Juxtapose extremes – followthethings.com

“Blood, Sweat & Takeaways“
A four-episode reality TV series produced directed & produced by James Christie-Miller for Ricochet Films for television broadcast on BBC3.
All episodes embedded above. Also available on Box of Broadcasts (with institutional login) here.

Lauren, 21, and loves luxury food. Jess, 19, is a fussy eater. Manos, 20, loves fast food. Josh, 20, loves to cook. Stacey, 20, is an ethical shopper. Olu, 25, is a fitness fanatic. But this group of multicultural Brits who don’t seem to care where their food comes from. Until they are approached by a TV company which challenges them to travel to Indonesia and Thailand and to step into the shoes of the farm, factory and trawler workers who source and process it for export. Over four episodes – on Tuna, Prawns, Rice and Chicken – they’re filmed working alongside supply chain workers, earning and spending the same 40p an hour wages, and living in the same places. They relentlessly gut, behead and loin tuna fish in a factory. They work in waist-deep mud farming prawns and up to their ankles in water in a rice paddy field. It’s hot. All they have to eat each day is a banana and a slice of bread. This is a shock to their systems. This is car crash reality TV. They crack under the pressure, retch, cry, faint, fall out, fight, refuse to work, slow down the production line, get sick, feel guilty, insult and patronise their co-workers and escape to a comfortable hotel, eat at McDonalds and get first class medical care. Olu is sent home after a fight with Manos. He’s replaced by James, a young farmer. At least he knows where food comes from. But, as they get over the shock, episode by episode, they are humbled by the experience and become more appreciative consumers. This is the second ‘Blood, sweat and…’ series broadcast by the BBC. And it’s equally successful, attracting big audiences, winning awards and being shown around the world. Its aim is to encourage young people to think about who makes their stuff, and to find their own solutions like the cast members do. Because this is reality TV, much of the discussion focuses on the cast and how ‘spoilt’ they seem to be, how terrible they are as British ‘ambassadors’ in Thailand and Indonesia, how distastasteful it is for them to ogle at squalour, and how easy it is for them – unlike the people they’re working alongside – to leave. Critics say that its reality TV format encourages an enjoyment of the casts’ meltdowns more than their thoughtful reflections. Others quibble the facts and argue that the series’ narrative arc is a work of fiction. Others say that it places too much emphasis on consumer awareness, without provinding any ideas about what viewers should do next. And there’s nothing in this series about other responsible actors in these supply chains (for a comparison, see our page on the BBC’s ‘Mangetout’ documentary here) and nothing about the need for structural change (e.g. living wage legislation). But the BBC sets up a web forum for people to discuss these issues and one cast member ends up on a late night BBC news show challenging some glib trade arguments made by a represenative of the British Retail Consortium. So, what does this TV series do for its British cast? Its Thai and Indonesian participants? The production company? The last one is easy. The success of this second ‘Blood sweat and…’ series is followed by the making of the next series. ‘Blood, sweat & luxuries’. Then, years later, TV production executives in Holland and the Czech Republic reported that it has inspired new reality TV series. The whole series was uploaded to YouTube in full in 2022, where a whole new generation of viewers – around the world – could engage with the series, its characters and its message.

Page reference: Harriet Clarke, Ben Thomson, Victoria Bartley, Katie Ibbetson-Price, Emma Christie-Miller & Harry Schofield (2025) Blood, Sweat & Takeaways. followthethings.com/blood-sweat-takeaways.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 102 minutes.

Posted on December 20, 2024January 8, 2025 by Ian Cook

Gravesend, 2007

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Electronics

SORCED IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

INCLUDE HAUNTING & HORROR

MAKE IT A MYSTERY

MAKE IT INCOMPLETE

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL

“Gravesend, 2007“
An art work / short film by Steve McQueen premiered at the Venice Biennale and exhibited at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, USA in 2007 and at the Uneven Geographies exhibition at the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery, UK in 2010.
Gallery photo above. Renaissance Society exhibition photos here. Acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA here. Not available to watch online.

After a decade of rare earth metal mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for use in the growing consumer electronics sector, and recognising the history of African colonial plunder artist Steve McQueen sets out to make a short film that brings this story into one piece of art work. He travels between the coltan mines of the DRC and a coltan processing facilities in the UK. The miners, sometimes children, dig coltan from muddy trenches. This is brutal and poorly paid work wrecks the environment and funds a civil war in which 4 million people have lost their lives. The specialist metals which emerge from this ravaged place are perfect ingredients for modern consumer electronics, because they can conduct electricity without getting too hot. McQueen visits a pristine, computerised factory facility in the UK where this coltan ore is processed. The film he makes out of these loaded and shockingly different elements is described by critics and viewers as abstract, poetic, animated (sometimes), deafeningly loud (sometimes), beautiful, intense, opaque, meditative, melancholy, that works though ‘phenomenological estrangement’, has no titles or narration and scenes and moods that leap between places and dissolve into one another. The coltan miners appear in it as ‘ghostly absences of light’. For McQueen, this isn’t a documentary film. It doesn’t give supply chain workers a voice. It’s a film about looking. It takes its name from a town in the British county of Kent, which sits on the banks of the River Thames where Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness book begins. You can only watch it in an art gallery when it’s being exhibited. Some commenter are impressed with its intellectual purpose and depth, while others say they need to read the museum brochure to understand what it’s about (e.g. coltan). It seems from what people say that this isn’t an activist film or art work. It’s not setting out to motivate its viewers to understand and to act. But it is, for some, intensely haunting. Maybe you have to be there, watching it in that gallery space, with other people, other art work, the signage, the space, the lighting. This is a space where its viewers to ‘make the necessary connections.’

Page reference: Tom Bollands, Alistair Brouard, Amelia Cozon, James Hornsby, Phoebe Park & Louise Richardson (2024) Gravesend, 2007. followthethings.com/gravesend.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 25 minutes.

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

iPod

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Electronics

“iPod“
Undergraduate coursework written by Rebecca Payne, published in the Teaching Geography journal.
Full text below.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Birmingham 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 – Rebecca Payne – is sitting in the university library wondering what to write. To block out the noise, and to help her concentrate, she listens to music in her iPod. And this is what she starts to think about, and to research, for her coursework. She spends a lot of time with her ‘little white friend’. She charges his battery. Takes him for a run. And he helps her to create the sonic bubble she enjoys living in which connects her to the work of her favourite musicians. Here coursework wants her to pop the bubble, though. So she looks at the ‘made in’ information on her iPod, and they consults the internet for a iPod teardown, where tech nerds take things to pieces to see what their component parts are. Then she looks up news stories about their places of manufacture. She find some connections. And thinks about the factory workers who have also helped to create this bubble she enjoys so much. She finishes with catchy turn of phrase: ‘I can only feel separated because I’m so connected’ and, mimicking Apple’s advertising tagline at the time, ‘iPod therefore I am.’

Page reference: Rebecca Payne (2006) iPod. followthethings.com/ipod.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.

Posted on December 20, 2024February 11, 2025 by Ian Cook

A Gadget To Die For

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Electronics

“A Gadget To Die For“
Front page headline and feature story in by Martin Hickman in the Independent Newspaper, plus a timeline of corporate and activist activity into which this story fits.
Front page featured above. The full text of the article is available below, and on the newspaper website here.

On May 27th 2010, the UK’s Independent newspaper published one of its most memorable front pages. This was the day that Apple’s new iPad device was being launched in the UK. The hype for this product had been extreme. At its launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had said it could help consumers to do things ‘in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before’. Classic commodity fetishism! Apple Stores had so many orders that they had to meet. The factory where they were being made in China – owned by the Foxconn corporation – had to keep up with demand. Those customers couldn’t be kept waiting. But the hours and working conditions that the people making these iPads in Foxconn’s factory had to endure were too much for some. Reports started to emerge of extreme levels of stress driving some workers to make their way to the roof of the factory to jump to their deaths. One of these workers was Ma Xiangqian, whose family carried a photo portrait of their son to a protest outside the factory that was broadcast on international news. Juxtaposing a photo of this new device and photo of a worker who committed suicide with the perfect double-meaning title ‘A gadget to die for’ contributed to the sullying of Apple’s marketing plans. More importantly, it was just one example of the sustained attention to the working conditions in the company’s Foxconn factories in China that was building at this time (e.g. see the factory worker suicide prevention level on the Phone Story game here). On followthethings.com, we tend to choose individual examples of trade justice activism and find out where they came from, and what impacts they have had on, for example, the pay and conditions of supply chain workers. But in this case, it’s not just this one story that made a difference. This page outlines a different story. The Independent story is copied in full, and is followed – like a standard followthethings.com page – by everything we could find about how it was discussed and what impact it had (not much). Then, below this, we try to place this news story in context, starting with the launch of the iPad by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, then following iPad news stories as they were published over the following months, then finding when and how the ‘iPad suicide’ story came to public attention (in the Independent and elsewhere), and then tracking this scandal and Apple’s reactions to it. This larger context had an important impact, forcing corporate change and – arguably – improving pay and conditions in Foxconn factories. More than anything, this page tries to show how trade justice activism works when its bubbles up in multiple places and formats, not necessarily in a wholly coordinated way. For this example, it shows the importance of on-the-ground student activists – in this case the Hong Kong based Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) – investigating, protesting, creating and promoting media content that others – like Independent journalists Martin Hickman – can pick up and run with.

Article reference: Martin Hickman (2010) A gadget to die for? Concern over human cost overshadows iPad launch. The Independent 27 May (www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/concern-over-human-cost-overshadows-ipad-launch-1983888.html last accessed 4 August 2010)

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) A gadget to die for? followthethings.com/a-gadget-to-die-for.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 42 minutes.

Posted on December 13, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Tangled Routes: Women, Work And Globalization On The Tomato Trail

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Grocery

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

KNOW YOUR HISTORY

FIND SOME CHARACTERS

SPEND SOME TIME

CULTIVATE RELATIONSHIPS

MAKE IT TOGETHER

HUMANISE WORKERS

ENCOURAGE FEMINIST SOLIDARITIES

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

JUXTAPOSE EXTREMES

TELL A STORY

“Tangled Routes: Women, Work And Globalization On The Tomato Trail“
An academic book written by Deborah Barndt published by Rowman & Littlefield
2007 second edition Google Books preview embedded above. Search online to buy a copy here.

In 1994, preparing to do some undergraduate teaching, Environmental Studies professor Deborah Barndt finds a popular educational tool called A whirlwind tour of economic integration with your guide, Tomasita the tomato. She thinks this fictional tomato is the perfect etrée for her students’ understanding of cross-border trade – in this case from Mexico to Canada – and the often confusing complexities of globalisation – including messy relations between corporate power, genetically modified seeds, pesticides, stolen indigenous land, exploited peasant labour and environmental racism. What follows is a 5 year feminist participatory research project – called the Tomasita Project – which connects the lives of tomato growers, truckers, checkout workers and other supply chain workers living and working in Mexico and Canada. What she discovers and tries to convey is the clash between a ‘globalisation from above’ – the uniform, genetically-engineered, neoliberal, NAFTA-friendly tomato trade – and ‘globalisation from below’ – grass roots social justice projects working across borders and producing alternative foods. As Tomasita explained when Barndt first saw her story, the tomato is an iconic crop in the Americas. A brilliant one to follow, loading with meanings. It was native to South America, was first domesticated in Mexico, is central to the diets in Mexico, the USA and Canada, can be grown (at least seasonally) in all three countries, and was ‘one of the winners for Mexico in the NAFTA reshuffle’ (Barndt 2002a, p.82). What readers value the most is her book’s ‘feminist act’ that makes visible women workers in the global food system, and the way that it brings feminist theories into understandings of international trade. We researched this book early in its life (in 2011) and are keen to return to it to flesh out this page one day. This is an early, innovative, important and inspiring example of ‘follow the thing’ scholar-activism.

Page reference: Robert Conor Burke (2024) Tangled Routes: Women, Work And Globalization On The Tomato Trail. followthethings.com/tangled-routes-women-work-and-globalization-on-the-tomato-trail.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes.

Posted on December 11, 2024January 28, 2025 by Ian Cook

Inside Job

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Money & Finance

EXPERIENCED WORLDWIDE

DOCUMENTARY FILM

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

FOLLOW THE MONEY

FIND THE CHARACTERS

INCLUDE EMOTION

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

BRING REGULATORS INTO VIEW

BRING ACADEMICS INTO VIEW

JOIN THE DOTS

JUXTAPOSE EXTREMES

INVOLVE A CELEBRITY

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

BLAME, SHAME & GUILT

“Inside Job“
A documentary film directed by Charles Ferguson, produced by Charles Ferguson, Audrey Marrs & Jeffrey Lurie & narrated by Matt Damon for Mongrel Media & Sony Pictures Classic.
Official trailer embedded above. Search online to watch the full movie here.

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, filmmaker Charles Ferguson sets out to find out how and by whom it was caused. This involves understanding and explaining complex financial instruments (like sub-prime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations), the governance of international finance and its deregulation (and its consequences), eye-watering banking losses (over $20 trillion), the organisations and individuals responsible for this happening (in financial services, government, academia) and the people plunged into poverty and homelessness after defaulting on their mortgages. The complexity is explained clearly in the film by narrator Matt Damon. And by the talking heads who Ferguson recruits to talk about what happened, their role in it, how they see their responsibilities, why so much public money was spent bailing them out, and why none of them went to jail. For many audience members, it’s shocking to see executives explaining how business works on camera. The logics and passions that drive their work, and the values that they express, can seem removed from the world, callous and dehumanising. But the experts who come out of this film looking worst are the academic economists. One of the biggest impacts of this film is the way that it encourages university business schools to look more closely at their ethics. Who are economists working for, and how responsible is their education of new generations of economists if their ideas remain unchanged after the Crisis? This is another example showing how important and how difficult it is to ‘follow the money’. But like any following study, it’s also about the ways that responsibility – in this case, for a colossal economic injustice – is understood, shared, taken. And where it isn’t. The solution sees obvious to many – regulation! But it’s not happening. If one film was going to cause a revolution, one commentor states, it would be this one. And this is just a taster page for this film. We’ll add much more detail later…

Page reference: Dom Ebbetts, Dave Simpson, Michael Brent, Mickey Franklin, Tommy Sadler & Charlie Timms (2024) Inside Job (taster). followthethings.com/inside-job.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.

Posted on December 4, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Those With Justice: A Disney Factory In China (+ Looking For Mickey Mouse’s Conscience – A Survey Of The Working Conditions Of Disney’s Supplier Factories in China)

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Gifts & Seasonal

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

CHANGE CORPORATE BEHAVIOUR

END VIOLENCE & EXPLOITATION

IMPROVE PAY & CONDITIONS

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

FLIP THE SCRIPT!

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

HUMANISE THINGS

SHOW THE VIOLENCE

INCLUDE HAUNTING & HORROR

PUT YOUR BODIES IN THE WAY

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

PROMPT GOOD CITIZENSHOP

BARGAIN & NEGOTIATE

“Those With Justice: A Disney Factory In China (+ Looking For Mickey Mouse’s Conscience – A Survey Of The Working Conditions Of Disney’s Supplier Factories in China)“
A short film directed by Karin Mak and translated by Jessie Wang for, and an NGO Report published by, Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) & Sweatshop Watch.
Watch the film in full above. Read the report – here.

Inspired by student anti-sweatshop activism in the USA, students in Hong Kong come together to protest the opening of Hong Kong’s Disneyland. They visit the factories where the Disney merch that is going to be sold there is made. They talk to the factory workers, and are horrified by what they learn. There are dangerous and exploitative labour practices behind the happy smiling image of Mickey Mouse and Friends. One group of students – who call themselves Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (or SACOM) – write a report about the working conditions in four of Disney’s hundreds of Chinese supplier factories. It’s called Looking for Mickey Mouse’s Conscience – A Survey of the Working Conditions of Disney’s Supplier Factories in China. They do this with the help of a California-based NGO called Sweatshop Watch, who send a delegation to China which includes University of California Santa Cruz film studies student Karin Mak. Mak films the factory workers talking about these working conditions, and produces an 11 minute documentary called Those With Justice: A Disney Factory In China. This focuses on one of the four factories – Hung Hing Printing & Packaging – which makes children’s books for Disney. Here, she finds, the workers are constantly reminded about the delicate fingers of Western children. They mustn’t be harmed by paper cuts. That’s why they have to use dangerous hot glue presses to stick the paper covers to hardback copies of a Mickey Mouse’s Haunted Halloween book, for example. The film and the report show images of their burned, crushed and mangled fingers. These injuries are caused by equipment and the speed at which they have to work to meet their targets. Mak’s film is used by SACOM and Sweatshop Watch (and other labour rights NGOs) to launch the report. It helps this Disney sweatshop story to get traction in the international new media. Now Disney is under pressure to respond. What follows is a fascinating to-and-fro between a huge multinational corporation and a small, determined, skilful and well-connected group of Hong Kong students. This is a fascinating and important example of successful trade justice activism. Piecing the story together below, we have found a variety of factors that have contributed to this success – some planned, some not – and a fascinating discussion about what counts as ‘success’.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2011) Those With Justice: A Disney Factory In China (+ Looking For Mickey Mouse’s Conscience – A Survey Of The Working Conditions Of Disney’s Supplier Factories in China). followthethings.com/those-with-justice.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 56 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 December 2, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Crude: The Real Price Of Oil

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Home & Auto

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

TRANSLATE & SUBTITLE

MAKE A WEBSITE

STREISAND EFFECT

“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.

Posted on November 29, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Door key

followthethings.com
Home & Auto

2006

UNBRANDED

DOOR KEY

MADE IN MANY COUNTRIES

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

“Door Key“
Undergraduate coursework written by Alice Williams published in the Primary Geographer.
Full text below.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Birmingham 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. Alice Williams writes about a recent experience. When she lost something and only then realised how important it was to her life. The key to her flat. Which gives her a sense of safety. Or at least she thinks so. Until she looks into its ingredients. Its metals. Like lead. Which is added to make it easier to cut. And its possible sources. Mines in South Africa and the USA. A smelter in Canada. A cutting plant in Italy… And the people who work with lead in these places. And the effects it has on their health. And their safety. They’re connected. Shouldn’t everyone feel safe?

Page reference: Alice Williams (2006) Door Key. followthethings.com/door-key.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.