Dissertation ideas

“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

Why the world needs more ‘follow the things’ trade justice research!

What is distinctive about the ‘follow the thing’ research that we feature on our site is that it takes a material culture approach to studying trade and trade (in)justice (see Woodward 2020). It’s an approach that sees commodities as the ‘DNA of capitalism’ (Watts 1999, Cook et al 2001). You grab hold of one (or more) and see where it takes you, who and what it connects, and what impacts this process of connection can have. There’s plenty to read about the academic and political heritage of this approach, its connection to the trade justice movement, and its challenges today (see the FAQs we’ve copied from our 🧐 About page below). Read the answers to these questions below and maybe use some of these points to guide the reading for your literature review.

Why ‘follow the things’?

[W]e have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories (Arjun Appadurai 1986, p.5).

As mainstream public concern emerged in the Global North in the 1990s about sweatshops and trade injustice in the Global South (see Bannister & Bergan 2023), the work of social scientists including Arjun Appadurai (1986), Cynthia Enloe (1989), David Harvey (1990), Doreen Massey (1991) and George Marcus (1995) emerged to help out. In different ways, each found limiting the ethnnographic convention of studying social life in one place and understanding what happens there in the context of a wider abstract ‘system’. For them, the ‘system’ included other people’s places, and it was the connections between these places – and the people who lived and worked in them – that needed studying (see Marcus & Fischer 1986).

One way to make these connections was to ‘follow the things’: to identify, study and make public the hidden social relations between the people who grow, mine, manufacture, ship, sell, buy, use and waste specific commodities. Once the audiences for this work could see these social relations, they would understand their dependence on, and responsibilities towards, distant others and treat them the same way they would treat their friends, family members and neighbors closer to home (see Harvey 2010). This became the logic of ‘follow the things’ trade justice activism.

But research on the consumption of this activism found that audiences could get just as angry with the activists who were making them feel guilty about their bad shopping behaviour as they got with the corporations who were exploiting their supply chain workers (see Sandlin & Milam 2008). Others argued that this work too often set up middle class people in the Global North as both the cause of, and the cure for, the trade injustices suffered by workers in the Global South (see Chouliaraki 2011, Siddiqi 2009). Others argued that following things shouldn’t stop at their purchase and use, but continue through their journeys as waste (see Gregson et al 2010, Balayannis 2020, and our ♻️ recycle my waste department). Still others argued that even the most recent ‘follow the thing’ research and trade justice activism relied too much on an academic literature that was published when global capitalism was simpler and the internet was in its infancy (typically Appadurai 1986, Harvey 1990 and Marcus 1995: see Hulme 2017). During the decade in which the academic cornerstones of follow the thing studies was published, email had become a popular means of communication and a forwarded email exchange in 2001 between a student and Nike became the first example of trade justice activism to go ‘viral’ (see our page on the ‘Nike Email Exchange‘). At that time, most audiences knew little about – and could be easily shocked by – sweatshops and labour exploitation (Hulme 2017) and corporations and governments could be shamed into action by revelations of trade injustice in their supply chains (Koul 2025). Partly due to trade justice activism’s successes, circumstances have changed. Its tried and tested theories and tactics may no longer work.

Despite these challenges, ‘follow the things’ research and activism is still going strong, with relentless NGO campaiging to improve workers’ rights in supply chains (see the work of NGOs like Global Labor Justice, Fashion Revolution and the Clean Clothes Campaign and join with others), activism that works with and is led by supply chain workers themselves (see the tactics: start somewhere different, flip the script & workers take the mic!) and – it seems – fresh waves of innovative ‘follow the thing’ research tackling important 21st Century issues (see, for example, Tsing 2015, Sodero 2019, Cowen 2020, Cullen 2020, Crutchlow & Cook 2022, Taffel 2023, Ouma 2023, Liu 2024 and the tactics: include the digital and track and trace). Activists, researchers and students continue to be motivated to ‘follow the things’ that matter to them and to others elsewhere. For us, no other approach provides such an accessible entrypoint into complex understandings of trade injustice and who and what can effectively counter it.

The ‘follow the things’ approach 🤝 trade justice activism – deliberately, but also by accident. As Marcus says in his 1995 essay, getting to know people who live and work in separate parts of a supply chain, and then piecing these lives together in a single joined-up narrative can disrupt not only your own sense of self as a researcher but also those of the people featured in that narrative. Seeing your previously unknown interdependencies with (and, with them, responsibilities for) distant others can change a person (see the tactic: show it back). It’s often easiest and most common to include in ‘follow the thing’ work the lives of the poorest and most powerless people along a supply chain – typically farm and factory workers (see the tactic: find a character) – and the people who buy the things they make (either as the imagined audience and/or as characters confronted with images of people making their cheap stuff – see the tactics: involve consumers). But when you can also include those of company executives and CEOs making the demands that affect and profit from the labour of supply chain workers and the manufactured desires of consumers, the impact can be extraordinary (see the tactic bring managers into view).

What we have learned through this followthethethings.com project is that effective ‘follow the thing’ trade justice activism has to pay just as much attention to the relationships between the producers and consumers of that activism as it does to the relationships between the producers and consumers of the commodities it follows. The classic blaming, shaming and guilting of ‘consumers’ for buying commodities made cheaply by exploited workers treats trade injustice as caused more or less only by ‘unethical’ shopping choices. But, if you want to improve supply chain workers’ pay and conditions, your activism will need see responsible actors everywhere and find mutiple ways to encourage multiple audiences to change corporate and government behaviour (see Young 2003). It should not only blame, and make resposible, ‘the consumer’. It should start somewhere different, choose the right thing, target the right brand and the right audience, have a theory of change, know your history and join with others to make its contribution.

followthethings.com’s CEO Ian got caught up in these debates as a student in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Teaching a traditional ‘Lands and peoples of the Non-Western World’ module as a Masters student at the University of Kentucky in the late 1980s, he found it frustrating to present these lands and peoples as distant and separate from his (bored) students. What if there were things which they owned and relied upon that were made by people in these lands? What if there were people who studied these relationships and you could ask your students to read their work? Ian wanted to be one of these people and ended up at Bristol University undertaking a multi-sited ethnographic PhD research along a fresh papaya supply chain connecting the lives of farm workers in Jamaica to supermarket buyers in the UK (Cook et al 2017).

He published a paper called ‘Follow the thing: papaya’ (Cook et al 2004) that captured what he’d found and wanted to say. Its composition couldn’t be inspired by academic writing at the time (there was very little of it). Instead, he turned to a documentary film that followed canned pineapples (Amos Gitai’s 1983 Ananas (pineapple): see Cook, Crang & Thorpe 1996) and social sculpture that followed fresh bananas (Shelley Sacks’ 1996 Exchange Values: images of invisible lives: see Cook et al 2001). Both presented their narratives in short accessible chunks, leaving audiences to figure out the connections between them, to add their own perspectives, and to become part of the work’s sense-making process (see the tactic: make it incomplete). As the production of ‘follow the thing’ trade justice activism – films, books, art work, journalism, music, pranks, academic research, etc. – began to mushroom in the late 1990s, Ian focused his research and teaching on gathering and researching these many examples as a genre in this database called followthethings.com (see Cook et al 2017). It first opened in 2011, and its design and content was updated in 2025. It’s now a database of over 100 examples of the making, reception and impacts of trade justice activism. And a work that’s still in progress.

Sources

Arjun Appadurai (1988) Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. in his (ed.) The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p.1-63

Angeliki Balayannis (2020) Toxic sights: The spectacle of hazardous waste removal. Environment & planning D: society & space 38(4), p.772-790

Laura Bannister & Ruth Bergan (2023) A timeline of UK trade and trade justice. London: Trade Justice Movement

Lilie Chouliaraki (2010) Post-humanitarianism: humanitarian communication beyond a politics of pity. International journal of cultural studies 3(2), p.107–126

Ian Cook et al (2000) Social sculpture and connective aesthetics: Shelley Sacks’s ‘Exchange values’. Ecumene 7(3), p.337-343

Ian Cook et al (2004) Follow the thing: papaya. Antipode 36(4), p.642-664

Ian Cook et al (2017) From ‘follow the thing: papaya’ to followthethings.com. Journal of consumer ethics 1(1), p.22-29

Ian Cook & Philip Crang (1996) Commodity systems, documentary filmmaking & new geographies of food: Amos Gitai’s Ananas. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Insitute of British Geographers/ Royal Geographical Society, Glasgow, January

Deborah Cowen (2020) Following the infrastructures of empire: notes on cities, settler colonialism, and method. Urban Geography 41(4), p.469-486

Paula Crutchlow & Ian Cook (2022) Museum of contemporary commodities zine. Exeter: Museum of Contemporary Commodities

Beth Cullen (2020) Constellations of weathering: following the meteorological mobilities of Bangla bricks. Mobilities 15(6), 862-879
Stephen Duncombe (2023) A theory of change for artistic activism. The journal of aesthetics & art criticism. 81, 260–268
Stephen Duncombe (2024) Aeffect: the affect & effect of artistic activism. New York: Fordham University Press

Cynthia Enloe (1989) Bananas, beaches & bases: making feminist sense of international politics. London: Pandora Press

Nicky Gregson, Mike Crang, Farid Ahamed, Nasreen Akhter & Raihana Ferdous (2010) Following things of rubbish value: End-of-life ships, ‘chock-chocky’ furniture and the Bangladeshi middle class consumer. Geoforum 41(6), p.846-854

David Harvey (1990) Between space and time: reflections on the geographical imagination. Annals, Association of American Geographers 80(3), p.418-434

David Harvey (2010) Commodities and exchange. in his A companion to Marx’s Capital. London: Verso, p.15-53

Alison Hulme (2017) Following the (unfollowable) thing: methodological considerations in the era of high globalisation. Cultural geographies 24(1), p.157-160

Scaachi Koiul (2025) What Ever Happened to the Yes Men? Slate 16 July (https://slate.com/culture/2025/07/donald-trump-political-protest-hoax-revenge-yes-men.html last accessed 9 September 2025)

Chen Liu (2024) Follow the digital: Methodological thoughts on doing everyday geographies in a digital world. Digital geography & society 6 (online early)

George Marcus (1995) Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual review of anthropology 24, p.95–117

George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986) Anthropology as cultural critique: an experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Doreen Massey (1991) A global sense of place. Marxism today (June), p.24-29

Stefan Ouma (2023) Defetishising the asset form. Dialogues in human geography 14(1), 30-33

Jennifer Sandlin & Jennifer Milam (2008) ‘Mixing pop culture and politics’: culture jamming and anti-consumption activism as critical public pedagogy. Curriculum inquiry 38(3), p.323-50

Dina M. Siddiqi (2009) Do Bangladeshi factory workers need saving? Sisterhood in the Post-sweatshop era? Feminist Review, 91(1), p.154–174

Stephanie Sodero (2019) Vital mobilities: circulating blood via fictionalized vignettes. Cultural geographies 26(1), p.109–12

Sy Taffel (2023) AirPods and the earth: digital technologies, planned obsolescence and the Capitalocene. Environment & planning E: nature & space 6(1), p.433-454

Sergei Tret’iakov (2006) The biography of the object. October 118, p.57-62

Anna Tsing (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Iris van der Tuin & Nanna Verhoeff (2022) Following. in their Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities. London: Rowman & Littlefield, p.101-103

Iris Marion Young (2003) From guilt to solidarity: sweatshops & political responsibility. Dissent 50(2), p.39-44

When did people start to ‘follow the things’?

… the history of the commodity is the history of global injustice … (Bruce Robbins 2005, p.460).

The most-told origin story of ‘follow the thing’ trade justice activism begins in the mid-1980s to 1990s (see above), and often reaches back to Karl Marx’s Capital: volume 1 – whose opening chapter on commodities introduced the concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ – published in 1867 (Harvey 1990, Cook & Woodyer 2012). But the ‘follow the thing’ approach is at least as old as capitalism itself and contributed to the emergence of popular literature, documentary film and other media before and after this (see Wenzel 2011). For example, cheap novels entertainingly explaining the emergence of global trade through the life story of a top hat or a guinea coin were being published in the mid-18th Century (see Bernaerts et al 2014, and our page on one of these novels here). In 1843, the British satirical magazine Punch published a poem called ‘The song of the shirt’ about the squalid conditions in which of women sewed clothes in London’s East End, which went viral through the media of the time (see our page on it here). Formerly-enslaved authors and anti-slavery activists were informing consumers about the ‘blood’ in their sugar in the late 18th Century (see Midgeley 1996). All of this happened way before Marx theorised commodities as the ‘DNA of capitalism’ in 1867.

The commodity (Marx) says is the ‘economic cell form’ of capitalism. It is as if he is saying that in the same way that the DNA sequence holds the secret to life, so the commodity is the economic DNA, and hence the secret of modern capitalism (Michael Watts 1999 p.308).

Dipping into the history of the ‘follow the thing’ genre, George Marcus (1990, 1995) has highlighted the importance of early 20th Century Russian constructivists like the filmmaker Dziga Vertov and the writer Sergei Tret’iakov. In 1924, when documentary film was in its infancy, Vertov included an extended ‘follow the meat’ scene in his experimental film Kino Eye called ‘Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat’. His aim, to quote from the summary on its followthethings.com page, was to ‘show how food shopping involves relations with hidden places, processes and people … [by following] a cut of meat that [Kopuchiska’s Mother] buys in reverse motion, from a cooperative market, via the slaughterhouse where it is put back into the cow, who then stands up, walks backwards into the train, which returns the cow to the fields where it grazed. Vertov’s message to the film’s audience is to buy your meat from a workers’ co-operative supermarket.’ Five years later, Tret’iakov’s essay ‘The biography of the object’ imagined a new form of literature – and society – whose central characters would be things rather than people. He explained:

The hero is what holds the novel’s universe together. The whole world is perceived through him. … [In contrast] the compositional structure of the ‘biography of the object’ is a conveyor belt. Every segment introduces a new group of people. … They come into contact with the object through their social aspects and production skills. … This longitudinal section of the human masses is one that cuts across classes. … [who] necessarily share in the biography of an object. Thus: not the individual person moving through a system of objects, but the object proceeding through the system of people – … this is the methodological device that seems … more progressive … We urgently need books about our economic resources, about objects made by people, and about people that make objects. Our politics grow out of economics, and there is not a single second in a person’s day uninvolved in economics or politics. Books such as The Forest, Bread, Coal, Iron, Flax, Cotton, Paper, The Locomotive, and The Factory have not been written. We need them, and it is only through the ‘biography of the object’ that they can be adequately realized (Sergei Tret’iakov 2006, p.58 & 62).

The idea that following things, making visible and appreciating the relationships between their producers and consumers, can help to appreciate human interdependence and to build more equitable societies pops up in other times and places too. We can see it, for example, in 1960s US civil rights activism where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King (1967, np) preached about his congregations’ responsibilities towards supply chain workers:

And don’t forget in doing something for others that you have what you have because of others. Don’t forget that. We are tied together in life and in the world. And you may think you got all you got by yourself. But you know, before you got out here to church this morning, you were dependent on more than half of the world. … You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom, and you reach over for a bar of soap, and that’s handed to you by a Frenchman. You reach over for a sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Turk. You reach over for a towel, and that comes to your hand from the hands of a Pacific Islander. … [So] Let us be concerned about others because we are dependent on others.

And, in the mid-late 20th Century era of large-scale migration from former colonies to their European imperial ‘homelands’, Black British writers like Stuart Hall (1991, p.48-9) were explaining how commodities and people have been crossing borders and complicating ‘us and them’, ‘here and there’ distinctions for centuries:

People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity – mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon – Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history.

It is important to acknowledge that there’s a deep history of people following things for different reasons and with different audiences and outcomes in mind. Taking a ‘follow the thing’-based (or material cultural) approach to understanding trade crosses all kinds of borders, and aims to persuade people who are disconnected from, or invisible to, one another to be more caring relations (see the tactics: pop the bubble, know your history & find lost relations).

Sources

Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman & Bart Vervaeck (2014) The storied lives of non-human narrators. Narrative 22(1), p.68-93

Ian Cook & Tara Woodyer (2012) Lives of things. in Eric Sheppard, Trevor Barnes & Jamie Peck (eds) The Wiley Blackwell companion to economic geography. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, p.226-241

Stuart Hall (1991) Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities. in Anthony King (ed) Culture, globalisation and the world-system. London: Palgrave, p.41-68

David Harvey (1990) Between space and time: reflections on the geographical imagination. Annals, Association of American Geographers 80(3), p.418-434

Martin Luther King Jr. (1967) Three dimensions of a complete life. youtube.com [https://youtu.be/GU3AnO_PJGU last accessed 2 November 2023]

George Marcus (1990) The modernist sensibility in recent ethnographic writing and the cinematic metaphor of montage. Visual anthropology review 6(10, p.2-12

George Marcus (1995) Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual review of anthropology 24, p.95–117

Clare Midgley (1996) Slave sugar boycotts, female activism and the domestic base of British anti‐slavery culture. Slavery & abolition 17(3), p.137-162
Bruce Robbins (2005) Commodity histories. PMLA 120(2), p.454-463
Sergei Tret’iakov (2006) The biography of the object. October 118 (Fall), p.57-62

Michael Watts (1999) Commodities. in Paul Cloke, Philip Crang & Mark Goodwin (eds) Introducing human geographies. London: Arnold, p.305-315

Jennifer Wenzel (2011) Consumption for the common good? Commodity biography film in an age of postconsumerism. Public culture 23(3), p.573-602

What is ‘trade justice’ and how can it be achieved?

Trade injustice consists in exploitation. Gains from trading are distributed justly only if the gains have been obtained without exploitation (Riise & Wollner 2019, p.5).

Since the Battle of Seattle in 1999, and the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory complex in 2013, the exploitation of workers in global supply chains and a disbelief in economists’ assertions that international trade is a ‘moral-free zone’ have become public knowledge (Christensen 2017, Hulme 2017, Riise & Wollner 2019, Bannister & Bergan 2023). This is arguably the result of a diverse and dispersed body of trade justice activism applying pressure to governments and corporations to reformulate trade rules and to redistribute the benefits and burdens of trade more equitably (Hadiprayitno and Bagatur 2022).

Those taking part in this activism have included labour rights NGOs, labour unions, politicians, legislators, filmmakers, journalists, video game designers, app designers, product designers, consultants, Fair Trade certifiers, ethical startup companies, artists, playwrights, musicians, comedians, activists, celebrities, researchers, teachers, museum curators, lawyers, investors, consumers, citizens, workers and more (Cook et al 2017, Bostrom et al 2019, Hadiprayitno and Bagatur 2022). There have been notable trade justice success stories – for example, the passing in July 2024 of the European Union’s  Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive to ensure sustainable and responsible corporate behaviour along supply chains within and beyond Europe (European Commission 2024, although watch this space) – and research has recognised the importance of diverse forms of trade justice activism in raising and energising the public concern to which legislators have responded (Evans 2020).

Despite such headline success stories, there is little consensus about how, individually and collectively, trade justice activism works and what it can do. Activists with diverse skill sets, audiences and leverage rarely meet to compare notes and coordinate actions. They don’t have a central repository of trade justice activism to refer to, a theory of change for trade justice activism, or a common vocabulary to connect and coordinate their thoughts on this work. Where theories of change do exist, they are often presented as linear or spherical models that are easily communicated but oversimplified, or as multilinear or multidimensional models which are more accurate but difficult to communicate (Chapman et al 2023). Both, it is argued, struggle to account for the feelings and hunches, surprise and non-linearity that are essential elements in any change-making initiative (ibid). Indeed, some argue that it is the non-linearity and loose organisation of trade justice activism that can make it effective because corporations cannot  easily understand or counter it as a whole (Connor & Phelan 2015).

Recent research reveals that activists’ theories of change are often implicit, simple and linear – for example, the ‘idealist theory of change’ which believes that the creation of critical perspectives and imagining of alternative futures can inspire change. Such theories rarely includes the changes to which activists’ work can (un)intentionally contribute, and don’t take account of the geographical and cultural contexts in which activism needs to take place (see Duncombe 2024). A new way to theorise change in trade justice activism is therefore needed, to borrow Duncombe’s words, which, while it ‘does not guarantee an outcome … does tell us where we might intervene in order to have the best chance of the outcomes we desire … [and] provides … activists a better understanding of what they are doing so they – so we – can do it better’ (p.68).

For us, followthethings.com is a kind of theory of change machine for trade justice activism. It’s aim is to inform and inspire its shoppers to make new work that better understands the relationships between the intentions, tactics, responses and impacts of activism that may (not) work. So visit one of our departmets, choose a product, visit its page, watch or read the original, read our summary, browse the comments below, click with the intention and tactic buttons when you see them (FAQ below) and check out the beginnings of our followthethings.com handbook for trade justice activism here.

Sources

Laura Bannister & Ruth Bergan (2023) A timeline of UK trade and trade justice. London: Trade Justice Movement

Magnus Boström, Michele Micheletti & Peter Oosterveer (eds) (2019) The Oxford handbook of political consumerism. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Sarah Chapman, Adiilah Boodhoo, Carren Duffy, Suki Goodman & Maria Michalopoulou (2023) Theory of change in complex research for development programmes: challenges and solutions from the Global Challenges Research Fund. The European Journal of Development Research 35, p.298–322

James Christensen (2017) Trade justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Tim Connor & Liam Phelan (2015) Antenarrative & transnational labour rights activism: making sense of complexity & ambiguity in the interaction between Global Social Movements & Global Corporations. Globalizations 12(2), p.149-163

Ian Cook et al (2017) followthethings.com: analysing relations between the making, reception and impact of commodity activism in a transmedia world. In Ola Söderström O & Lauren Kloetzer (eds.) Innovations sociales: comment les sciences sociales transforment la société, Neuchátel, Switzerland: University of Neuchátel, p.46-60

Stephen Duncombe (2024) Aeffect: the affect & effect of artistic activism. New York: Fordham University Press

European Commission (2024) Corporate sustainability due diligence. European Commission 25 July (https://commission.europa.eu/business-economy-euro/doing-business-eu/sustainability-due-diligence-responsible-business/corporate-sustainability-due-diligence_en last accessed 1 August 2025)

Alice Evans (2020) Overcoming the global despondency trap: strengthening corporate accountability in supply chains. Review of International Political Economy, 27(3), p.658-685

Irene Hadiprayitno and Sine Bagatur (2022) Trade justice, human rights, and the case of palm oil. in Elena V. Shabliy, Martha J. Crawford & Dmitry Kurochkin (eds) Energy Justice: Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, p.157-172

Alison Hulme (2017) Following the (unfollowable) thing: methodological considerations in the era of high globalisation. Cultural geographies 24(1), p.157-160

Mathias Risse & Gabriel Wollner (2019) On trade justice: a philosophical plea for a new global deal. Oxrord: Oxford University Press

If you would like to make your own contribution to this literature, what choices do you have as a dissertation student using followthethings.com as your fieldsite? For us there are two types of dissertation that it can help you to do involving A) ‘follow it yourself’ and/or B) ‘intentions → impacts’ research.

Sources
Ian Cook et al (2001) Commodities: the DNA of capitalism. https://followtheblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/commodities_dna.pdf (last accessed 9 September 2025)
Michael Watts (1999) Commodities. in Paul Cloke, Philip Crang & Mark Goodwin (eds) Introducing human geographies. London: Arnold, p.305-315
Sophie Woodward (2020) Material methods: researching & thinking with things. London: Sage.

Type A: follow it yourself (desk-based)

Basic dissertation title: ‘The biography of a ….’

Basic research question: [no idea at the start, you don’t know what you will find!]

This type of ‘follow the thing’ dissertation can be done entirely through finding and connecting secondary sources (academic research, journalism, NGO reports, user-generated content, and more) to piece together the life of a thing, from production to consumption to waste and maybe beyond. We have outlined this ‘who made my stuff?’ research process elsewhere on our site. To quote the abstract on that page:

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 his kind of thing as an academic researcher can help you to produce ‘follow the thing’ publications (see Taffel 2022). We have … set … out below … 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.

You will see there that we have published 500 word ‘taster’ examples showing what this research can look like and what it can find. It may be a good idea to read one or two of these before you take the dissertation plunge! For this kind of research, you could take a material culture approach to an important but confusing global issue (war or genocide, for example) and study it through the lens of a commodity (e.g. a mineral whose extraction is said to be the cause of that conflict, or a commodity that is being used to perpetuate that conflict). Another approach could be to choose a commodity that you know nothing about, suspect nothing about, and see where that takes you (as CEO Ian did with the ⏵ Gillette Razor Blades he bought when writing the ‘who made my stuff?’ research page. To see what full-scale, dissertation-length ‘follow it yourself’ research can look like, check this excellent academic paper:

Source
Sy Taffel (2022) AirPods and the earth: digital technologies, planned obsolescence and the Capitalocene. Environment & planning E: nature & space 6(1), p.433-454

Type B: intentions → impacts of trade justice activism (followthethings.com-based)

Basic dissertation title: [some combination of your chosen example(s), and their intentions, tactics, responses & impacts?]

Basic research question: ‘How does trade justice activism work, and what can it do?’

If you have come across an example of trade justice activism and are wondering how it works and what it may have done, one option would be to scour the internet for secondary data outlining its making, its reception and it impacts. To do this you might bring together secondary materials you have found in publicly-available sources like YouTube comments, online reviews and their comments, reddit boards, and the academic journals, books and newspaper archives to which your university subscribes.

followthethings.com can provide a short-cut to this process – we have done this research for over 100 examples of trade justice activism, the secondary data is ready to process [although check the ‘last updated’ date at the foot of each compilation page]! This readymade collection of secondary data can also help you to do some more niche, more ambitious research on trade justice activism. Simple or complex, your dissertation research would draw on our site’s ‘compilation pages’. These are the ones that showcase an example of trade justice activism and the collection of secondary data that we have found and arranged below them in sections called ‘Descriptions’, ‘Inspiration / Technique / Process / Methodology’, ‘Discussion / Responses’ and ‘Outcomes / Impacts’.

Here’s a couple of quotations from our page on a series of Al Jazeera TV news features following weapons to show how a compilation page presents this secondary data:

The references for each quotation and their ‘last accessed’ dates are provided in a list of sources at the foot of each page.

For a fairly straightforward dissertation, you could take one example of trade justice activism featured on our site and analyse the secondary data like that above to work out how it works and what it does (or not). You could do some textual analysis of the data we have assembled on its compilation page, come up with a series of codes for their intentions, tactics, responses and impacts, and work out how they do(n’t) connect. As Stephen Duncombe (2024) argues, it’s unusual to find research that follows cultural activism through to its discussion and impacts. What activists intend their work to do isn’t always what it actually does. The task is to follow this through, to work out what has(n’t) happened, and to suggest why! TOP TIP: pick an example that has at least 100 comments on so you have sufficient depth and detail to dig into so your arguments can be convincing.

You will notice near the top of each example page on our website a series of coloured buttons. Among other things, these name the intentions and tactics that we have identified in the comments below. These named intentions and tactics can provide some language that you can use in your analysis and some recommended readings to go with them (coming soon here). If you click any of the intention and tactic buttons, you will see a brief explanation of each one at the top of its results page. These explanations can be useful for the straightforward dissertation type outlined above, but the ‘Why are there buttons and how do they work?’ FAQ from our 🧐 About page (copied below) provides insight into a more ambitious use of our site for dissertation research.

Why are there buttons and how to they work?

As part of the 2025 redesign, each example page now contains a series of buttons of different colours. These are the first signs of the ways in which the new followthethings.com website can help to theorise change for trade justice actisism. Here’s the key:

YEAR OF PUBLICATION / HAPPENING

BRAND(S) TARGETED (OR UNBRANDED)

FEATURED COMMODITY

WHERE IT ORIGINATED

WHERE IT ENDED UP

TYPE OF TRADE JUSTICE ACTIVISM

INTENTIONS OF THIS ACTIVISM

TACTICS CHOSEN TO REALISE THIS INTENTION

Each of these buttons is linked to a tag so that, for example, if you click one example’s year of publication you will see all of the examples published in that year. If you click one example’s brand, you will see other examples targeting that brand. And, if you click one example’s white-on-orange intentions buttons or red-on-white tactics buttons, you will see a page defining that intention or tactic and every example organised according to that intention or using that tactic.

There’s lots going on ‘within’ between the lines’ of our site’s design. These buttons bring to the surface the ways in which the 2025 version of followthethings.com is developing an ‘antenarrative approach’ towards, and a ‘pattern language’ for, ‘theorisations of change’ that shoppers could develop for their trade justice activism. Here’s the explanation.

Social movement researchers have argued that trade justice activism’s numerous, dispersed, loosely organised, transnational, competing, collaborating, spontaneous, and/or temporary or unstable networks are unsuitable for description, analysis or theorisation via traditional linear narrative forms. Rather than focusing on a limited selection of activist actors and organisations and explaining their (lack of) impact on a targeted corporation, for example, these researchers take a non-linear ‘ante-narrative’ approach which pays attention to ‘the way in which relatively disordered processes – including spontaneous actions by actors on the peripheries of campaign networks … – can contribute as much to achieving the movement’s goals as can globally coordinated and highly disciplined campaign activities’ (Connor & Phelan 2015, p.160).

Building on this understanding of the ways in which trade justice activism can be effective, the followthethings.com project is developing a ‘pattern language’ to theorise relationships between its intentions, tactics, responses and impacts. We have been inspired to do this by a series of handbooks called Beautiful trouble: a toolbox for revolution (Boyd 2012), Beautiful rising: creative resistance from the Global South (Abujbara et al 2017) and Beautiful solutions: a toolbox for liberation (Williams et al 2025). Written by and for artistic activists planning new work, they have been inspired by architects Christopher Alexander et al’s 1977 book A pattern language: town, buildings, construction.

Alexander et al’s book contains 253 easy to understand four page chapters – or patterns – each focusing on a single element of the built environment – e.g. ‘A place to wait’ (p.707). Each chapter has a common format: cataloguing each element, providing an image of a typical example, describing its function, history, context and ‘the field of forces that the pattern must bring into balance’ (Mitchell & McGee 2011, p.141), prescribing actions to make it work well, and suggesting other patterns that would complement it – e.g. ‘Opening to the street’  or ‘Still water’ – to read next (Alexander et al 1977, p.150: see also Dawes & Ostwald 2017). Each element is therefore understood in relation to, and as dependent on, multiple possible others, with their collection in the book provides a flexible, open-ended ‘pattern language’ that ‘allow[s] for infinite nondeterministic generativity’ (Bhatt 2010, p.712 & 716). Rather than reading the book from cover to cover, A pattern language was designed so that readers could start on any page, with any pattern, choose a recommended complementary pattern to read next and, via a non-linear process, piece together a larger design of their own.

Written by and for artist-activists working in different contexts, the three Beautiful books were ‘inspired by [A pattern language’s] modular interlocking format, its organically expandable structure and by the democratic nature of the form, which provides tools for people to adapt to their own unique circumstances’ (Boyd & Oswald Mitchell 2012, p.4). The skill in creating a pattern language is in identifying the elements (isolating them from complexity), writing concisely and evocatively about them (using a common chapter format) and choosing their dependent connections (what goes with each individual element). To write Beautiful trouble, for example, Seventy authors shared their experiences in order to distil from them a ‘pattern language’ for artistic-activism comprising 31 tactics (e.g. ‘Blockade’), 53 principles (e.g. ‘Team up with experts’), 30 theories (e.g. ‘Environmental justice’), and 34 case studies (e.g. ‘Santa Claus Army’) to make this work more effective (Uzer 2020). Each short chapter simply names and catalogues its tactic, etc., pictures it, identifies its fields of forces and actions to take, and suggests complementary tactics, principles, theories and case studies to read next.

Commenters have described their experience of reading Beautiful trouble as similar to a ‘popular travel guide book with side columns highlighting key points, case studies, and further insights… [which] makes it comfortably familiar and easy to navigate’ (Simpson 2017, p.54), ‘its modular [interlocking] structure [meaning] … you can wander, weaving between practice and theory … forging your own path’ (Anon 2012, np), as if ‘mounting a revolt [were] like someone assembling a Swedish bookcase’ (Ramirez 2012, p.1). The Beautiful books are organised as if each tiny chapter was connected to recommended others via hyperlinks, which means that they have easily been transposed (and continue to be added to) as websites (see https://beautifultrouble.org/). What the Beautiful series does not do, however, is to follow through from the intentions, tactics and theories that it identifies into the responses and impacts – including the unintended, boomerang ones – that its case studies have generated (see Duncombe 2024).

This is why we believe that our new followthethings.com website (and its emerging Handbook for trade justice activism) could allow us, and our shoppers, to better theorise change for trade justice activism. To provide a proof of concept for the handbook, book designer Patricia Moffett was commissioned in 2022 to create an InDesign template based on the Beautiful trouble model and CEO Ian wrote into it sample pages for intention, tactic, response and impact chapters. From 2023-2025, students analysed the comments collected on 15 trade justice films, TV series and music videos on the followthethings.com website during the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Exeter. With CEO Ian, they identified 22 intentions (e.g. show capitalist evils and show what’s possible), 101 tactics (e.g. find & give inspiration and juxtapose extremes), 60 responses (e.g. I laughed my ass off and that’s disgusting) and 21 impacts (e.g. I shop differently now and Governments intervene). In 2024-25, students drew upon a draft version of the Handbook to offer documentary filmmakers advice on how to make an effective trade justice documentary. We’ve published their advice to give a sense of how our Handbook can work:

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ADVICE TO FILMMAKERS

How students have used this handbook to criticaly anaylse trade justice activism

‘Get people to reflect, not recoil’ – by Abbie Gollings
‘Choose the emotion that won’t let go – then hit ‘record’ – by Luke Elkington
‘You can’t Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V resistance’ – by Lucian Harford
‘Yes, it’s small. But that’s the point’ – by Sophie Burden
‘Just showing up – again and again – can be the start of something’ – by Jock MacKinlay
‘It’s funny how you can be so angry at someone who is just doing their job’ – by Katie Smart

TO THE HANDBOOK CONTENTS PAGE 👉

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followthethings.com is, and always will be, a work in progress. The work that we have yet to do will, we hope, make a novel contribution to trade justice (and wider cultural) activist theory and practice. We are thankful to all the Beautiful trouble people for showing us the way to do this. We ❤️ those books.

Sources

Juman Abujbara, Andrew Boyd, Dave Mitchell & Marcel Taminato (comps.) (2017) Beautiful rising: creative resistance from the Global South. New York: O/R Books

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel (1977) A pattern language: town, buildings, construction. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Anon (2012) [lost source]

Ritu Bhatt (2010) Christopher Alexander’s pattern language: an alternative exploration of space-making practices. The Journal of architecture, 15(6), p.711-729,

Andrew Boyd (comp) (2012) Beautiful trouble: a toolbox for revolution. New York: O/R Books

Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell (2012) Introduction. in Andrew Boyd (comp) (2012) Beautiful trouble: a toolbox for revolution. New York: O/R Books, p.1-5

Tim Connor & Liam Phelan (2015) Antenarrative & transnational labour rights activism: making sense of complexity & ambiguity in the interaction between Global Social Movements & Global Corporations. Globalizations 12(2), p.149-163

Michael Dawes & Michael Ostwald (2017) Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: analysing, mapping and classifying the critical response. City, territory & architecture 4(17), p.1-14

Stephen Duncombe (2024) Aeffect: the affect & effect of artistic activism. New York: Fordham University Press

Alex Mitchell & Kevin McGee (2011) Writing in style: pattern languages and writing short fiction. Storyworlds: a journal of narrative studies 3, p.139-160

Julia Ramirez (2012) Beautiful Trouble o cómo moverse entre el arte y la revuelta. re-visiones 12, p1-3 [traslated from Spanish by Google Translate)

Romanda Simpson (2017) Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. Undercurrents 20, p.54-55

Evren Uzer (2020) Beautiful Trouble: a pattern language of creative resistance – an interview with Nadine Bloch. in Jilly Traganou (ed). Design & political dissent: spaces, visuals, materialities. New York: Routledge, p.110-120

Elandria Williams, Rachel Plattus, Eli Feghali & Nathan Schneider (comps.) (2025) Beautiful solutions: a toolbox for liberation. New York: O/R Books

A more ambitious dissertation using our site would ask its research question about how trade justice activism works and what it can do of more than one example. This could be done by clicking any of the buttons on any of the compilations on our site. Let’s try an example:

Say you visited our compilation page for the 2011 iPhone game called Phone Story.

From here ➡️ you could click the brand Apple and decide to do a dissertation on this and other examples of trade justice activism targeting this brand. OR ➡️ you could click Mined in the Democratic Republic of The Congo and decide to do a dissertation on this and other examples of trade justice activism highlighting the conflict monerals sourced in this part of the world. OR ➡️ you could click Phone game and decide to do a dissertation on this and other examples of trade justice activism that takes the form of a video game. OR ➡️ you could click Show capitalist evils and do a dissertation on this and other examples of trade justice activism whose intention is to do this (in contrast, perhaps, to that which intends to Show what’s possible). OR ➡️ you could click the tactic to Make it funny and do a dissertation on this and other examples of trade justice activism that use (often sick) humour to encourage their audiences to think differently and maybe change their behaviour. OR ➡️ you could click the Streisand Effect bonus button (we don’t add these to every page) and do a disseration on efforts to contest or silence trade justice activism that are played out so much in the public realm that they attract much larger audiences than they could ever have hoped for! Again, textual analyses of your chosen compilation pages would be your dissertation’s main research method, but the research questions would be more niche!

To get a flavour of this second kind of dissertation research, and the kinds of arguments you could be making using the secondary data assembled on our website, check the ‘advice to filmmakers’ links on this page. A section from one is screengrabbed at the top of this page. In 2024-25, students taking the ‘Geographies of material culture’ module that’s behind this site were tasked to choose at least 4 ‘follow the thing’ films on followthethings.com and to work out how they worked, and what they did. They were asked to imagine using what they learned to help a budding filmmaker make an effective trade justice documentary! They were tasked to follow the filmmakers’ stated intentions, through the tactics they used to realise these intentions, to the responses their work provoked, to the impacts that it appeared to have had. They were tasked to code their chosen films’ followthethings.com pages using a list of intention, tactic, response and impact phrases provided to them (e.g. the encourage empathy tactic and the that’s so sad response above). Their task was to find and suggest patterns connecting intentions → impacts along the lines of ‘If you intend your trade justice activism to do this …’ (e.g. show what’s possible) ‘… it’s a good idea to use this tactic …’ (e.g. find the unions) ‘… because that can elicit this kind of response …’ (e.g. these people are inspiring) ‘… which can help to create this kind of impact’ (e.g. workers pay and conditions improve) [← that’s an ideal scenario, but things don’t often turn out that way]. The students were tasked to evidence their arguments by quoting secondary data from their chosen films’ followthethings.com pages, and to provide academic depth to their arguments with reference to recommended readings associated with each phrase. We’ll be adding these to the phrases listed in our draft Handbook for trade justice activism as soon as we can.

If you’re keen to try this second dissertation idea, it’s important to spend a few hours browsing the compilation pages on our site. Click the logo in the top left to get to our home page and click whatever seems interesting to you from there. Once you find an interesting compilation page, click some of its buttons, follow some threads that are most fascinating or intriguing to you. And see what questions you end up asking yourself.

Page written by Ian Cook et al (last updated August 2025).

Image credits

Header: followthethings.com

Speaking icon: Speaking (https://thenounproject.com/icon/speaking-5549886/) by M Faisal from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0) Modified August 2024