and masters students to do ‘follow the thing’ trade justice research usinb our site.
Screenshot from Sophie Burden’s coursework illustrating the second ‘intentions → impacts’ idea.

followthethings.com is an online store, a database of trade justice activism, and a research resource containing almost everything ever said about over 100 examples of trade justice activism: its intentions, tactics, discussion and impacts. This page outlines two ways in which this site can inform and inspire in-depth student research. Both are desk-based: a ‘follow it yourself’ dissertation that assembles a ‘follow the thing’ narrative from already published sources outside our site; and an ‘intentions -> impacts’ dissertation that focuses on one or more of our site’s compilation page examples (the ones with all the comments) to work out how trade justice activism works and what it can(not) do. This is an ideas page, one which you can share and discuss with your friends, tutors, supervisors and/or advisory board members. We provide below arguments from the academic literature that can justify and give focus to such ‘follow the thing’ trade justice activism research, some basic lines of enquiry, and some examples of student work on our site that can give a sense of what’s possible. Our background is in Anglo-American cultural geography, but the ‘follow the thing’ approach has been used across the arts, humanities, social sciences and beyond, and by students whose starting point could be anywhere in the world.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Dissertation ideas. followthethings.com/dissertation-ideas.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)

Estimated reading time (includeing all FAQs): 43 minutes

Posted on September 2, 2025September 2, 2025 by Ian Cook

‘What would you say to the person who made your … ?’

followthethings.com
Back to school

ENCOURAGE THANKFULNESS

MAKE IT SNAPPY

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

‘What would you say to the person who made your … ?’
A ‘pop the bubble’ icebreaker task for trade justice education
Selected poscards from our wesbite’s launch at the Eden Project in 2011 in slideshow above.

If you’re starting out some trade justice education – at any level, and with any students or public you would like to engage – it’s important to assume that they may already know and care about the issues you want to address. A simple way to find out is to a) encourage them to think about a commodity that’s important to them and then b) ask them what they would say to someone working in its supply chain if they had the opportunity. We have written about a couple of times when we have done this – when we launched followthethings.com in the Tropical Biome at the Eden Project in 2011, and when we were invited to introduce trade justice to a class of primary school students in Exeter in 2015. In both cases, this task needed a good prompt. At the Eden Project, the prompt was the Eden Project – the Tropical Biome was stocked with plants that are the sources of everyday commodities and their labelling and the design of the space made these connections. So we set up our card writing station to catch people as they walked by. In the primary school, the teacher asked the students what their favourite foods were, CEO Ian did some ‘who made my stuff?‘ research on a few, showed the class his findings, and the students were tasked to write to a corporation or supply chain worker that was mentioned with their thoughts. There’s always the option, if the writers (and their parents / guardians where appropriate) give their permission, of making this writing public, posting it online, tagging the corporations, asking for replies. The aim of this task is to gently ‘pop the bubble’ of commodity fetishism in order to encourage an appreciation of the work that has gone into making the things that people love to eat, wear and buy. This summary may be enough for you to try this for yourself. But we’ve also re-published a couple of blog posts below about our experiences of trying this out for ourselves.

Page reference: Ian Cook & Joe Lambert (2025) ‘What would you say to the person who made your … ?‘ followthethings.com/what-would-you-say-to-the-person-who-made-your.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 19 minutes.

Posted on August 18, 2025September 9, 2025 by Ian Cook — Leave a comment

Who made my stuff? (⏵ Gillette Razor Blades)

followthethings.com
Follow it yourself (page) | Follow it yourself (examples) | Health & Beauty (⏵ example)

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

ENCOURAGE DETECTIVE WORK

SHOW WHAT’S POSSIBLE

MAKE THE FAMILIAR STRANGE

INVOLVE CONSUMERS

ENCOURAGE CURIOSITY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

TAKE IT TO PIECES

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

HOLD ‘EM ACCOUNTABLE

HUMANISE THINGS

FIND & GIVE INSPIRATION

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

TELL A STORY

MAKE IT AVAILABLE

JOIN WITH OTHERS

“Who made my stuff?” | example ⏵ Gillete Razor Blades
A ‘follow it yourself’ detective work task suitable for activists, journalists, filmmakers, artists, researchers, teachers and students
CEO Ian’s ‘Traces of labour’ YouTube playlist embedded above. Can be used as a task / lesson taster. The jeans paper mentioned is Hauser (2004)

Behind the followthethings.com website lies a university undergraduate module called ‘Geographies of material culture’ taught be CEO Ian from 2000 to 2025. The first version of the module (2000-2008) encouraged students to do some online detective work to see if they could find out who had made a commodity that mattered to them. He wanted his students to appreciate if and how their everyday lives were made possible – in part – by the work done by supply chain workers elsewhere in the world. He wanted to them to find out, and think, about the responsibilities that they and others had for any trade injustices they found in the process. The results were always surprising, and Ian started to share some of their writing (with permission) with geography school teachers which led Ian and his students being invited to publish some in teacher-facing journals (see Angus et al 2001, Cook et al 2006, 2007a&b). Because this detective work always began in their personal worlds of consumption, Ian was invited to bring this ‘follow it yourself’ approach into a Geographical Association and Royal Geographical Society project called the ‘Action Plan for Geography’ (see Martin 2008, Griffiths 2009). This, in turn, helped the ‘follow the thing’ approach to gain a wider audience after it the GA and RGS wanted it to be included in the 2013 UK National Curriculum for Geography as a means to teach students about trade (see Parkinson & Cook 2013, University of Exeter 2014). Ian taught this approach to trainee geography teachers at the University of Nottingham who tried this out on their placements and wrote #followtheteachers posts for the followthethings.com blog (see Whipp 2013). It was also fleshed out in the ‘Who made my clothes?” online course that Ian co-authored and presented for the Fashion Revolution movement (Cook et al 2017-2018: see here). There’s one main principle in this ‘follow it yourself’ work: if you know how and where to look, you can find a connection between your life and the lives of others who have made anything that matters to you, anything that’s part of your life. There’s been an explosion of journalism, NGO activism, academic research and corporate social responsibility initiatives relating to trade justice since the 1990s that means that there are secondary data sources that you can find, sift and create a story about anything that comes from anywhere – or so it seems. Doing this detective work in groups can encourage diverse learners to share their expertise (e.g. by drawing on their experiences of living in different parts of the world, and being able to research in different languages: see Bowstead 2014). Doing it for younger learners can motivate them to write (e.g. by asking them what they would say to the person who picked the cocoa in their Milky Bar buttons, for example – see Lambert 2015). And doing his kind of thing as an academic researcher can help you to produce ‘follow the thing’ publications (see Taffell 2022). We have updated the advice we gave in the 2000s and set it out below as a three stage process: A – reading the results of other ‘follow it yourself’ research; B – choosing the thing you want to follow; and C – doing the ‘follow it yourself’ detective work to find out who made it for you and the trade justice issues that come with this. To illustrate what this research is like to do, what sources you can find where, and how to find and follow a productive trail, we have researched a new example from start to finish: who made Ian’s pack of Gillette razor blades? Just click ⏵ example to find out.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Who made my stuff? followthethings.com/who-made-my-stuff.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)

Estimated reading time (including example detective work): 80 minutes

Posted on July 31, 2025September 9, 2025 by Ian Cook

Following the white phosphorus trail

followthethings.com
Security

2009

UNBRANDED

WHITE PHOSPHORUS ARTILLERY SHELL

SHOW MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX EVILS

CROSS CULTURES

CHANGE GOVERNMENT BEHAVIOUR

END VIOLENCE & EXPLOITATION

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

INCLUDE SUFFERING KIDS

“Following the white phosphorus trail”
A series of four TV news stories broadcast on Al Jazeera English.
Embedded in the YouTube playlist above.

‘Follow the things’ trade justice activism tends to connect unknowing consumers to the exploited supply chain workers who make the things they buy. But not when it comes to the arms trade. Here, the direction of travel is reversed: it’s this industry’s ultimate ‘consumers’ – the people who are killed and maimed by these commodities – that activists are worried about, especially when their use can be considered a war crime. Since Hamas’ October 7th 2023 attack on Israel and the Israeli government’s military response (described by many, and denied by Israel, as a genocide), arms trade activists around the world have set out to make public the geographies of the arms trade supplying the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and to disrupt this via non-violent direct action. They have also sought to hold arms manufacturers, shipping companies, Israeli and other goverments, and the IDF accountable for their actions under international law. But who are the people who make these weapons, where in the world? What do they know about the devastating impacts of their work? How do they feel about this? How do they rationalise it? Who’s responsible for this death and destruction? Soon after Hamas’ October 7th attack, news reports emerged that accused the IDF of using white phosphorus shells to bomb civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. These shells are designed to light up the sky, and/or to provide a smokecreen, for ground troops to more safely move into an area. That’s their permitted use. But if they’re used to bomb people, that’s a war crime. White phosphorus burns when it comes into contact with oxygen, and it keeps burning for weeks. It’s fat soluble so, if it lands on people’s skin, it burns and burns. Journalists and arms trade activists could identify where these white phosphorus shells were made from production codes they found on fragments of the shells found in burning ruins. An arsenal in the small town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, USA, was the source. And not for the first time. In 2008-9, white phosphorus shells from the Pine Bluff Arsenal had been dropped on Palestinian civilians during the IDF’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’. The Quatari news station Al Jazeera sent a reporter there and broadcast at least four news stories that followed the trail of white phosphorus munitions there from Gaza. Reporter Mike Kirsch talked to locals, showed them images of Palestinian people burned by munitions made in their town, asked them what they felt about this, asked their mayor what he felt about this. There was a detailed Amnesty International report that he could show them. Were people in this town at least partially responsible for this death and destruction? Was the Arsenal responsible? Was the US government responsible? The IDF? Hamas? Here’s what we have been able to find.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Following the white phosphorus trail. followthethings.com/following-the-white-phosphorus-trail.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 53 minutes.

Posted on July 29, 2025July 29, 2025 by Ian Cook

Handbook: intentions page

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

Pop the bubble
Change consumer behaviour
Change corporate behaviour

TACTICS

Target the right brand
Show the violence
Embody exploitation
Include suffering kids
Juxtapose extremes
Bring managers into view
Blame, shame & guilt
Hold ’em accountable
Suggest concrete action
Encourage a boycott

RESPONSES

Wow 💥 WTF?
Capitalism is sh*t
I’m so angry
This is disgusting
I gotta do something
I won’t buy it
Oh shut up
Attack your critics
Liar! Fraud!
LOL capitalism
Who to believe?
There is no alternative
It could be worse

IMPACTS

Now we’re talking
Activism is publicised
I shop differently now
Workers suffer
Can’t tell

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

Bananas!*
Employee visualisation appendage
Ghosts
Girl model
Ilha das Flores
Maquilapolis
Mangetout
Primark – on the rack
The true cost
UDITA

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGES

POP THE BUBBLE

Show capitalist evils

IN BRIEF

Corporations exploit workers & environments across the world & consumers benefit from cheap products for which others pay a high price. If more people could see this, they would act differently.

What’s this page?

This is a placeholder intention page that, once finished, will explain this intention, illustrate it with reference to comments taken from relevant followthethings.com example pages, and will give a clickable sense of the tactics, responses and impacts that go with this intention.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque faucibus ex sapien vitae pellentesque sem placerat. In id cursus mi pretium tellus duis convallis. Tempus leo eu aenean sed diam urna tempor. Pulvinar vivamus fringilla lacus nec metus bibendum egestas. Iaculis massa nisl malesuada lacinia integer nunc posuere. Ut hendrerit semper vel class aptent taciti sociosqu. Ad litora torquent per conubia nostra inceptos himenaeos.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque faucibus ex sapien vitae pellentesque sem placerat. In id cursus mi pretium tellus duis convallis. Tempus leo eu aenean sed diam urna tempor. Pulvinar vivamus fringilla lacus nec metus bibendum egestas. Iaculis massa nisl malesuada lacinia integer nunc posuere. Ut hendrerit semper vel class aptent taciti sociosqu. Ad litora torquent per conubia nostra inceptos himenaeos.

SECTION: Intentions

by Ian Cook (July 2025)

Posted on July 16, 2025July 16, 2025 by Ian Cook

Handbook page: impacts

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

Change government behaviour
Change corporate behaviour
Change citizen behaviour
Change consumer behaviour
Change the system
Show what’s possible

TACTICS

Have a theory of change
Join with others
Find the unions
Bring managers into view
Bring politicians into view
Bring regulators into view
Hold ’em accountable

RESPONSES

Capitalism is sh*t
This is disgusting
I’m so angry
I gotta do something
These people are inspiring

IMPACTS

Governments intervene
Corporations are punished
Corporations change

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

Mangetout
UDITA
<more to be added>

Workers’ pay & conditions improve

IN BRIEF

Although it’s not always easy to trace a line between individual examples of trade justice activism and improvements in supply chain workers’ pay and conditions, this work does make a positive difference when looked at more broadly.

What’s this page?

This is a placeholder impact page that, once finished, will explain this impact, illustrate it with reference to comments taken from relevant followthethings.com example pages, and will give a clickable sense of the intentions, tactics and responses that go with it.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque faucibus ex sapien vitae pellentesque sem placerat. In id cursus mi pretium tellus duis convallis. Tempus leo eu aenean sed diam urna tempor. Pulvinar vivamus fringilla lacus nec metus bibendum egestas. Iaculis massa nisl malesuada lacinia integer nunc posuere. Ut hendrerit semper vel class aptent taciti sociosqu. Ad litora torquent per conubia nostra inceptos himenaeos.

SECTION: Responses

by Ian Cook (July 2025)

Posted on July 16, 2025July 29, 2025 by Ian Cook

Handbook: response page

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

Pop the bubble
Tell the truth
Show capitalist evils
Change consumer behaviour
Change citizen behaviour

TACTICS

Include emotion
Show the violence
Embody exploitation
Include suffering kids
Let the tears flow
Bring managers into view
Juxtapose extremes
Blame, shame & guilt

RESPONSES

Capitalism is sh*t
I’m so angry
Creeperific
I won’t buy it!
Who’s responsible?
I gotta do something
LOL capitalism
Nobody cares

IMPACTS

Now we’re talking
Activism is inspired
Activists are recruited
Say no to enquiries

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

Girl model
Ilha das Flores
Mangetout
<more to be added>

This is disgusting

IN BRIEF

Sometimes showing how & where commodities are made physically disgusts audience members. They feel it in their bodies, it makes them flinch, retch, squirm. It’s ‘icky’ & that ick can feed into (in)action.

What’s this page?

This is a placeholder response page that, once finished, will explain this response, illustrate it with reference to comments taken from relevant followthethings.com example pages, and will give a clickable sense of the intentions, tactics and impacts that go with it.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque faucibus ex sapien vitae pellentesque sem placerat. In id cursus mi pretium tellus duis convallis. Tempus leo eu aenean sed diam urna tempor. Pulvinar vivamus fringilla lacus nec metus bibendum egestas. Iaculis massa nisl malesuada lacinia integer nunc posuere. Ut hendrerit semper vel class aptent taciti sociosqu. Ad litora torquent per conubia nostra inceptos himenaeos.

SECTION: Responses

by Ian Cook (July 2025)

Posted on July 16, 2025July 29, 2025 by Ian Cook

Handbook: tactic page

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

Show capitalist evils
Change industry minds
Change corporate behaviour
Show what’s possible

TACTICS

Target the right brand
Hold ’em accountable
Include emotion
Show both sides
Find a character
Overlap scenes
Juxtapose extremes
Use myths & legends
Go to court!
Show social justice
Show how to win
Create a character
Make the hidden visible
Lie to tell the truth
Bring politicians into view
Bring regulators into view

RESPONSES

Capitalism is sh*t
I’m so angry
This is disgusting
Creeperific
Silence your critics
Who’s responsible?
Guilty as charged
That brand deserves credit

IMPACTS

Corporations change
Activism is inspired
Workers pay & conditions improve
Can’t tell

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

Bananas!*
Big boys gone bananas!*
Employee visualisation appendage
Girl model
Mangetout
The true cost
<more to be added>

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGES

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

Bring managers into view

IN BRIEF

So much trade justice activism puts exploited workers centre stage, often as victims or Davids vs. unseen Goliaths. So include / focus on Goliaths, their responsibilities & power to change things.

What’s this page?

This is a placeholder tactic page that, once finished, will explain this tactic, illustrate it with reference to comments taken from relevant followthethings.com example pages, and will give a clickable sense of the intentions, responses and impacts that go with it.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque faucibus ex sapien vitae pellentesque sem placerat. In id cursus mi pretium tellus duis convallis. Tempus leo eu aenean sed diam urna tempor. Pulvinar vivamus fringilla lacus nec metus bibendum egestas. Iaculis massa nisl malesuada lacinia integer nunc posuere. Ut hendrerit semper vel class aptent taciti sociosqu. Ad litora torquent per conubia nostra inceptos himenaeos.

SECTION: Tactics

by Ian Cook (July 2025)

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

TACTICS

RESPONSES

IMPACTS

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGES

Include haunting & horror

RECOMMENDED READINGS

SECTION: Tactics

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

TACTICS

RESPONSES

IMPACTS

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGES

Show capitalist evils

RECOMMENDED READINGS

SECTION: Intentions

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

TACTICS

RESPONSES

IMPACTS

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

Workers’ pay & conditions improve

RECOMMENDED READINGS

SECTION: Responses

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

TACTICS

RESPONSES

IMPACTS

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

This is disgusting

RECOMMENDED READINGS

SECTION: Responses

RELATED INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

TACTICS

RESPONSES

IMPACTS

EXAMPLES

HANDBOOK PAGES

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGES

Bring managers into view

RECOMMENDED READINGS

SECTION: Tactics