followthethings.com is a database of trade justice activism making ‘real’ hidden relations between producers & consumers of everyday things. It’s a resource designed to help activists, teachers, researchers, students and others to appreciate commodity-centred trade justice activism as a whole, and to inspire and inform new work that can have positive effects on the pay and conditions enjoyed by supply chain workers worldwide.
Ian Cook et al, a Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Exeter in the UK has been its ‘CEO’ since it opened in 2011 (see Ian’s university profile page here and followthethings.com’s contact page here).
Why âfollow the thingsâ?
âFollow the thingsâ is a phrase coined by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in 1988 and elaborated by anthropologist George Marcus in 1995. Both encouraged academic researchers to undertake multi-site research with people whose lives were (often unknowingly) intertwined through, among other factors, the making, trading, purchase, use and disposal of things. All of the work showcased on this website does this, in one way or another. In 2004, followthethings.com CEO Ian published a paper called ‘Follow the thing: papaya‘ in an academic journal called Antipode. It was based on his multi-sited ethnographic PhD research along the papaya supply chain linking Jamaica and the UK. In 2017 he explained how this led to the creation of followthethings.com in the Journal of consumer ethics (download here).
Why does this website offer âanother kind of shoppingâ?
On followthethings.com âshoppingâ has an important double meaning, both âto seek or examine goods, property, etc. offered for sale in or byâ and âto behave treacherously toward; inform on; betrayâ or âto give away information aboutâ those goods, property, etc. Anyone who has made work featured on the site, and anyone who has visited the site, is therefore referred to as a âshopperâ.
Source: Anon (nd) Shop. dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shop last accessed 17 July 2011)
Why does the logo look like that?
The followthethings.com logo includes arrows whose shape and direction are borrowed from a lecture slide explaining âfollow the thingâ work by Professor Trevor Barnes, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia in Canada. For more detail about the design of our website, see CEO Ian’s explanation here. You can download Trevorâs lecture slides here.
Is anything for sale?
No. This is a non-commercial website.
What kind of work is showcased here?
âFollow the thingâ films, books, academic journal articles, art installations, newspaper articles and undergraduate research. Work that has followed nuts, t-shirts, tablet computers, cash, bullets and more. Work that aims to better understand global capitalism by paying attention to the âsocial livesâ of individual things as they come into being, move and change between farms, factories, shops, homes and beyond in different parts of the world. Work that tries to encourage empathetic understandings of trade as social relations between people and to orchestrate and provoke discussion of social and economic (in)justice, sustainability, activism etc. for old and new audiences.
What kinds of audiences has it been created for?
followthethings.com has been designed for non-specialist public audiences. Anyone who is concerned about globalisation, trade, social and economic justice, sustainability. Academics, teachers, students, artists, filmmakers, consumers, activists, business people, and others wanting to think through the issues raised by this work and/or to create new work that builds upon it. Each example featured on the website has been chosen because the filmmaker, artist or writer has tried to involve their audiences in the stories they tell, and the connections they make. The website has also been designed to do this. It showcases, and is itself and example, of trade justice activism.
How is the website organised?
Like an online store, with Fashion, Grocery, Electronics, Health & Beauty and other âdepartmentsâ and different ways of shopping on its homepage via ‘iconic brands’, or ‘prime content’ for example. Each âdepartmentâ contains images of the products that have been followed and, underneath each one, a collection of buttons outlining their geographical origins and destinations (there’s more on these buttons below), their brand(s), the type of work that has followed them, a sense of that work’s intentions and tactics, and and a sense of its price. Clicking on any one of these images will lead to the page devoted to that example.
What kind of writing can we expect to read?
Each of the example pages begins with access to the example and is followed by a series of buttons which describe its date of production, featured brand(s), origin and destination geographies, and the example’s main intentions and tactics as we see them. This is followed by a brief discussion of the example and its significance, the page reference to use if you want to refer to this in your work and an estimated reading time. There are three kinds of pages on this website which aim to do this in different ways: âarticle pagesâ (a small number of original newspaper articles reproduced in full), âcompilation pagesâ (made from found quotations that we have re-arranged to read like the comments people make on online videos or newspaper articles), and âfollow it yourselfâ pages (work by students and followthethings.com staff and interns which is inspired by the website’s content). This website showcases the kinds of discussions that people can have about trade (in)justice, the kinds of research they can do for themselves on the lives of commodities that matter to them, and what can and should be done to improve the pay and conditions of supply chain workers. Most of the examples pages on this website are ‘compilation pages’. Reading a page like this is like reading the comments on a YouTube video, on an online newspaper article, on an amazon review, or on a discussion forum like reddit. The comments are arranged without analysis. They don’t tell you who or what is right or wrong, good or bad. They invite you into these conversations, to agree and disagree with what’s being said, and to work out what you think about the problems of, and solutions to, trade injustice – whether that be ethical consumption, activism and protest, changing the laws of global trade, and/or many other options. These conversations don’t often take place in school or university classrooms. But watching / reading an example and then reading a conversation about it on our website can spark such conversations (see our ‘Back to School‘ page for ideas).
Who has produced its pages?
Most of the pages have been produced by students taking CEO Ianâs âGeographies of Material Cultureâ module at the Universities of Birmingham and Exeter in the UK and Keith Brown’s âAnthropologies of Global Connectionâ module at Brown University in the USA. Some pages have been produced by other students at Birmingham University, and some have been produced by Ian and Exeter-based followthethings.com interns and summer school students and Brown-based ‘UTRA’ students (see below). The page summaries have been written by CEO Ian, who has also edited every page and written everything else (including these questions and answers).
What’s ‘under construction’?
followthethings was first published in 2011, and the version you are visiting now was published in January 2025. The 2025 re-design has made room for future expansion of followthethings.com’s archive of trade justice activism and its discussion. A number of pages are therefore ‘holding pages’ – where an important example has been added without comments – and ‘taster’ pages – where an important example has been added with a limited selection of comments. At the time of writing, there are many more pages which will be added as tasters when time allows, with the aim of fkleshing them out fully as soon as time and funds enable this. These funds would also allow us to analyse connections between the intentions, tactics, responses and impacts of this work, to theorise change in this body of trade justice activism, and to make that theorisation freely available on this website. Wish us luck!
Why are the buttons there and how to they work?
As part of the 2025 redesign, each example page now contains a series of buttons of different colours. Here’s the key:
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, etc. etc. The ‘Intentions’ and ‘tactics’ buttons provide a taste of the way that followthethings.com will theorise change in trade justice activism. There’s lots going on ‘within’between the lines’ of our site’s design.
What do the colours of the comment icons represent?
Each individual comment on a compilation page has a different coloured comment icon to its left. There is no intended signifance to the colour choice, only that each comment has is a different person speaking, and that this is a (manufactured) conversation like you would find under a YouTube video. Our aim in designing this website is to engage our shoppers by making something familiar.
Do the numbers of comments mean anything?
Yes and no. To make a compilation page, we search online for discussions and comments about each example until we reach a saturation point where we find nothing new. We then create the conversations that you can read by editing these quotations down and placing them carefully in an order that we think is interesting and thought-provoking. We state the number of comments on each compilation page because it’s what other websites with comments do (tactic: ‘Make it familiar‘). But a compilation page with more comments is likely to contain a richer and more multidimensional conversation than one with fewer comments. It’s important to note that each compilation page was published some time between 2011 and the present day. Each page lists this date in its page reference and in the ‘This page was compiled by…’ information after the last comment. When we update a page – like we did with the 2011 version of the 1989 Brazilian short film Ilha Das Flores in January 2025 – we sometimes find hundreds of new comments that bring an example’s relevance and impact into the present day. With time and research money, we hope to update every page.
What does the homepage timeline show?
This timeline presents the examples featured on followthethings.com in the date order in which they were created. It’s the only place where all of the examples featured on our website are visible. Most of the examples featured were recently-viral examples that were given to CEO Ian’s ‘Geographies of material culture’ students to research. Groups of students were given a DVD or a link to an original example and a number of hits for that example that Ian had found on online searches, social media apps, newspaper archives and other relevant online comment sources. The reason for the absence of some examples is that they didn’t go viral enough at the time that the module was being taught, or that they were outdated in a way that Ian thought students would find less relevant to their everyday lives. Many more examples were research by Ian’s students than appear on this site. We have another 50 or more to add that need some extra research and editing, and it’s been difficult to find time to do this work for a project that has so far received no major research grant funding. What the timeline also shows, to an extent, is that Ian’s teaching of the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module (more or less every year from 2000 to 2025) coincided with a mushrooming of trade justice activism starting in the late 1990s (see the Trade Justice Movement’s Timeline Of Trade and Trade Justice here). The last time that compilation pages were set as unassessed coursework for ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ was in 2019. The module’s redesign for online provision during lockdown moved the followthethings.com project into a new analysis stage, where Ian and his students started to code the compilation page comments in order to find patterns of connection between the intentions, tactics, responses and impacts of the trade justice activism featured on the site. The intentions and tactics identified so far appear in the new followthethings.com design as buttons (see above). This move from a website-building (2000-2019) to an analysis (2020-2025) stage of the followthethings.com project can explain the relative lack of recent examples on our site. We are trying to expand our site’s archive to include examples that came to public attention before 2000 and after 2019 with taster pages. This includes examples that date from the birth of capitalism and consumer culture (see our taster page on the 1760 novel ‘Chrysal; Or, The Adventures Of A Guinea‘). Trade justice activism and the history of empire and the capitalist economy go hand in hand.
Why does the site have a ‘back to school’ page?
Many of the ideas in the background of this site come from many years of work with school Geography teachers, teacher trainers, the Geographical Association (a professional association for teachers of Geography in the UK), and the Royal Geographic Society (with the Institute of British Geography: the professional association of Geography academics in the UK). The GA and RGS(IBG) were awarded funding for a joint initiative called the ‘Action Plan for Geography’ (2006-2011) whose ‘Young People’s Geographies’ project involved CEO Ian as a participating academic [see the project website archive on the Wayback Machine here]. This involvement drew, among other things, on his joint publications in teacher-facing journals with ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ students who researched and wrote about the human stories in their socks, iPods, chewing gum, ballet shoes and other things. Ian subsequently continued to work with YPG participants and organisers including Dan Raven-Ellison (through the Mission Explore website [Wayback Machine archive here]), Mary Biddulph (through the PGCE in Geography at the University of Nottingham, some of whose students and graduates took part part in a #followtheteachers project) and Alan Parkinson (Geography education consultant, blogger and school teacher with whom Ian has written and published specialist ‘follow the things’ teaching and learning resources [see Alan’s ‘follow the things’ blog posts here]). These projects, pages and resources have emerged from conversations, interest and ideas with the school geography education community within and beyond the UK. A number of comments from school teachers are featured on our ‘peer review’ pages, including one American teacher who describes our site as ‘Like IMDB for everything’. The classroom aspect of our project has been funded by the Department of Geography and the University of Exeter. We hope to continue developing resources for, and stories from, school classrooms in the future. Please get in touch via i.j.cook@exeter.ac.uk if you have ideas or experience you would like to share
How has this site been funded?
In its early days, this project was jointly funded by Exeter University in the UK and Brown University in the USA. It was Ian’s small unfunded experiment until extra editorial work was undertaken through an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantship (UTRA) awarded to Jeff Bauer in the summer of 2010. This was funded by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, USA and supervised by Keith Brown. Subsequently, the site has been worked on through followthethings.com internships awarded to Daisy Livingstone, Aidan Waller, Jack Parkin, Alice Goodbrook and Emma Christie Miller in the summer of 2011, to Eeva Kemppainen, Eleanor Bird and Jack Parkin in the summer of 2012, to Tommy Sadler, Rachael Midlen & Nancy Scotford in the summer of 2013, and to Charlotte Brunton, Will Kelleher and Jenny Hart in the summer of 2014. Additional work on the site was undertaken as coursework by followthethings summer school students Diana Shifrina and Sabrina Skau in 2012. All of these interns were nicely paid, and the money to pay for them and for the summer school students came from the University of Exeter International Office. In 2017-18, new funding was provided by the Kone Foundation to support interns to work with Ian and Eeva Kemppainen on a ‘follow the thing’ culture jamming activism project in association with the Finnish Fair Trade NGO Eettisen Kaupan Puolesta [see Eeva’s blog here]. These nicely paid interns were Annily Skye-Jeffries, Caroline Weston Goodman, Kate Fox, Lily Petherick, Zahra Ali, Beth Massey and Jemma Sherman. Support from the University of Exeter then enabled us to employ Annabel Ray, Sarah Ader and Izzie Jeffrey in the summer of 2019 and Natalie Cleverly in the summer of 2021. All of our interns and summer school students have been involved the production of new work for our site and/or its blog and/or social media accounts. New work was also produced through Watson Institute UTRAs awarded in the summer of 2010 to Sabrina Skau, Maura Pavalow, Diana Shifrina, Emma Buck and Jeff Bauer, and in the summer of 2011 to Jasmine Lee. See Jeffâs blog here, Jasmineâs blog here and Natalie’s blog here for more. followthethings.com was re-designed in 2024 by Patricia Moffett and Ian Cook with funding from the Department of Geography at the University of Exeter. Additional design advice came from Edie Cook.
How does followthethings.com deal with copyright and intellectual property issues?
This website was designed, and is continually checked, with advice from the University of Exeter’s legal team. The siteâs Terms of Use, Disclaimer and Takedown Policy are set out on its Legals page here.
Didn’t the original site include LEGO re-creations?
Yes. In the summer of 2012, our interns and summer school students set up and worked in a ‘followthethings.com LegoLab’. We began by making a Lego Maersk container ship, and re-creating scenes from the 2007 MSC Napoli ship wreck. After this, we started to re-create in Lego scenes from the compilation pages that we had worked on, and began posting them in a ‘Made in Lego…’ flickr album here. We found that imagining and then creating scenes from the examples had a powerful effect on us and allowed us to produce beautifully awful photos that we hoped could encourage new shoppers to visit our site. Geographer of play Tara Woodyer spent a day with us, quizzed us, and wrote about our Lego work on her blog. When the pages we finished that summer were added to the site, some of these re-creations were included. We added Lego re-creations to our flickr set and to our site’s pages, particularly ones which don’t have a photo or embedded video at their beginning. After some fascinating discussions on twitter, Ian put together a talk that examined the development of this genre including, for example, legofesto’s 2009 re-creation of scenes from the ‘war on terror’ and the animation company Spite your Face’s 2001 Lego re-creation of a scene from the film ‘Monty Python & the Holy Grail’ (discussed on our blog here). Our ‘peer review‘ page contains some surprising responses to our LEGO re-creations from filmmakers and journalists whose work is featured on our site. Ian’s academic paper about followthethings.com’s use of LEGO was published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in 2018 (download here) and Ian’s 2017 inaugural lecture at the University of Exeter was also about these LEGO re-creations (download here). In the 2025 redesign of followthethings.com, some of these LEGO re-creations appear on some compilation pages as comments…
Unanswered questions?
If there is a question that you would like to ask us, please go to our contact page. We will answer as soon as we can.