2017 – followthethings.com

“Who made my clothes?“
A ‘follow it yourself’ detective work task originally written for learners taking Fashion Revolution’s / University of Exeter’s ‘Who made my clothes?’ free online course starting in 2017 .
Introductory video embedded above. Course outline available on the Futurelearn website here (course no longer available). Course instagram feed here and twitter feed here. Search for learners’ blog posts here.

In the summers of 2017 and 2018, we ran a free online course called ‘Who made my clothes?’ with and for the Fashion Revolution movement. 16,000 people from all over the world, many with experience working in the industry, joined us for three weeks to Be Curious (week 1), Find Out (week 2), and Do Something (week 3). We’re hoping the course will run again but, in the meantime, wanted to share some of its content: the parts where we showed how fashion’s supply chains work and the places and lives they connect (via an excellent webdoc series from NPR which is featured on our site here) and then how you can do this research yourselves, with your own clothes, to create your own personal answers to the question ‘Who made my clothes?’ You can try this for yourself, set it for your class to do, whatever you like. It starts with each person choosing an item of clothing that’s special to them, one they wear every day, one they know nothing about. The mystery helps. Follow our advice… and see what you can find, and how you can creatively express and share these findings. This task will in volve a lot of educated guesswork, but you can always get in touch with the brands to see if you’ve got it right! We’ll add some of our learners’ posts along the way so you can see what’s possible.

Page reference: Ian Cook, Verity Jones & Kellie Cox (2025) Who made my clothes? followthethings.com/who-made-my-clothes.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)

Estimated reading time: 19 minutes

Posted on December 2, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Step Away From The Weapon

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Security

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

“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.

Posted on September 30, 2024January 9, 2025 by Ian Cook

A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump

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Recycle my waste

DUMPED & PROCESSED IN GHANA

DOCUMENTARY FILM

POP THE BUBBLE

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

“A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump“
A documentary film starring by Reggie Yates, produced by Harriet Morter for BBC TV.
Available in full above (with ads). Available on the BBC’s iPlayer platform without ads (with login) here. Search online for streaming options here.

“A harrowing new BBC documentary has exposed the continued illegal dumping of e-waste in developing countries. … [Presenter] Reggie [Yates], whose parents were born in Ghana, heads to the country’s capital – Accra – to spend a week living on one of the largest electronic waste dumps in the world. Nicknamed Agbogbloshie, this 20-acre site was established in the 1990s and has grown from a former wetland area with rivers, farms and a lagoon, to one of the most toxic sites on the planet. An electronic graveyard littered with fridges, computers, air conditioning units and TV monitors, the dump sits beneath a permanent plume of thick black smoke. That’s because Agbogbloshie’s ‘burner boys’ – a name given to the manual workers at the very bottom of the chain – burn the waste electronics, which are bought and dismantled in bulk by wholesalers, to salvage precious metals like copper, aluminium and lead. The men, who often work in gangs in strong competition with one another, sell the precious metals on as raw materials. They’re paid in pennies for their efforts and live in extreme poverty – rarely earning enough to move further up the chain – but they’re paying the ultimate price: with their lives” (Source: Anon 2017, np link).

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump (holding page). followthethings.com/a-week-in-a-toxic-waste-dump.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: tbc minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Hard To Follow Things: Natural Gas

Field photograph, taken in 2015. A Northern Gas Networks repair team responds to a reported gas leak in County Durham. The way gas drew actors such as these in to respond to its escape provided a valuable opportunity for me to talk to practitioners and to observe the practices they employed to visualise and govern natural gas.
Field photograph of a section of low-pressure distribution pipe, taken in Middlesborough in 2015. This pipe has been excavated as part of a nation-wide programme of pipeline replacement.
Field photograph taken in 2015 during a visit to a meter calibration facility, owned by DNV-GL.

followthethings.com
Home & Auto

SOURCED FROM THE NORTH SEA

USED IN THE UK

FOLLOW IT YOURSELF

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

FOLLOW THE THING

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“Hard To Follow Things: Natural Gas“
A blog post by Peter Forman originally published on the followthethings.com blog.
Available in full below. Originally published here.

PhD student Peter Forman wants to follow the thing, but his thing is natural gas. That’s a difficult thing to follow. Most of the things that people follow could be held in their hand, placed in their shopping bag. But it’s difficult and dangerous to do that with gas. Most of the things that people follow clearly come from somewhere. This banana was grown in this country. This phone was assembled in that country. But natural gas molecules from different sources get mixed up, so you can’t follow this commodity from source to destination, from production to consumption. It also gets from A to B underground, along pipes whose exactly network is a closely guarded secret. So how do you follow gas? For Peter, you find the places where it comes to the surface, in infrastructure, where it leaks, where the gas company vans and workers are digging holes, mending and replacing piping, that kind of thing. Thing-followers know that their thing is going to be a co-author of their work. It’s going to shape the way they work, and how they can study it. Nothing is impossible to follow, you just need some creative thinking, theorising and fieldwork strategies to work it out. As Peter says a the end of his post, ‘Every “thing” introduces its own challenges for study, and as thing-followers, we must be attentive to these specificities, continue to develop novel strategies for dealing with these difficulties, and continue to share our experiences of the challenges encountered.’ He’s sharing his experiences below.

Page reference: Pete Forman (2024) Hard To Follow Things: Natural Gas. followthethings.com/hard-to-follow-things-natural-gas.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.

Posted on August 19, 2024January 10, 2025 by Ian Cook

Help Me Please PMP Staff Are Evil

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Ship my order

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

ASK FOR HELP

PUT A MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

MAKE IT SNAPPY

ADD TO THE MIX

MAKE IT A MYSTERY

“Help Me Please PMP Staff Are Evil“
An anonymous note found in a make-up advent calendar ordered from amazon.co.uk and reported in the Daily Mirror newspaper.
Photograph of note reproduced above.

‘A mum says her teenage daughter discovered a ‘help me’ note hidden inside an Amazon Christmas delivery. Kim Dorsett said April, 13, found the words scrawled onto an invoice inside a £30 make-up advent calendar ordered by her dad Philip. The note said: ‘Help me please, PMP staff are evil.’ PMP is the recruitment agency used by Amazon to fill jobs at its distribution sites. The discovery comes just over a week after a Sunday Mirror investigation exposed shocking working conditions inside Amazon’s huge warehouse in Tilbury, Essex’ (Source: Selby & Taylor 2017, np link).

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Help Me Please PMP Staff Are Evil (holding page). followthethings.com/help-me-please.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: tbc minutes.

Posted on August 17, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Plastic Bag

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My shopping bag | Recycle my waste

2017

UNBRANDED

SINGLE USE PLASTIC BAG

CHANGE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“Plastic bag“
A short film directed by Ramin Bahrani and narrated by Werner Herzog for ITVS.
Published on YouTube, embedded in full above. Search online for other streams here.

Remember those thin plastic bags that used to be available, free, at the checkout? This is the starting point for Ramin Beahrani’s short film. What lives do they lead after the shopping is emptied from them at home? And what if one of them could tell that story for itself (in a droll Bavarian accent)? What would it say? It’s exciting to have finally been chosen, there at the checkout, to fulfil your destiny. To help a shopper carry their shopping home. The shopper-bag relationship is short-lived, but beautiful. But what if she then uses you to pick up her dog’s poo? And put you in a bin? How would you feel about her then, as your life continued, further and further away from hers? You’re not the slightest bit biodegradable. Your life is going to last for ever, starting in a landfill dump. What’s it like to be there with millions of bits of other trash? Imagine being caught in the wind, blown through the countryside, travelling hundreds of miles, and ending up in the sea, with the fish, possibly causing them all kinds of problems. Who and what might you have seen and met on your journey? What would you ponder about your life now its purpose is so far in the past? It’s a silly and unbelievable plot, but a wonderfully moving film. Viewers are surprised to find themselves empathising with a plastic bag. Caring about its fate. How its life could have been different. Maybe this is the best way to change people’s minds about the mountains of waste created by capitalism and its commodity culture. See what you think…

Page reference: Molly Healy, Josephine Thompson, Daisy Aylott, Lily Andrews, Kate Ward, Charlotte Rooker, James Swain, Edward Denton & Ethan Langfield (2024) Plastic Bag (taster). followthethings.com/plastic-bag.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.

Field photograph of a section of low-pressure distribution pipe, taken in Middlesborough in 2015. This pipe has been excavated as part of a nation-wide programme of pipeline replacement.

Field photograph taken in 2015 during a visit to a meter calibration facility, owned by DNV-GL.