Origin – Mexico – followthethings.com

“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 12, 2024January 8, 2025 by Mark

A Global Positioning System

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Electronics | Home & Auto

2006

UNBRANDED

GPS NAVIGATION ASSISTANT

SOURCED IN THE PHILIPPINES

SOURCED IN SOUTH KOREA

SOURCED IN SOUTH AFRICA

SOURCED IN ANGOLA

SOURCED IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

TAKE IT TO PIECES

TRACK & TRACE

FOLLOW THE THING

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“A Global Positioning System“
A art work / animated film created by Melanie Jackson, first exhibited at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK.
Two screengrabs from the film are featured above. Watch it in full on the artist’s website here.

If you’re interested in finding out who makes your stuff, it’s important to make a strategic choice about what stuff is best to follow. Artist Melanie Jackson makes an excellent choice – what better to guide your way than the technology that helps to guide your way. An in-car GPS Navigation Assistant. The kind of device you could buy in the 2000s to stick to your dashboard. Type in the destination, and it would help you on your way, showing the route on screen. She gets some funding for a trip to China to visit a factory where they are assembled. But this isn’t anything like enough of the story of this thing. She looks into its in many many ingredients, and finds out where and by whom they are sourced. She reads news stories, collects photographs, and turn to drawing to bring all of these connections together into a 12 minute animated film. There’s something magical about animation. It’s obvious that animation is not an objective account of the life of a thing, but something that’s been imagined and made. Animation allows the complexities of trade to be conveyed in a way that would otherwise be impossible either because the scale of the task would be too enormous, or because permission would not be granted to access the industrial sites that matter. There’s a powerful argument that’s made about ‘follow the thing’ research that things can be – for these reasons – ‘unfollowable (see Hulme 2017). But animation – and other creative approaches to thing-following (click the ‘make the hidden visible’ tactic button) – provide means to work around this. This is a mind-blowing film. Its amazing what you can learn in 12 minutes!

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) A Global Positioning System. followthethings.com/a-global-positioning-system.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes.

Posted on December 11, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Maquilapolis (City Of Factories)

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Home & Auto | Health & Beauty

MULTIPLE OTHER BRANDS

MANY OTHER COMMODITIES

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

EDUCATE WORKERS

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

WORKERS TAKE THE MIC!

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

SHOW THE VIOLENCE

INCLUDE SUFFERING KIDS

BRING POLITICIANS INTO VIEW

SHOW HOW TO WIN

FIND & GIVE INSPIRATION

ENCOURAGE FEMINIST SOLIDARITIES

“Maquilapolis (City Of Factories)“
A participatory documentary film in Spanish with Spanish or English subtitles directed by Vicky Funari & Sergio de la Torre, with music by Pauline Oliveros with the Nortec Collective & John Blue for the Independent Television Service & CineMamás Film.
Trailer and pay-per-view stream embedded above. Search online for other streaming options here. Read the film transcript in English & Spanish here.

Carmen Duràn and Lourdes Lujàn work in Tijuana, the ‘city of factories’, on the Mexico-US border. They work in factories on the hill making televisions and other COMMODITIES for brands like Panasonic and Sony. These multinationals treat this city as a garbage can that their workers have to live in. How can they fight back, claim their rights, their humanity? They take part in a participatory filmmaking project with directors Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre. The directors have been working with a local collective of ‘promontoras’ including Carmen and Lourdes for years. They have planned this project together for years. There’s been some filmmaking training and the promontoras take camcorders into the places where they live and work. The films they make are full of personality and a close attachment to place. They document life from these factory workers’ perspective. They document the ways in which these multinationals treat them as workers – especially when they leave – and how they treat the place where they live – as a dump for industrial waste that ruins their environment and threatens their health. They document their campaigns to clean up toxic industrial waste. In the process audiences get to know Carmen and Lourdes, to empathise with them. But the film also contains some surprising and beautiful creative scenes – often made in place of the footage that’s impossible to take inside the factory – that look like performance art. They want to show the intimate, bodily connection between the labour they perform, the commodities you buy (or are treated with in hospital) and the brands that you may be familiar with. And there’s some specially commissioned film music, made with a local music collective and featuring sounds from the factories. This is a gem of a film for anyone interested in trade justice activism. This is the film – with caveats – that these Mexican factory workers wanted to make and to show to the world. It’s one of the most intimate place-based examples featured on our site. And it was shown, deliberately, to audiences of workers either side of the US-Mexico border. Seeing empowered women like themselves struggling, resisting was an inspiration to many other women. And when the film hit the film festival circle, and there were panel screenings, the promontoras were there, answering questions alongside the directors.

Page reference: Rosie Buller, Melanie Bonner, Rebecca Lyons, Georgie Little, Tilman Schulzklinger & Jennifer Hart (2020) Maquilapolis (City Of Factories). followthethings.com/maquilapolis-city-of-factories.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 86 minutes.

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

Dream Crazy

followthethings.com
Fashion | Sport & Fitness

“Dream Crazy“
An advertising campaign for Nike by the Wieden+Kennedy agency.
Video ad embedded ABOVE. Full campaign materials here.

It’s the 30th anniversary of Nike’s ‘Just Do it’ campaign. So the advertising agency hired by the brand most associated with sweatshops hires an African American football player called Colin Kaepernick to front it. He’s the quarterback who became famous in 2016 for taking the knee during the national anthem before games because, he said, ‘I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color’. After George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in 2020, taking the knee became associated with support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Condemned as unpatriotic by many, including President Trump, Nike was courting controversy by making Kaepernick the figurehead of its campaign. But he could show that by ‘dreaming crazy’, marginalised people like himself could excel. And Nike could be part of this. But strange things happened. People who did’t like Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement started burning their Nike gear, criticising its production overseas by sweatshop workers and boycotting the brand. Others normally critical of Nike said they’d buy more from them because of their support for BLM. Others asked why the lives of Nike’s Black consumers and consumers of color mattered more than the lives of their Black producers and producers of color. What did Kaepernick know and think about these marginalised people and their dreams before he took Nike’s money? This kind of advertising – where, for example, civil rights are used to mask labour rights – is called woke-washing. Nike seems to be running this campaign to stir controversy, by launching it on Labor Day bang into the US’s toxic ‘culture war’ around BLM. This campaign itself isn’t trade justice activism. But the responses to it are. The debates that it can take you into are around ‘systemic racism’ and ‘racial capitalism’. Why is it that the workers trade justice activists are concerned about tend to live in the Global South and be people of colour while the consumers they address tend to live on the Global North and seem by default to be white? How did that happen? Can trade justice / follow the thing activism be decolonised? Who would do this work? What commodities would they trace from where to where? What would they make for what kinds of audiences to act upon? And you might be wondering if this controversial campaign does Nike any harm. No. Its impact was much more about the uncomfortable, progressive, ‘mind-f$@k’ conversations that it sparked. Thank you Colin…

Page reference: Louise Mason, Maddy Shackley, Izzie Jeffrey, Megan Holden, Sophia Stainer, Emily Taylor, Andrew Gamble & Monty Leaman (2018) Dream Crazy. followthethings.com/dream-crazy.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)

Estimated reading time: 101 minutes.