INTENTION: consumers’ experience of commodities can be personal. Providing comfort, escape, togetherness. This is the bubble of ‘commodity fetishism’ that trade justice activists like to pop. Workers of the world helped to create these experiences. Let’s, at least, acknowledge that!
“China, Britain And The Nunzilla Conundrum“ A radio documentary presented by Anna Chen (a.k.a. Madam Miaow), produced by Sally Heaven for BBC Radio 4. Audio clip embedded above. Listen to the full radio documentary on the BBC website here (when available, with account, screengrab above) and on Box of Broadcasts here (with University subscription).
Chinese-English comedian and writer Anna Chen loves kitsch, ‘tat’, and (to some) offensive ‘stocking filler’ gifts like the clockwork fire breathing nun ‘Nunzilla’ and ‘Dashboard Jesus’ (not to mention elastic band holder ‘Mummy Mike’ and singing fish ‘Billy Bass’). Unsurprisingly, they’re ‘Made in China’ but, she wants to find out, what do they tell us and the people who design and make them about Western culture, religion and values? What gets lost and found in translation? And what do the factory workers who make them think they are for? How do they imagine the people who buy them? And what can tracing the relations between the designers, makers and consumers of cheap plastic kitsch tat tell us about China-UK relations? This is a serious piece of cross-cultural commodity following. It’s enjoyable and worrying. But there aren’t any exploited workers. What’s it hoping to achieve?
Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) China, Britain And The Nunzilla Conundrum. followthethings.com/china-britain-and-the-nunzilla-conundrum.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Banksy’s Slave Labour“ Street art by Banksy. Photo of the original artwork in situ above. Whereabouts and condition currently unknown.
It’s 2012. Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee is being celebrated in the UK. The London Olympics are also taking place. There’s Union Jack bunting everywhere. It’s cheaply and readily available in discount stores like Poundland. Including one in Wood Green, South London. Along a street where the Olympic torch relay may have passed. This is where the anonymous celebrity British street artist Banksy paints a mural of a child hunched over a sewing machine, making this bunting in India. Physical bunting is part of the work. It’s hung up on the wall and spills onto the pavement. Banksy, as usual, explains little or nothing. Commentators say it’s inspired by a 2010 exposé of child labour in Poundland’s supply chains. Like other examples of Banksy’s street art, it quickly makes the news, people visitfrom afar, locals claim it as theirs, and it’s stolen and auctioned on the international art market. Trade justice activists love it when their work goes viral. This story was everywhere. This image of child labour in pound shop supply chains was reproduced countless times. But this viral story wasn’t, unfortunately, about trade injustice. It did’t put pressure on Poundland, or any other retailer, to remove child labour from their supply chains, to improve workers’ pay and conditions, or to achieve any other trade justice goal. The story that went viral was about this Banksy being stolen and auctioned in Miami the following year and, later, in London for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s about who owns this work, who has the right to sell it, where it belongs and the irony of an artwork that critiques commodity cultrure becoming a commodity. Local residents argue that the work only makes sense in situ (a point that Banksy makes about all of his street art). It’s never returned but countless people around the world have not only seen it but also bought it. You can buy Slave Labour as a sticker, an ornament to hang on your Christmas tree, a framed print to hang on your wall, a stencil or wallpaper mural to recreate it on your wall. Because of the controversy about its removal and sale, it has become one of Banksy’s most iconic works. And the wall where it was originally posted is still haunted by its presence, with countless grafitti artists adding copies, versions and alternatives there. This is one of the most famous examples of trade justice art-activism. Banksy lending his celebrity status to the cause brought it into the media spotlight for months. But there’s no evidence that this helped to improve the pay and conditions of workers, younger and older, in pound shop supply chains. So what can we learn from what did and didn’t happen here? What could and couldn’t happen?
Page reference: Lydia Dean, Lucinda Armstrong, Jessica Bains-Lovering, Emily Hill, Harriet Allen & Rose Cirant-Carr (2025) Banksy’s Slave Labour. http://followthethings.com/banksy-slave-labour.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“The First Ever Pacemaker To Speak For Itself“ Undergraduate coursework made and recorded by Jennifer Hart Images of the pacemaker and packaging submitted is in the slideshow above, the song is embedded below.
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 what properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming’ it. Student Jennifer Hart feels guilty about the conflict minerals in her mobile phone. Then she finds that the heart pacemaker her mum is having fitted also contains those minerals. It’s a lifesaving operation. How can she reconcile her mum’s suffering and that of these minerals’ miners? How best can she express her feelings about this technological object? By making a pacemaker that knows what she knows, feels what she feels, and can sing about it. A pacemaker that can express a huge thank you.
Page reference: Jennifer Hart, J. (2014) The First Ever Pacemaker To Speak For Itself. followthethings.com/pacemaker.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Find Your Doppelganger“ A concept for a mobile phone app submitted by Rachel Grant as part of a BA Geography dissertation at the University of Exeter, UK. Full concept text below.
Student Rachel Grant likes to try out the latest apps on her smartphone. She’s tried ones that tell you which celebrity you look like. That’s OK. But there’s a photographer who finds unrelated people who look exactly alike. The technical terms is doppelganger. He arranges for them to meet, photographs them together and finds they feel connected, like lost relations. So what if there was a phone app – like the ones that help you find your celebrity lookalike – that could scan your face and introduce you to your supply chain doppelganger? A garment worker? A tungsten miner? A tea picker? A delivry driver? A plastic recycler? Someone who helped to make your stuff? Might you feel more empathetic towards supply chain workers if they looked like you? Would it be easier to imagine walking in their shoes? What if the ‘Find Your Doppelganger’ app gave you the chance to chat? What if you met up? What impact could meeting a lost ‘relation’ like this have on you?
Page reference: Rachel Grant (2024) Find Your Doppelganger. followthethings.com/doppelganger.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Machines“ A documentary film directed by Rahul Jain with cinematography by Rodrigo Trejo Villanueva for Jann Pictures, Pallas Film & IV Films. Trailer embedded above. Available on demand on Vimeo here and Dogwoof here. Available on Box of Broadcasts here and Kanopy here (with institutional login). Search online for other streaming options here.
Director Rahul Jain revisits the fabric factories of his youth to document machines and people that print patterns on the rolls of fabric bought by clothing manufacturers to make the shirt, dress or pair of tights that you or I might wear. His film is beautiful, atmospheric, metronomic, disturbing. Watching the machines at work, and the people tending them, is mesmerising. The cinematography is wonderful. It seems like a proper ‘fly on the wall’ documentary for a long time. When the workers later start to talk about their lives and work in this place, it’s depressing, hopeless, boring, toxic, abject, unhappy. This is a powerful film that moves audience members viscerally, but Jain doesn’t want them to do anything to help the workers. Towards the end, workers telling Jain that he’s just like a politician. He visits. He hears problems. He leaves. Nothing changes. So what can a film like this do? What’s the point of making it? How do audience members respond? What difference can it make? Is it about this factory and its workers? Or capitalism as a system? Is this trade justice activism? Or an arthouse film? The answer is open…
"A little deeper into the squalour and another rung down the ladder of exploitation. Children. Several young boys working on the same Primark vest we saw those women sewing earlier...
... one could be as young as 9 or 10. They're testing the stitching so the sequins don't end up falling off in the hands of customers back in Britain. When we asked their ages, their manager kept silent."
[The film then briefly shows the vest's 'atmosphere' label. This is a Primark band promising customers affordable fresh fashion]
“Primark – on the rack“ A documentary film presented by Tom Heap & produced by Frank Simmonds with Dan McDougall for BBC TV’s Panorama series. Screenshot slideshow of the contested scene embedded above. Watch on Box of Broadcasts (with institutional login) here.
The BBC produces an exposé of cheap clothing retailer Primark. It finds children making its clothes, and sewing and testing their sequins, in factories, slums and refugee camps in India. Primark is asked to contribute to the film before it’s shown. Instead, they decide to cut ties with the supply chains featured, then launch a website to counter the film’s claims. They research the film’s research to pick apart its claims, and then complain to the BBC that one 45 second scene (the one in the screenshots above) is fake. Their critic-silencing strategy has mixed success. The BBC is forced to admit that it cannot be 100% sure that the scene wasn’t faked, and the Panorama team are forced to hand back an award they were given for the film. But Primark’s persistent public attempts to silence this investigative journalism draws attention – for years – to the company’s reputation as the ‘poster boy of child labour in the UK’. Supporters of the film highlight the other 3,555 minutes of the film that Primark didn’t claim the producers had faked? Then, 5 years after the film was broadcast, the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapses and over a thousand garments workers are crushed to death making high street clothes. Journalists, filmmakers and others keep this tragedy relentlessly in the news. UK newspaper headlines refer to this as the ‘Primark factory’. There’s no way that this footage is fake. Primark has to react differently this time.
Page reference: Kate Adley, Richard Keeble, Pippa Russell, Noora Stenholm, William Strang and Tuuli Valo (2025) Primark – on the rack. followthethings.com/primark-on-the-rack.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Where Am I Wearing? A Global Tour To The Countries, Factories, and People that Make Our Clothes“ A non-fiction book written by Kelsey Timmerman and published by Wiley. Google Books preview embedded above.
Self confessed ‘All-American Guy’ Kelsey Timmerman is curious about the ‘Made in…’ tags in his favourite clothes. He wants to go to those countries and meet the people who made them for him. So he sets off around the world to meets workers in each place. But he doesn’t work alongside them or quiz them about their pay and conditions. He wants to get to know them as people. So, in Bangladesh, they go bowling together. In Cambodia, they ride a roller-coaster. He wants to appreciate how globalisation isn’t abstract, but it happens to regular (if impoverished) people. He’s not trying to ‘nail’ a corporation. He doesn’t have strong moral views. He sees himself as an innocent abroad, a ‘touron’ (tourist + moron). Readers say this social justice meets crazy road trip book is friendly, funny, easy to read and not at all preachy. Some say everyone should go on a trip like this to appreciate who made their stuff too. What Timmerman has written either naively skims over, or brilliantly introduces, complex trade (in)justice debates. Maybe this is the best way introduce new readers to these debates? Does an example of trade justice activism have to include everything? Where do you start?
Page reference: Emma Baker, Eleanor Bird, Gemma Crease, Imogen Crookes and Coralie Sucker (2012) Where Am I Wearing? followthethings.com/where-am-i-wearing.shtml (last accessed: <insert date here>)
“The Song Of The Shirt“ A poem written by Thomas Hood, published in Punch magazine. Original publication in Punch included above.
Curiosity and concern about the poverty of the people who make everyday commodities is as old as capitalism itself. One of the most iconic and influential examples in this genre is a poem called ‘The Song Of The Shirt’ which was published in the satirical British magazine Punch in 1843. This was 24 years before Karl Marx published the first volume of Capital, with its famous opening chapter on the commodity. The subject of the poem is a woman working in East London making linen shirts for the city’s well-to-do men. It contains lines that wouldn’t be out of place in Twenty-First Century trade justice activism: ‘Oh Men, with Sisters dear! O! Men! With mothers and wives! It’s not linen you’re wearing out. But other creatures’ lives’. ‘The Song Of The Shirt’ went viral through the media of its time, being reprinted and discussed in countless newspapers, pamphlets and books across Great Britain and overseas, often with accompanying illustrations of its subject at work. It also crossed over into ‘Song Of The Shirt’ paintings, songs and plays. But how did the poverty of seamstresses come to the surface, here, at this time? How did this poem become so popular and influential? What can we learn from it today?
Page reference: Rachael Midlen & Charlotte Brunton (2014) The Song Of The Shirt (taster). followthethings.com/the-song-of-the-shirt.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)
“Confessions Of An Eco-Sinner” A non-fiction book by journalist Fred Pearce. Available to preview on Google Books (embedded above).
British journalist Fred Pearce travels 180,000 miles, to over 20 countries, to meet the people who produce (and sometimes recycle) the prawns in his curry, the cotton in his shirt, the computer on his desk, the gold in his wedding ring, and many other things. He wants to explore his own personal ecological footprint, and to work out whether he should be ashamed and/or proud of the impact that his shopping has on the world. This is classic ‘follow the thing’ research. A quest narrative. Starting in the Global North. With a person asking ‘who made my stuff?’ They travel the world to meet the people who they rely upon and then reflect on what this means for them (and maybe you) as a ‘consumer’. This is an approach that critics within the ‘follow the thing’ genre would like to ‘de-centre’. This work could start somewhere else! But what can readers learn from Fred’s travels nonetheless? Is everyone, unknowingly, an eco-sinner like he is? And what can be done to prevent the damage that consumption causes, out of sight and out of mind?
Page reference: Robert Black, Naomi Davies, Tom Mead, Pete Statham, Lucy Taylor and Laura Wilkinson (2011) Confessions Of An Eco-Sinner. followthethings.com/confessions-of-an-ecosinner.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Cries For Help Found In Primark Clothes (a.k.a. ‘Labelgate’)” Social media posts by Rebecca Jones, Rebecca Gallagher, and Amnesty International Northern Ireland. Label photos originally posted online embedded above.
Shoppers Rebecca Jones and Rebecca Gallagher find an extra label in dresses they buy from Primark stores in South Wales. One says ‘Forced to work exhausting hours’, the other ‘Degrading sweatshop conditions’. Belfast shopper Karen Wisinska then finds a letter in the pocket of some Primark shorts. It’s written in Chinese, but starts ‘SOS! SOS! SOS!’. It seems to be a coincidence. Rebecca, Rebecca and Karen post them online to share what they have found with their friends and followers. Their posts set off an international ‘whodunnit?’ which makes the national news and ties the company’s PR department in knots. Are they genuine? Are they mischief-making of an artist or activist? Either way, is what they say true?
Will Kelleher & Ian Cook (2014) Cries for help found in Primark clothes (a.k.a. ‘labelgate’). followthethings.com/cries-for-help-found-in-primark-clothes.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
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