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Barracetamol’s Family Reunion

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Health & Beauty | Home & Auto

Barracetamol’s Family Reunion
A cartoon character created, brought to life, placed, photographed and posted online by Elaine King, Nancy Scotford, Rosie Cotgreave, Katie Lewis, Jack Ledger, Alice Wakeley, Olivia Rogers, Dennis Yeung, Isabelle Baker and Hannah Willard.
Original interview with Barracetamol below. Family reunion photos available on Flickr here. Barracetamol’s twitter feed here. Download Barracetamol’s Family Reunion Action Pack here to print and place your own Barracetamol.

In 2012, students start the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ by researching different examples of trade justice activism to add to the followthethings.com website (not all of them made it). Next, students who have researched different examples come together to create their own original examples of trade justice activism. They pick up some important ideas from their own research and what has already been published here on followthethings.com. They know the importance of taking commodities to pieces by looking through their ingredients and searching each one for mining, factory, farm and other human stories from their origins. They know the importance for filmmakers and activists of finding or creating a charismatic character for their audience members to relate to and empathise with. They’re familiar with literature arguing – and examples showing – that commodities have their own agentic power, can teach us things, and can be imagined coming alive and teaching us a few things. One group of students chooses something they all carry around with them: paracetamol. They look through its list of ingredients on the box. And look them up online. They find stories about talc and its miners and magnesium stearate and its connection to palm oil workers. These ingredients aren’t even in the pills, but they do help to make them. They use news stories to follow these two ingredients to their possible origins, and then turn around and look back towards their consumption. Yes, these workers and these ingredients help to make the paracetamol they carry around with them. But they start looking at the ingredients in other products, and find that talc and/or magnesium stearate are loads of other commodities too: toothpaste, paint, bronzer, beer and more. The task of the paracetamol cartoon character that they create – Barracetamol – is to go shopping with them, to find his missing relations, and to have his photo taken with related commodities with a little caption to post on his socials. He’s trying to tap into the vibe of those tear-jerking family reunion shows on TV. A familiar genre. The group’s creative process seems silly. The students enjoy it. They find it funny a lot of the time. But there’s a serious message about commodity-following behind this. At a teardown-level, countless commodities have the same ingredients sourced from the same places, mined and made by the same people. So a simple ‘this comes from there and therefore I should or should not buy it’ narrative obscures the complex interconnectedness of things in the global economy. Not everything is made for its final consumer. Barracetamol tries to convey a more complex story in a relatable way. Group member Nancy imagines that these moving reunions have made Barracetamol a minor celebrity. So he’s profiled in a magazine. Below you can read the interview.

Page reference: Elaine King, Nancy Scotford, Rosie Cotgreave, Katie Lewis, Jack Ledger, Alice Wakeley, Olivia Rogers, Dennis Yeung, Isabelle Baker & Hannah Willard (2012) Barracetamol’s Family Reunion. followthethings.com/barracetamols-family-reunion.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 27 minutes.

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Kidney Trade

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Health & Beauty

Kidney Trade
Research mapping by followthethings.com intern Eeva Kemppainen.

followthethings.com intern Eeva Kemppainen is reading academic and activist work on the illegal trade in human organs. How they’re obtained, from whom, by whom, where in the world. How they’re transplanted, into whose bodies, by which surgeons, where in the world. Everybody and everything in between. The international criminal investigations and court cases where it comes to the surface. The covert journalism and ethnographic research that exposes it. It’s the most labyrinthine and startling example of ‘follow the thing’ commodity tracing and activism. But there’s no one example we can feature on our site. But something like this needs to be in our collection. Eeva does this by taking passages from lots of academic and newspaper articles that mention specific places, notes what aspect of the illegal kidney trade takes place there, and adds them as points on a google map. What she maps is an amazing, complex world of illegal activities, (un)ethical academic and journalistic practices, and the connected lives of differently desperate ‘donors’ and ‘recipients. How real can it make the traffic of these organs seem? See for yourself.

Page reference: Eeva Kemppainen (2012) Kidney Trade. followthethings.com/kidney-trade.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated browsing time: 35 minutes.

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The Pill (a.k.a. A Female Issue)

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Health & Beauty

The Pill (a.k.a. A Female Issue)
Undergraduate coursework created by Kate Ross.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Exeter is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. Because you’re a cyborg, your body cannot function without the people, animals, technologies, networks that makes its inputs like food and medicine. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. See what you can find online and write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Kate Ross – chooses a prescription drug that she takes every day called Co-cyprindiol. It’s a contraceptive pill that’s also prescribed for skin and other conditions. When searches online to find out more about it, she discovers women in China, Brazil and Taiwan who are forced to take contraceptive pills in order to work in the factories and on the farms which make the stuff she buys. Her argument is that her connection with them is not only through the goods they might produce than she might buy. Their connection is through their consumption – as women – of the same medicine, voluntarily or not. They have something in common. Their bodies. Their fertility. Their medication. Once she learns about their relationships with the drug she takes, she thinks about how she’s feeling every time she pops one out of the foil pack… and then I see that face. To make her coursework more visceral, she takes an empty Co-cyprindiol foil, sticks it to a piece of paper, and handwrites these thoughts around it, day by day. These are the same foils that the supply chain workers she’s read about will pop their pills out of every day. She writes her thoughts and footnotes these with academic and detective work readings that have helped her to think this way.

Page reference: Kate Ross (2004) The Pill (A.K.A. A Female Issue). followthethings.com/the-pill-leaflet-thyroxine-a-k-a-a-female-issue.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.

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Mirror

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Health & Beauty | Home & Auto

Mirror
Undergraduate coursework written by Lucinda Lawrence.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Exeter is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. And write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Lucinda Lawrence – creates the most ‘meta’ example we have ever seen. It’s about a mirror that she bought in a market. It’s about the science and ingredients of mirrors. It’s about the people who mine its ingredients. Like tin. It’s about who you see when you look in the mirror, who helps you to be you. And – aaaand – she submits two things. A piece of paper with some typed writing on it. And a mirror. The writing has been reversed, so it can only be read in the mirror. And the mirror has a message written in red lipstick on its surface. ”If you fall, no one’s gonna carry you out (Rubin Age 13)’ (Cook 2007, p,2).’ It’s a fantastic piece of work. But you’ll need a mirror to read it. It’s worth the effort! When we showed this at an academic conference, one member of the audience called it ‘conceptual art’.

[If you want more ‘who I see in the mirror’ trade justice activism, see our page on a short film called Handprint here]

Page reference: Lucinda Lawrence (2009) Mirror. followthethings.com/mirror.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

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‘I Found This In A Box Of Halloween Decorations’ (+ Letter from Masanjia)

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Gifts & Seasonal

“‘I Found This In A Box Of Halloween Decorations’ (+ Letter from Masanjia)”
A letter written by ‘Mr Zhang’ (Sun Yi) in a Chinese prison factory and found in a box of Kmart Halloween decorations bought in Oregon, USA by Julie Keith (+ a documentary film starring Sun Yi and Julie Keith directed and produced by Leon Lee for Flying Cloud Productions).
Letter posted online by Julie Keith, reproduced in ‘Letter From Masanjia (trailer embedded above). Search online to watch the documentary here.

In 2013, shopper Julie Keith is unpacking a box of styrofoam Halloween decorations she bought from her local K-Mart. In between the ghoulish plastic gravestones, she finds a folded-up letter. It’s written in English by someone who says that they’re a prison factory worker in China who has helped to make this product. They give the address of the prison (called Masanjia) and say that its inmates work long hours and have been tortured, beaten and insulted. It asks its recipient to forward the letter to the ‘World Human Rights Organisation’. Julie thinks it’s genuine and posts o photo of the letter on her facebook with the caption ‘I found this in a box of Halloween decorations’. It gets a flurry of responses. Is it genuine? What should she do with it? There isn’t a ‘World Human Right Organisation’. The discussions spread. The post is shared many times. Soon it’s being reported on the local TV news. Next it’s a global news story. Who is this person? How did they write this note? How did they smuggle it into a box of Halloween decorations? How many letters did they write? What did they hope would happen? What danger were they in for doing this? Can journalists find the author and verify the story? And, most importantly, why are ‘made in China’ goods coming from factory labour? Isn’t that illegal? Next, this story is picked up by a documentary filmmaker who tries to answer these questions, and more. He find the author, now out of prison but still living in China. They film secretly. Sun Yi is not only the best travel guide but – helpfully – is also a cartoonist who draws the scenes of his captivity and factory labour to add unfilmable footage to the documentary. The filmmaker arranges for the Sun Yi and Julie Keith to meet in person. It’s an emotionally charged scene. She hands him the letter, they talk about their connected lives and the impact that the story about their connection has had on both of them. They are so happy to see eachother. They seem to care deeply about one another because, together, they have accidentally (her) and on purpose (him) become trade justice activists. They agree that they’re doing the right thing. But what are the consequences? He sought to expose this system of prison labour in China, but she didn’t. It’s illegal to import goods into the USA that are made with forced labour. That’s hugely problematic for the Chinese prison factory complex. So it’s hugely risky for him as the person who was instrumental in exposing this, helping to turn it into an international news story by hopefully writing a letter to an unknown consumer that asked for help. For us, this is an extraordinary example of trade justice activism because of its documentation (there’s so much!) and its impacts (so huge, unexpected and sad).

NB – this page currently focuses on the letter and will be updated to add details about the film.

Page reference: Harry Marriot, Alex Partington, William Finley, Milly Bowen, Sarah Murray & Jenny Sharp (2014) ‘I Found This In A Box Of Halloween Decorations’ (+ Letter from Masanjia). followthethings.com/i-found-this-in-a-box-of-halloween-decorations.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 34 minutes.

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Step Away From The Weapon

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Security

Step Away From The Weapon
Undergraduate coursework written by Ginny Childs, originally published on followtheblog.org here.
Full text below.

In the version of the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module that was first taught at the University of Exeter, groups of students were given books, music videos, films and other example of trade justice activism to research. Their job was to produce draft pages on these sources for the followthethings.com website. Ginny Childs was in a group researching Indian rap artist Sofia Ahraf’s ‘Dow vs Bhopal: A Toxic Rap Battle’ music video [see this page in our website here]. Ginny wasn’t born when the Bhopal factory exploded in 1984 but, as a member of the university’s Office Training Corps, she notices stringent rules about toxic chemical leaks in her rifle drills. While thousands of people of Bhopal had been poisoned by Methyl Isocyanate, she was at risk from a tiny dose of the radioactive hydrogen isotope called tritium that was in her rifle battlesight. The safety procedures in place if that leaked its tritium are stringent. So she investigates the safety procedures the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal in the 1980s and wonders if she’s benefitted from better chemical safety regs that emerged after the disaster. Dow still hasn’t paid compensation top the Bhopal victims. And she’s still reliant on Dow (who bought Union Carbide) as a company making chemical ingredients in the commoditiies she loves. So what can she do with what she learns? How can she make a difference? Share Ashraf’s ”toxic rap battle’ video on her socials maybe? Keep the story alive.

Page reference: Ginny Childs (2017) Step Away From The Weapon. followthethings.com/step-away-from-the-weapon.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

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Crude: The Real Price Of Oil

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Home & Auto

Crude: The Real Price Of Oil
A documentary film directed & produced by Joe Berlinger for First Run Features.
Trailer & pay per view stream embedded above. Search online for other streaming options here. Watch clips on the film’s YouTube channel here. Check its website here.

30,000 people living in Ecuador’s remote Amazon rainforest are taking out a US$27 billion class action suit against oil giant Chevron in the US over the dumping of toxic waste that has (allegedly) ruined their environment, livelihoods and health. Filmmaker Joe Berlinger hears about the case from the plaintiff’s US attorney and visits Ecuador to see what’s happening. He sees a gathering of indigenous people preparing a meal from canned tuna – unable to fish in their own water because its toxicity has killed or diseased any fish they might catch. The US oil giant Texaco had been drilling for oil here since the 1960s, and had allegedly dumped 18 billion gallon of toxic wastewater in the environment. Chevron had bought Texaco many years later so bought this responsibility too. Berlinger can’t imagine what his documentary will look like, or how it will appeal to audiences, until he meets an Ecuadorian oilfield labourer-turned-lawyer called Pablo Farjado who is working on the case. He’s the hero Berlinger needs, and he films without funding for a year (another two follow, after funding is secured). To join the dots in this case, he visits multiple places and talks to people who speak multiple languages. He films the trial, giving equal credence to the prosecution and the defence. He wants the audience to act as the jury, making up their own minds about the case. The film has fascinating twists, like the celebrities who get involved – most notably Trudie Styler and Sting – who help to turn what could have been a local news story into an international ’cause célèbre’. Once the film is released nationwide in the USA – even though the case is not resolved – it’s described as tragic, light, and comedic thriller because of its characters and unexpected twists and turns. One reviewer describes the film as ‘one of the most extraordinary legal dramas of our time’. Chevron’s lawyers and scientists have their say on screens, but audiences don’t warm to them. It’s a PR nightmare for Chevron. So the company attacks the film, filmmaker and prosecution team. Crude is one-sided, propaganda. And Chevron alleges corruption in the prosecution team which they say is shown in the film. A US court agrees that Berlinger should hand over all 600+ hours of footage so that Chevron’s complaint can be investigated, despite his First Amendments rights as a journalist. More celebrities (as well as filmmakers, journalists and professional organisations) come to his defence. But defending such a case is expensive when you’re up against an adversary with bottomless pockets. This is another excellent example of the ‘Streisand Effect’ – can attempts to intimidate trade justice activists (even when they’re trying to be even-handed!) discredit them and their work? Or can it create free publicity that makes it yet another unmissable film that a corporation ‘didn’t want you to see’? And, finally, can this type of manufactured scandal wither way, because less and less emphasis gets placed on the lives and environments of Ecuador’s indigenous people whose lives have been ruined by the oil industry?

Page reference: Jesse Fratkin, Judy Hwang and Shay O’Brien (2011) Crude: The Real Price Of Oil. followthethings.com/crude-the-real-price-of-oil.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 47 minutes.

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Curse Of The Black Gold: 50 Years Of Oil In The Niger Delta

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Home & Auto

Curse Of The Black Gold: 50 Years Of Oil In The Niger Delta
A coffee-table book featuring the photos of Ed Kashi, edited by Michael Watts for Powerhouse.
Video promotion embedded above. Preview long & borrow here. Search online to buy here.

Photojournalist Ed Kashi visits the oilfields of the Niger Delta to document the consequences of 50 years of oil extraction on people and environment. His photographs are published in a book edited by geographer Michael Watts containing essays by prominent Nigerian journalists and human rights activists, and Watts himself. It looks and feels like a coffee table book: hardback, large glossy photos, and text. It’s a thing of beauty, but its subject matter is very far from beautiful. Why is it that The Niger Delta is such a ‘hell-hole’ of poverty, conflict and environmental destruction when it could be as wealthy as Kuwait? Kashi travels through this dangerous area with armed rebel groups and takes photos of workers wearing uniforms with familiar oil company logos. Kashi wants to open the public’s eyes about this scramble for oil in Nigeria. He wants them to feel the emotions that he felt when looking these oil workers in the eye. He creates the book, a short promo film to post in YouTube, and gives talks about it. With the murder of local activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, this place and this industry is all over the news. But seeing this up close, in page after page of large and lush colour photographs can – he believes – change people’s minds. But what happens when people do? Are the photos so shocking that they prompt people into action, or into despair? And who bears the responsibility for the unfolding chaos and exploitation in the Niger Delta – the oil companies, the local and national politicians in Nigeria, the foreign governments who support both, oil consumers? Yes. All of them. And Kashi’s photographs – along with Watts’ essays – help to fuel debates about these issues amongst readers in university classes and beyond. There’s something uniquely provocative about coffee-table book trade justice activism.

Page reference: Alice Goodbrook, Jack Middleton, Luke Pickard, Jessica Plumb, Emma Rowe & Megan Wheatley (2011) Pipe Trouble. followthethings.com/curse-of-the-black-gold.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 21 minutes.

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Life Of A Bullet

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Security

Life Of A Bullet
Opening credits to the movie ‘Lord Of War’ directed by Andrew Niccol with visual effects supervisor Yann Blondel.
Opening credits embedded above. Search online to watch them here. Stream the full movie here.

Imagine you could literally follow a thing, from the thing’s own point of view – like a video game – from its sites of production to its sites of consumption and maybe beyond. The opening credits of a Hollywood movie starring Nicholas Cage do just this. Set to Buffalo Springfield’s 1960s counterculture song ‘For what it’s worth (stop, hey what’s that sound)’, Lord of War begins by following the life of a bullet from a piece of sheet metal in a Ukrainian arms factory to a bullet flying out of an AK-47 assault rifle in streets of a Sierra Leone gunfight. Along the way it’s handled by lots of different people connected through its supply chain. At the end of its life, it serves its purpose by entering the forehead of a child soldier. This is when the song abruptly stops and the screen goes black. It’s catchy, bleak and brutal. But a bullet cannot be followed like this IRL. You need some research, an imagination and some heavy duty CGI expertise: like visual effects supervisor Yann Blondel’s. At followthethings.com this example has achieved a cult status. It’s like a foundation stone in the follow the thing genre. We keep coming back to it. Not only is this 3 minutes of GGI animation the best part of the movie (many commenters agree with us on that). It’s also the most brutally clear ‘follow the thing’ example we’ve found. Plus, it’s provoked the wildest discussions we have found about anything featured ion our site. Some discussion is are about the evils of the arms trade, and its undertones of colonialism and racial capitalism. But there are so many other perspectives. Some seem to have experience of shoot-em-up POV video games, others seem to have experience with real guns and ammunition, while still others seem to have an apparently deep knowledge of CGI animation, and more besides. Read the comments we’ve arranged below to see what we mean. If you’re a budding trade justice activist and you want to provoke enthusiastic discussion with your work, maybe this is the example to dig into. But, if you want that discussion to be focused on trade (in)justice, maybe it’s not. The movie, and the iconic opening scene that we’re talking about here, do get caught up in an international campaign to regulate the arms trade alongside another example we’ve researched (check here). But that doesn’t seem to have been the intention at the start.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2019) Life Of A Bullet. followthethings.com/life-of-a-bullet.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 50 minutes.

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Darwin’s Nightmare

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Grocery | Security

Darwin’s Nightmare
A documentary film directed by Hubert Sauper for Mille et Une Productions.
Trailer embedded above. Search online for streaming options here.

Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper examines the effects of a fish that’s been introduced to the African Great Lake Victoria for commercial reasons. They’ve displaced other fish that local people rely upon for their diet and are farmed and flown away on cargo planes to be eaten by Northern consumers. More controversially, some of those planes (allegedly) return full of weapons that fuel civil wars in neighbouring countries. Here, capitalist and colonial logics create a place where Tanzanian fishermen, homeless children, prostitutes, government minsters, Russian pilots, World Bank officials, European Union commissioners live and work together in an ‘ungodly alliance’. Viewers say the film is clever, damaging and racist, and/or artfully depressing. Its director calls it a ‘feel bad’ movie. It’s nominated for an Oscar but loses to a penguin documentary. Northern consumers who love the Omega 3 in fish like Nile Perch start to boycott it, and sales are affected for a while. Darwin’s Nightmare makes Tanzania look terrible. Its government denounces the film, accuses its director of fabricating storylines (e.g the role of this arms trade plays in the spread of HIV), demands that he apologies and pursues the subjects of his film to punish them. Western governments learning about this arms trade from the film put pressure on Tanzania to stop it, and to stop silencing African journalists who have let the world know about it. One journalist criticises the film’s one dimensional portrayal of the hell caused in Tanzania by this fish trade. It’s a mixed picture. So much of its positive effects aren’t included. One critic is sued for calling the film a hoax. There are unprecedented personal attacks on the director, accusing him of acting unethically, threatening him with death and posting fake photos online of him with Saddam Hussein. The main criticism of his film is that it plays to centuries-old Western stereotypes of African savagery and backwardness. Critics say it reveals – but also helps to do – damage to the people of Tanzania. Sauper says he’s not found anything new. All he’s done is joined the dots between well known issues. Between the global arms and food trade, for example. It’s not an out and out activist film. It’s more of a film noir. No solutions are offered. So what responsibility do you have for the impacts of your film noir? Discussions of this film are super-heated.

Page reference: Aparupa Chakravarti & Jeff Bauer (2014) Darwin’s Nightmare. followthethings.com/darwins-nightmare.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 93 minutes.

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