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 this ‘follow it yourself’ guidance and advice. The first lesson 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 one another. The way that ‘follow the things’ research ‘joins the dots‘ can turn the most apolitical researcher into a ‘circumstantial activist’ when its participants and audiences learn about their interconnection and the responsibilities that come with this (Marcus 1995, p.95). The second lesson is that the best sources to make sense of, and to present the complexities uncovered in, ‘follow the things’ research are the films, art work and other creative trade justice activism that we have put together on this website (see Cook et al 2019).
We believe that academic researchers could learn a great deal from these non-academic sources, from the people who make them, and from the way that they’re explained and critiqued. Individually, the relationships between their intentions, tactics, responses and impacts can be fascinating to study, but they can also besources of inspiration for academic research struggling, in particular, with access and impact. When academic researchers become flummoxed about what to do with ‘hard to follow’ things (see Hulme 2017), they could turn to the work of artists, filmmakers and others who have developed tactics to – for example – ‘Make the hidden visible‘ or ‘Lie to tell the truth‘.
On this page, we share some guidance on how students and researchers can become commodity detectives to 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, in order to work out 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 inspiration we have found for ‘follow it yourself’ from an artist called Christien Meindertsma, b) two ‘follow it yourself’ detective work guides that we developed for our ‘Who made my clothes?’ and ‘Geographies of material culture’ courses, 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) how to ‘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
