Flip the script! – Page 2 – followthethings.com

“Radi-aid: Africa For Norway“
NGO video campaign by and for The Norwegian Students’ & Academics International Assistance Fund (SAIH).
Video playlist embedded above. Campaign website here.

It’s unusual to find a humanitarian campaign where people in the Global South take pity on people in the Global North and send them aid in the hope that it will improve their miserable, pitiless lives. The kind citizens of many African countries, blessed with warmth that many take for granted, get together to help the people of Norway who are suffering terribly from freezing cold temperatures. What better to send them? Electric radiators. Charity workers collect and deliver them to grateful aid recipients. They even record a charity single and video to raise awareness and funds, like Band Aid’s ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ or USA for Africa’s ‘We are the world’. Their song is just as awful. Just as patronising. Just as one dimensional. Just an inaccurate. Just as tear-jerking. This is a campaign by a Norwegian development NGO that wants to challenge the ‘white saviour complex’ that so much European development NGO fundraising is based upon. What if the tables were turned? What if you were represented in the way that you represent others? What if you found that offensive, partial, ridiculous? Would that lead you to think differently about humanitarian aid, the way it is represented in charity ads, and the things that its NGOs send to people who it sees as needy? Like goats. This campaign, and particularly the video for its charity single ‘Africa for Norway’, went viral. This became a very public debate. Who could have imagined that a gift of radiators could have been so effective?

Page reference: Marie Conmee, Rebecca Jones, Frederic Montaner-Wills, Thomas Paulsen, James Pidding, Hannah Rusbridge & Joe Shrimpton (2016) Radi-Aid: Africa For Norway (taster). followthethings.com/radi-aid.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Beautiful Clothes, Ugly Reality

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Fashion

IMPROVE PAY & CONDITIONS

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

MAKE IT FAMILIAR

MAKE IT PROVOCATIVE

FLIP THE SCRIPT!

WORKERS TAKE THE MIC!

ADD MOOD MUSIC

“Beautiful Clothes, Ugly Reality“
A parody catwalk show by garment factory workers sponsored by the Workers’ Information Centre & United Sisterhood Alliance, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, filmed & posted online by Heather Stillwell. See the Chenla Media version here.

Six months after police shot into a crowd of protesting garment workers in Phnom Penh, Cambodian garment workers turned to another kind of protest, a fashion show. Wearing the clothes they were paid so little to make and re-creating scenes from the violent crackdown on their street protests on stage, they challenged Western brands to play their part in stopping this violence and exploitation and paying the people who make their clothes a decent wage. Canadian photojournalist Heather Stillwell’s online film of the show went went viral. How did this happen, and what impacts did it have?

Page reference: Caroline Weston Goodman (2018) Beautiful Clothes, Ugly Reality. followthethings.com/beautiful-clothes-ugly-reality.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Page also available in Finnish here (coming soon)

Estimated reading time: 50 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 26, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Messenger Band

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Fashion

“The Messenger Band“
A protest girl band / labour rights NGO including Em [aka Saem] Vun, Leng Leakhana, Chrek Sopha, Nam Sophors, Kao Sochevika, Sothary Kun, Van Huon & others based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Band profile and selected music videos on YouTube embedded in playlist above. The Messenger Band YouTube channel here & facebook page here.

One of the most fascinating, inspiring examples of creative trade justice activism we have found. Made by garment workers, for garment (and other) workers. In 2005, a labour rights NGO based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia hold a talent concert for women working in the city’s garment factories. They want to form a girl band. Inspired by Bob Marley, it’s called ‘The Messenger Band’ because its songs and performances will carry a message to garment and other workers about their rights. They will write and perform in the style of contemporary Cambodian pop music. Sweet and beautiful songs with choreographed dance routines. But the lyrics will come from their community research with garment and other workers about their lives and struggles, and their knowledge of global trade and labour rights. They will record CDs and music videos to post online, and will perform at local concerts and during labour rights protests. Their audiences will learn the lyrics and sing along. The ‘MB’ wants to empower its audiences to claim their rights and to hold their employers to account. They sing in Khmer for Khmer-speaking audiences. They are not talking to overseas consumers, asking them to do anything to help their situation. They take advantage of the fact that women and performance are not taken seriously by the Cambodian authorities. But they are taken seriously by the working class audiences who love and learn from their music. What they do has a huge impact. Much more impact than a labour rights workshop! Labour rights organisations and NGOs outside Cambodia admire their work. They are an inspiration.

Page reference: Lily Bissell, Grace Hodges, Fran Ravel, Julia Sammut & Ellie Reynolds (2020) The Messenger Band. followthethings.com/the-messenger-band.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 62 minutes.

Posted on August 21, 2024January 5, 2025 by Mark

UDITA (ARISE)

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Fashion

“UDITA (ARISE)“
A documentary film directed by Hannan Majid & Richard York of the Rainbow Collective.
Available in full on YouTube (embedded above).

The women who work in garment factories in the Global South are often seen by factory bosses as docile and nimble fingered and by Global North journalists and activists as victims in need of saving from capitalist exploitation. But what if there was a film about their work, lives and struggles that was told from their perspectives? Watch UDITA (ASRISE)! Filmed in Dhaka, Bangladesh over five years – starting before and ending after the Rana Plaza factory collapse which killed so many women like them (including their friends and relatives) – Hannah Majid & Richard York show garment workers as an organised body of people teaching, learning and fighting for their labour rights through the campaigning and strike action of Bangladesh’s National Garment Workers’ Federation. There’s no Western filmmaker narrating their quest to find out who made their clothes. There’s no voiceover at all. The only voices are those of the women themselves. They are less interested in what ‘guilty’ consumers in the Global North can do to help them, and more interested in what they can do to help each other. So, who would want to see a film like this? Who was it made for? What are audiences supposed to take away from it? One answer is to appreciate how garment workers in the Global South have powerful collective agency. This is a fundamental, but often neglected, principle in trade justice activism. An important move for audiences to make, as the philosopher Iris Marion Young has put it, ‘from guilt to solidarity’.

Page reference: Theo Barker, Joe Collier, Annabel Baker, Lizzie Coppen & Henry Eve (2020) UDITA (ARISE). followthethings.com/udita.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 48 minutes.