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“The Connectivitea Of Britain And Sri Lanka“
A dissertation by Sarah Wrathmell, submitted as part of their BA Geography degree at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Sample pages from its findings chapters are embedded in the slideshow above. Click them to read the dissertation.
Undergraduate Geography student Sarah Wrathmell has an ambitious idea for her dissertation research. She wants to travel to Sri Lanka to find the people who grow her morning cup of tea on a plantation in Kandy, Sri Lanka. She plans to ‘follow the thing’ and to undertake some multisited ethnographic fieldwork along the supply chain of ‘Tillings’ (a pseudonym) loose breakfast tea. She ends up writing about six places: the tea garden where the tea is grown, its collection spaces, its production factory (all in Sri Lanka), its blending factory, a specialist tea shop, and a tea garden where she shares a pot of tea with a group of friends (all in the UK). She talks to pickers, packers and drivers; visits factories and talks to people tasting, processing and packaging it to exacting standards; and finally drinks that tea with those drinkers. This is embodied, sensory work that she has to – somehow – get on the page. What she wants to understand is what, and who, are the ingredients in her tea? And how are the lives of the people involved in making and drinking it interrelated? As a reader, your job is to follow her on her travels as she tries to make sense of this. Its assessors say it’s a fantastic piece of work. So, it’s submitted for a national dissertation prize. It wins this unanimously. We have a grainy .pdf copy that you can download and read. It’s important to show that not only are there high profile films, publications, and other forms of trade justice research and activism to pay attention to. Students have been doing this work too, for much smaller audiences, for years. What can this work look like?
Dissertation reference: Sarah Wrathmell (2003) The Connectivitea of Britain & Sri Lanka. BA Geography Dissertation: University of Birmingham, UK (followthethings.com/the-connectivitea-of-Britain-and-sri-lanka.shtml last accessed <insert date here>)
Page reference: Sarah Wrathmell (2024) The Connectivitea of Britain & Sri Lanka. followthethings.com/the-connectivitea-of-Britain-and-sri-lanka.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
Estimated reading time: 60 minutes.
5 comments
Discussion / Responses
… highly original and ambitious … wonderful, evocative, detailed and imaginative … a great combination of social scientific rigour and creative writing … exemplary ethnographic stuff (Source: Anon 2003a, np)!
… probably a unique undergraduate study requiring as it does multi-site investigations that call for a high degree of commitment, energy and initiative … There is certainly lots to like in this study – it is attractively and engaging presented, it brings to life the various stages the commodity passes through, it is well bedded in the literature and so on (Source: Anon 2003a, np).
There were 10 entries to the [Developing Areas Research Group undergraduate dissertation] prize in 2003, many of which were classified as ‘outstanding’, but the panel was unanimous in selecting Sarah’s dissertation as the best. The dissertation was highly innovative and demonstrated a highly sophisticated approach to the theoretical questions covered and the methodology. This dissertation was beautifully presented and Sarah was commended for her highly mature approach to all aspects of the dissertation process (Anon 2003c, np).
Outcomes / Impacts
[In the discussion recorded between the authors of Allsop et al 2010. Lecturer] Ian: I know you read Sarah Wrathmell’s [dissertation], Didn’t you [Helen]? That got you. Do you want to, can you talk a bit about that Helen?
[Student] Helen Clare: It’s amazing, her dissertation. Um. Scared me quite a lot, actually, read it. …
Ian: Do you want to explain just a little bit to everyone else, what it’s about …
Helen: Yeah. She studied tea. The ‘connectivitea’ of tea … [Helen explains it and calls it ‘absolutely amazing’]. And part of me, when I read that, I was just scared that, ‘could I do this?’ Like, could I actually go somewhere and do this? Um..
Ian: What was ‘amazing’ about it? How would you describe it?
Helen: Because it was so real. It was so, I could [pause] reading about these other people that she’d gone and visited, um, just her writing style was amazing as well. Um..
Ian: What’s amazing about it then?
Helen: That it was really descriptive, that you could um imagine being there..
Debbie: Did she take you on a journey?
Helen: Yeah. Yeah.
[Student] Debbie Allsop: That sounds good.
(Source: Allsop et al 2006, np).
The [undergraduate dissertation] I read [before I did my dissertation research – featured on our site here] was about people in Sri Lanka and England whose lives were connected through the tea trade [Wrathmell 2003]. It was amazing. It was so real, reading about the people she had gone and visited. You could imagine being there. It scared me quite a lot, actually. I thought, ‘could I do this?’ ‘Could I actually go somewhere and do this?’ (Source: Clare in Allsop et al 2010, p.7).
Page compiled by Ian Cook et al (last updated January 2024). Dissertation downloadable with permission of author.
Sources
Allsop, D., Allen, H., Clare, H., Cook, I.J., Raxter, H., Upton, C., & Williams, A. (2006). Unpublished transcript of a conversation between undergraduate geography students who had completed ethnographic dissertations and their supervisor Ian Cook – which was turned into Allsop et al (2010).
Allsop, D., Allen, H., Clare, H., Cook, I.J., Raxter, H., Upton, C., & Williams, A. (2010). Ethnography & participant observation. In Gomez, B. & Jones, JPJ III (eds) Research Methods in Geography: a Critical Introduction, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (download draft at http://followthethings.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/allsop-et-al-ethnography.pdf)
Anon (2003a) Internal examiner comments. on Wrathmell, S, (2003) The connectivities of Britain and Sri Lanka. University of Birmingham: BA Geography Dissertation.
Anon (2003b) Internal examiner comments. on Wrathmell, S, (2003) The connectivities of Britain and Sri Lanka. University of Birmingham: BA Geography Dissertation.
Anon (2003c) Assessor comments, for Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) Developing Areas Research Group undergraduate dissertation prize for Wrathmell, S, (2003) The connectivities of Britain and Sri Lanka. University of Birmingham: BA Geography Dissertation.
Image credit
Speaking icon: Speaking (https://thenounproject.com/icon/speaking-5549886/) by M Faisal from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0) Modified August 2024