Itâs amazing what you can find out when youâre sitting at a computer, surfing â doing âdetective workâ, using corporate, NGO and news websites, blogs, photo and video-sharing websites and online encyclopaedias. So much information! Where to start? How to narrow it down? Start with the evidence â yes, keywords, right, on those things. Look closely: âMade in …â or âAssembled in …â, company names, brands, lists of ingredients â printed on these things, their labels, their packaging â somewhere. OK, open browser: âwww.google.comâ. Search: âMarks & Spencerâ and âsocksâ. There are 49,500 hits including a manufacturerâs website, Delta Galil (Anon, no date); a BBC news story: âKing of socks leaves the UKâ …; a PR Newswire story: âDelta Galil addresses discount request from Marks and Spencerâ …; interesting: âJews for Justice in Palestineâ …. What would they have to say about my socks? An article in Red Pepper …: whatâs that saying? That fairtrade cotton in M&Sâs new sock range is great for farmers in India, but not for anyone else involved in their production, distribution or sale. Right: agriculture, economic restructuring, international politics, boycotts, shifting production, trade justice. In my M&S socks, with my feet, comforting them, protecting them: what geographies are these? My sock geographies…
Ian Cook, James Evans, Helen Griffiths, Lucy Mayblin, Becky Payne & David Roberts (2007, 81-2).
Who makes my stuff?
Resources for researchers
CEO Ian became interested in ‘follow the thing’ activism after doing multi-sited ethnographic research along grocery supply chains connecting Jamaica and the UK in the 1990s and 2000s (see Cook et al 2004, Cook & Harrison 2003, 2007). He has written and reflected on this research practice (see Cook 1998, 2001, 2005; Cook et al 2019; Cook & Crang 1995, Crang & Cook 2007) and on how this fed into the followthethings.com project (see Cook et al 2018). And he has written about the ‘follow the thing’ art-activism that he’s done, including experiments in making ‘Political LEGO’ (Cook et al 2018) and collaborating on a ‘Museum of contemporary commodities’ (see Crutchlow & Cook 2022).
Two major lessons from this research have been brought into the ‘follow it yourself’ guidance and advice presented on this page. The first is that ‘follow the thing’ work connects the lives of people who tend not to know about one another, or about the impacts that their choices can have on each another. The way that it ‘joins the dots‘ can turn the most apolitical researcher into a ‘circumstantial activist’ when it participants and audiences learn about these connections and the responsibilities that come with them (Marcus 1995, p.95). The second is that the best sources he has found to make sense of and to present the complexities uncovered in academic ‘follow the thing’ research are the films, art and other creative trade justice activism that are featured on this website (see Cook et al 2019). Academic researchers could learn a great deal from these non-academic sources. They’re excellent examples to study (especially if you want your ‘follow the thing’ work to make an impact), but they can also be inspirations for academic research struggling, in particular, with access and impact. While academic researchers seem to be flummoxed about what to do with ‘hard to follow’ things (see Hulme 2017), for example, artists, filmmakers and others have for decades been experimenting with how to ‘Make the hidden visible‘ (see our page on artist Melanie Jackson’s animated film A Global Positioning System).
On this page, we share some guidance for student, academic and other researchers about how how they can become commodity detectives who can find out who made their stuff. We also share some ideas about how our website can be used to study connections between the intentions, tactics, responses and impacts of trade justice activism, how trade justice activism works and what it can do. We’ve refined this desk-based ‘follow it yourself‘ guidance though more than 20 years teaching the ‘Geographies of material culture’ module at the Universities of Birmingham and Exeter in the UK and running Fashion Revolution’s online ‘Who made my clothes?’ course in 2017-2018 (see Cook, Jones & Cox 2017, 2018).
Below we provide a) the best prompt we have found for thinking this way, b) two ‘follow it yourself’ detective work guides, and c) two ways that you can use followthethings.com as a source of case studies and qualitative data for essays and dissertations.
a) a prompt
Artist Christien Meindertsma talks about her fascination with where things come from and her enjoyment of the detective work she does to find out. We’ll be adding a page on her PIG05049 book as soon as we can.
b) follow it yourself
Who made my clothes?
2017-8 x Fashion Revolution / University of Exeter
Written by Ian Cook, Verity Jones & Kellie Cox
Fashion Detective ‘how to?’ | Senior school, university & public-facing | No subject specialism | ‘Fashion‘, ‘Multiple brands‘ | ‘Involve consumers‘, ‘Encourage detective work‘, ‘Target the right brand‘, ‘Hold ’em accountable‘, ‘Choose the right thing‘, ‘Take it to pieces‘, ‘Follow it yourself‘, ‘Pop the bubble‘, ‘Cross cultures‘, ‘Humanise workers‘, ‘Humanise things‘, ‘Encourage empathy‘, ‘Find lost relations‘, ‘Tell a story‘, ‘Make it snappy‘, ‘Make it available‘.
c) essays & dissertations
coming soon
