followthethings.com is a database of trade justice activism that aims to make ‘real’ the hidden relations between the 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 – Emeritus 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).
Cite this site: Ian Cook et al (ed.) (2011-date) followthethings.com. Available at: http://followthethings.com (Accessed: <add your date here>)
Cite this page: Ian Cook et al (2025) 🧐 About. in Ian Cook et al (ed.) (2011-date) followthethings.com. Available at: http://followthethings.com (Accessed: <add your date here>)
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’ (see our page on this scene here). His aim, to quote from the summary on that 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. Authors, filmmakers and activists who have taken a ‘follow the thing’-based (or material cultural) approach to understanding trade have crossed all kinds of borders, and persuaded people who are disconnected from, or invisible to, one another to consider and act upon their relational connections and responsibilities for centuries (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 the discrediting of 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 knowledge is arguably the result of a diverse and dispersed body of trade justice activism that has applied 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 makes it effective because corporations cannot easily understand or counter it as a coherent 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 include 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
What kind of trade justice activism is showcased here?
This site showcases ‘follow the thing’ films, books, academic journal articles, art installations, newspaper articles and undergraduate research. This work has followed nuts, t-shirts, tablet computers, cash, bullets and more. It aims to better understand global capitalism by paying attention to the ‘social lives’ of individual things as they come into being, move and change between farms, factories, shops, homes and beyond in different parts of the world. It 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 followthethings.com 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 an example of, trade justice activism.
Why make a website and why use that logo?
followthethings.com not only curates and studies examples of trade justice activism, but is also an example of trade justice activism in its own right. It has drawn on two main tactics: make a website and make it familiar. A key task to make our website familiar was to design its logo. This was achieved through a combination of design activism and a found lecture slide. Explaining the design activism she and her students created for the Bananas!* documentary (and its sequel) that are featured in our store, Rebeca Méndez explained:
When I left advertising I was interested in applying [the] lessons of mass market messaging to non-profit or cultural organizations, where the motive is not monetary profit, but spreading a social awareness. … Because non-profit agencies and many cultural institutions do not have big budgets to spend on marketing and advertising, you have to find this force within, so it will propel itself and do the work for you … The original movie title BANANAS! had a two-fold edge; it means that bananas are the subject matter of the film, and the exclamation mark makes it into a widely known catch phrase used to exclaim indignity and disbelief about an absurd situation, as in: ‘This mess is so bananas! ’ We wanted to add a third dimension of awareness to the title that tells you there is more to find out about bananas. There is a footnote to its jolly image, this information that has been omitted, that once revealed will make you think twice about the food that we consume. The asterisk is our engine to activate a movement, and, in hindsight, it is perhaps also our saving grace. With the addition of an asterisk to the title we acquire this built-in force to expose the rotten state of affairs behind the delicious bananas. … By adding this universally understood typographic character we acquire a method to reveal unjust circumstances and affect behavior. It has the potential to become a tool to unmask unethical business practices in any industry. That’s the idea and ambition (Source: Méndez in Cook et al 2010, np link).
We wanted our store’s logo to ‘find the forces’ of internationally well-known online stores and use them to do some work for us. Our logo brief was inspired in part by the many online stores that we visited to select familiar design features, and by a diagram from lecture slide by Professor Trevor Barnes, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia in Canada (see above left: from Cook et al 2015). Trevor had created it to exlain the ‘follow the thing’ approach to his students. The text above the diagram read:
Early work presented commodity chains as a simplified network (supposes a single order and one direction of movement): A => B => C => D (commodity chain as simplified network). But networks can be more complex [as illustrated by the second A-B-C-D diagram below] (Barnes nd, np).
CEO Ian asked our site’s graphic design team to wrap around our site’s name a couple of arrows whose shape and direction were borrowed from Trevor’s slide. We chose a black text with orange arrows on a white background because this was a common colourway. In 2022, a review of ‘digital renderings’ of otherwise unknown supply chains described the 2011-2024 design of followthethings as:
Simulation, familiarity, particularity: follow-the-things gathers documentation of the supply chain underbellies of various commodities that users can browse as if shopping online. [And] … an Amazon underbelly of sorts, designed to match the feel of online shopping but linking the visitor instead to scholarship, films, stories, reporting on a given product (Matthiessen & Steele 2022, p.16).
For more detail about the design of our logo and every other part of the 2011 followthethings.com store, see Cook et al (2015, 2017). The 2025 redesign which created the website you’re visiting right now shared the same design principles as the original site, bit with updated reference to the ways in which popular shopping and video-sharing websites have more recently been designed.
Sources
Trevor Barnes (nd) Commodity chains and consumption: lecture topic 13. Department of Geography, University of British Columbia (https://followthethings.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/ftt_trevor_barnes_lecture_slides.pdf last accessed 9 Augist 2025)
Ian Cook et al (2020) Bananas!* followthethings.com/bananas.shtml (last accessed 10 August 2025)
Ian Cook et al (2015) Fabrication critique et web 2.0: les géographies matérielles de followthethings.com.Géographie et Cultures 91-92, p.23-48 [download the English version here]
Ian Cook et al (2017) followthethings.com: analysing relations between the making, reception and impact of commodity activism in a transmedia world. In Söderström, O. & Kloetzer, L. (eds.) Innovations sociales: comment les sciences sociales transforment la société, Neuchátel, Switzerland: University of Neuchátel, p.46-60
Miriam Matthiessen & Anne Lee Steele (2022) Rendering supply chains research and its (dis)contents: an anti-paper on open knowledge and maintenance as a research ethos. APRJA 11(1), p.10-27
Why is the site’s tagline ‘another kind of shopping’?
On followthethings.com ‘shopping’ has an important double meaning, both “to seek or examine goods, property, etc. offered for sale” and “to behave treacherously toward; inform on; betray” or “to give away information about” those goods, property, etc (Anon nd). Anyone who has made work featured on the site, and anyone who has visited the site, is therefore referred to as a ‘shopper’ (for more, see Cook et al 2015).
Sources
Anon (nd) Shop. dictionary.com (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shop last accessed 17 July 2011)
Ian Cook et al (2015) Fabrication critique et web 2.0: les géographies matérielles de followthethings.com. Géographie et Cultures 91-92, p.23-48 [download the English version here]
Is anything for sale?
No. This is a non-commercial website.
How is the website organised?
followthethings.com is organised like an online store, with Fashion, Grocery, Electronics, Health & Beauty and other ‘departments’ and different ways of shopping on its homepage via ‘iconic brands’, or ‘prime content’ for example. Each ‘department’ 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 above), 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 about these examples?
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.
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: ‘article pages’ (a small number of original newspaper articles reproduced in full, e.g. A gadget to die for on the launch of the iPad), ‘compilation pages’ (made from found quotations that we have re-arranged for you to read), and ‘follow it yourself’ pages (work by students and followthethings.com staff and interns which has been inspired by the website’s content).
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 product for sale on amazon, 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 these conversations (see our ‘Back to School‘ page for ideas).
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:
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:
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 👉
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
Who has produced its pages?
The design of followthethings.com was created, trialled and revised by CEO Ian in 2010-2011 with the help of a ‘user crew’ including James Evans, Peter Jackson, Tim Cresswell, Jane Hodgson, Duncan Fuller, Shelley Stephenson, Keith Brown, Tracey Skelton, Alison Hulme, Nissa Ramsay, Damian Maye, Alan Parkinson, Shelley Sacks, Jenny Chan, Kerry Burton, David Lambert, Helen Griffiths, Lisa Tucker, Estelle Levin, Alex Hughes, Phil Crang, Neil Coe, Inge Daniels, Andrea Chung, Freddie Abrahams, Sarah Wrathmell, Mike Goodman, Roger Firth, George Marcus, Louise Ellis, Becky Morris, Mary Biddulph, Leah Hager Cohen, Heather Putnam, Kris Olds, Deborah Leslie, Louise Crewe, Raul Sutton, Alice Williams, Melanie Jackson, Di Swift, Karin Mak and Kate Rich. The 2025 redesign was trialled and revised with the help of members of the University of Exeter’s Cultural and Historical Geographies Research Group, including Laura Smith, Lizzie Hobson, Alice Angus, Nicola Thomas and Daisy Curtis.
Most of followthethings.com’s pages have been produced by students taking CEO Ian’s ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the Universities of Birmingham and Exeter in the UK and Keith Brown’s ‘Anthropologies of Global Connection’ module at Brown University in the USA. Student authorship is acknowledged in the page reference which is listed under the summary/abstract at the start of a page, and between the final comment and the source list further down, for example (from the Gravesend, 2007 page: Bollands et al 2024):
Some pages have been produced by CEO Ian and Exeter-based followthethings.com interns and Brown-based Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantships [UTRA] students. These interns and UTRAs have been: Jeff Bauer, Maura Pavalow, Emma Buck, Jasmine Lee, Daisy Livingstone, Aidan Waller, Jack Parkin, Alice Goodbrook, Emma Christie Miller, Eeva Kemppainen, Eleanor Bird, Jack Parkin, Tommy Sadler, Rachael Midlen, Nancy Scotford, Charlotte Brunton, Will Kelleher, Jenny Hart, Diana Shifrina, Maura Pavalow, Sabrina Skau, Annily Skye-Jeffries, Caroline Weston Goodman, Kate Fox, Lily Petherick, Zahra Ali, Beth Massey, Jemma Sherman, Annabel Ray, Sarah Ader, Izzie Jeffrey, Natalie Cleverly and Lucian Harford. Each page summary has been written by CEO Ian, who has written everything else (including these FAQs) and edited every student- and intern-written page.
How has this site been funded?
The followthethings.com project began as CEO Ian’s unfunded experiment until site research was undertaken through Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantships (UTRAs) awarded in the summers of 2010 and 2011 [employing Jeff Bauer, Sabrina Skau, Maura Pavalow, Diana Shifrina, Emma Buck and Jasmine Lee: see Jeff’s blog here & Jasmine’s blog here]. These were funded by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, USA and were supervised by Dr Keith Brown who collaborated with CEO Ian at the start of the project, and protoyped its student participation. Ian and Keith had been colleagues at the University of Wales, Lampeter and ended up teaching parallel modules at Exeter and Brown on the ‘Geographies of material culture’ and the ‘Anthropologies of global connection’ respectively.
The followthethings.com project has since been funded mostly by the University of Exeter, initially by its’ International Office to support a Memorandum of Understanding between Exeter and Brown universities which was signed in 2012, and since then by the University of Exeter’s College of Life & Enviromental Sciences and Faculty of Environment, Science & Economy as a means to offer students nicely-paid internships on academic research projects [these employed Daisy Livingstone, Aidan Waller and Jack Parkin in 2011; Eeva Kemppainen, Eleanor Bird and Jack Parkin in 2012; Tommy Sadler, Rachael Midlen & Nancy Scotford in 2013; Charlotte Brunton, Will Kelleher and Jenny Hart in 2014; Annabel Ray, Sarah Ader and Izzie Jeffrey in 2019; Natalie Cleverly in 2021 – blog here – and Lucian Harford in 2025].
In 2017-18, former followthethings.com intern Eeva Kemppainen was working for the Finnish Fair Trade NGO Eettisen Kaupan Puolesta and gained funding from the Kone Foundation to collaborate with followthethings.com on a media literacy project using ‘follow the thing’ culture jamming activism [see Eeva’s blog here, & Tani 2018: employing Annily Skye-Jeffries, Caroline Weston Goodman, Kate Fox, Lily Petherick, Zahra Ali, Beth Massey and Jemma Sherman].
In 2024, funding was awarded by the Department of Geography at the University of Exeter to employ Patricia Moffett to work with Ian to update the design of followthethings.com. Additional design advice came from Edie Cook.
Sources
Sirpa Tani (2018) Tarinoita papaijasta, etnografiasta ja tieteen rajojen koettelusta: haastattelussa Ian Cook ja Eeva Kemppainen. Terra 130(1), p.39-42
What’s ‘under construction’?
followthethings was first published in 2011, and this version was published in January 2025. The 2025 re-design 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 fleshing 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!
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 it 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 page on 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.
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 site’s Terms of Use, Disclaimer and Takedown Policy are set out on its Legals page here.
What does the homepage timeline show?
1989
1992
1998
2010
Wasteland | China, Britain And The Nunzilla Conundrum | Santa's Workshop | My Fancy High Heels | Simpson’s Couch Gag (series 22, episode 3) | The Forgotten Space | Trein Maersk: A Report To The NATOarts Board Of Directors | Made In Dagenham | Inside Job | Our New Commemorative £2 coin | A Gadget To Die For | iPhone 4CF
2019
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. Currently followthethings.com 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‘) to the passing of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive in 2024 (see the example detective work on our ‘follow it yourself‘ advice page on Gillette Razor Blades).
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
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.
