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Handbook: example page




Pop the bubble
Show capitalist evils
Teach economic geography

Make the familiar strange
Follow the thing
Join the dots
Lie to tell the truth
Embody exploitation
Make it incomplete
Make it funny

Wow 💥 WTF?
Capitalism is sh*t
They aren’t experts!
I gotta do something

Image credit

Fresh Tomatoes, Loose – Tomato isolated (https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/tomato-isolated_7481096.htm#fromView=search&page=1&position=26&uuid=9e0c895b-6975-47d6-a7cc-9e1dc7cb06d1) by timolina (Freepik)


Ilha das Flores

More about this page

We are slowly piecing together a ‘followthethings.com handbook for trade justice activism’ and are publishing the pages here as we write them. This is an ‘example’ page. The wide column paraphrases and condenses this example’s followthethings.com page, section by section. The narrow column contains some details about the commodity, some key facts about the activism that took place around it, and a list of its ‘ingredients’: its intentions, tactics, responses and impacts. These have been identified during the writing of this example page and, as more handbook pages are added, you will be able to click each one to read about it, and there will be links to other examples where we have found that ingredient, and a list of linked ingredients. This hypertext format, we believe, will help readers to understand how trade justice activism can work, and what it can do.


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DEPARTMENT: Grocery

by Lucian Harford (June 2025)

Posted on

T-Shirt Travels

followthethings.com
Fashion | Recycle my waste

T-Shirt Travels
A documentary film produced & directed by Shantha Bloemen for Grassroots Pictures.
Watch on Alexander Street here (with institutional login). Search for other streaming options here.

Filmmaker Shantha Bloemen is working as an aid worker in a village in Zambia. She is surprised to see Western band t-shirts being worn by people who could never have heard their music. She wonders how they got there, why people are wearing them. It turns out that they were donated to thrift stores in the USA, were shipped overseas in bundles and bought by garment traders in Zambia to sell in street market stalls. By following the afterlives of thrown-away clothing, she connects good post-consumer behaviours in the West – like charity donation and recycling – with the disruption of economies in the underdeveloped world where they are cheaper to buy than locally-made clothes. She finds that an AC/DC or Chanel t-shirt can connect the life of the Zambian child who is wearing it to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s shaping of global trade’s ‘economic colonialism’. Bloemen’s film also makes a point that’s important to our collection – that ‘follow the thing’ work is not only about where things come from, but also where they go.

Page reference: Hannah-Rose Mann & Rebecca McGoldrick (2011) T-Shirt Travels. followthethings.com/t-shirt-travels.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 28 minutes.