Origin – Worldwide – followthethings.com

“How To Run A Subvertisement Workshop“
A subvertisement workshop designed by Eeva Kemppainen for Eettisen kaupan puolesta ry (Pro Ethical Trade Finland).
Workshop video embedded above. ‘How to’ booklets available to download in Finnish here and English here. Eeva’s project blog is here. An archive of subvertisements produced by students can be found on Flick here. This page was originally published on the followthethings.com blog here.

Eeva Kemppainen took the ‘Geographies of material culture’ module that’s behind our site as an Erasmus student, did her Masters research at the University of Helsinki on the pedagogy she had experienced in the module and went on to work for the pro-Fair Trade NGO Eettisen kaupan puolesta (a.k.a. Eetti) in Helsinki. In 2014, she published a paper in the Finnish journal Natura (here) about ways in which her work for Eetti tried to engage students in humorous critiques of consumption and advertising through a pedagogy of culture jamming. In 2016 Eetti published Eeva’s booklet Medialukutaitoa vastamainoksista (also published in English as Teaching media literacy and the geographies of consumption) which set out how to run culture jamming workshops – like the one in the video above – and showcased the kinds of work that students produced. The booklet drew inspiration from a number of examples of trade justice culture jamming from the followthethings.com website. What can students examine, then cut up, rearrange and/or scribble on magazine adverts? They try to subvert advertising’s messages so that the information that is hidden – including the lives of the people who make what’s being advertised – is made visible. What they produce are called ‘subvertisments’. In this post, Eeva describes how she organises these workshops, and showcases some of the work that students can produce.

Page reference: Eeva Kemppainen (2015) How To Run A Subvertisemeht Workshop. followthethings.com/how-t-run-a-subvertisement-workshop.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.

Posted on January 29, 2025January 30, 2025 by Ian Cook

Fashion Transparency Trump Card Game

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Back to school

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

ENCOURAGE DETECTIVE WORK

MAKE IT FAMILIAR

INVOLVE CONSUMERS

TARGET THE RIGHT BRANDS

“Fashion Transparency Trump Card Game“
A card game developed by Ian Cook et al for originally for the Fashion Revolution (2014) and Fashion Revolution Brazil (2020)
Fashion Revolution Brazil’s instagram game video & YouTube Programa Educacional Jovens Revolucionários video embedded above. Resources available below. This page is an edited and updated version of posts originally published on the followthethings.com blog here.

When trade justice organisations produce numerical data about corporations’ ethical, sustainability or transparency there’s an opportunity to make this data accessible to students in the form of a Trump Card game that they can make and play with their own possessions. The initial idea for this game came from students taking the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module that’s behind the followthethings.com website (see our demo cards here and some cards made and played by students at Bath Spa University here). What’s presented below are a set of blank cards and an ongoing, updated set of data that your students could work with now. This game is an excellent ice-breaking activity to engage students in discussions of the pay and conditions of the people who make their clothes. It’s also a good way to encourage discussion of the terms that are being played with (what’s good ‘governance’ for example?) and to appreciate how corporations can and do make different amounts of effort to create a more ethical and sustainable economy (with limits). This game can be made and played by any group of people trying to learn the basics and/or intricacies of Ethical Trade and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2025) Fashion Transparency Trump Card Game. followthethings.com/fashion-transparency-trump-card-game.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes.

Posted on December 16, 2024January 30, 2025 by Ian Cook

Who made my clothes?

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Follow it yourself | Follow it yourself

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

ENCOURAGE DETECTIVE WORK

FIND & GIVE INSPIRATION

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

“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 9, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Kidney Trade

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Health & Beauty

2012

UNBRANDED

HUMAN KIDNEY

SOURCED IN MANY COUNTRIES

TRANSPLANTED IN MANY COUNTRIES

INTERACTIVE MAP

CROSS CULTURES

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TEACH ILLICIT ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

EMBODY EXPLOITATION

TRACK & TRACE

“Kidney Trade“
Research mapping by followthethings.com intern Eeva Kemppainen.

followthethings.com intern Eeva Kemppainen is reading academic and activist work on the illegal trade in human organs. How they’re obtained, from whom, by whom, where in the world. How they’re transplanted, into whose bodies, by which surgeons, where in the world. Everybody and everything in between. The international criminal investigations and court cases where it comes to the surface. The covert journalism and ethnographic research that exposes it. It’s the most labyrinthine and startling example of ‘follow the thing’ commodity tracing and activism. But there’s no one example we can feature on our site. But something like this needs to be in our collection. Eeva does this by taking passages from lots of academic and newspaper articles that mention specific places, notes what aspect of the illegal kidney trade takes place there, and adds them as points on a google map. What she maps is an amazing, complex world of illegal activities, (un)ethical academic and journalistic practices, and the connected lives of differently desperate ‘donors’ and ‘recipients. How real can it make the traffic of these organs seem? See for yourself.

Page reference: Eeva Kemppainen (2012) Kidney Trade. followthethings.com/kidney-trade.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated browsing time: 35 minutes.

Posted on November 10, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Chewing Gum

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Grocery

INGREDIENTS SOURCED WORLDWIDE

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

TAKE IT TO PIECES

JOIN THE DOTS

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

MAKE IT A MYSTERY

JUXTAPOSE EXTREMES

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

EMBODY EXPLOITATION

MAKE IT SNAPPY

MAKE IT META

“Chewing Gum“
Undergraduate coursework written by Lucy Mayblin, 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, their lecturer (now 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 – Lucy Mayblin – ends up writing about being an accidental consumer. She’s walking to class. She steps in chewing gum recently spat from someone else’s mouth. It’s stuck to her shoe. But what exactly is stuck to her shoe, and why? She buys some gum and inspects the ingredient list. She searches the internet to find out more. What she finds out is shocking. She had trodden in the ‘war on terror’?! But is it true? To add to the stickiness of her work, she prints it out, rolls it into a tube, puts it into a shoe, and hands it in with some fresh gum on the sole. It sticks to the hand-in desk.

Page reference: Lucy Mayblin (2004) Chewing Gum. followthethings.com/chewing-gum.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes.

Posted on November 8, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

McLibel

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Grocery

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TELL THE TRUTH

SHOW WHAT’S POSSIBLE

FIND & GIVE INSPIRATION

FIND TWO CHARACTERS

FOLLOW THE PEOPLE

WORRY ABOUT ANIMALS

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

GO TO COURT

MAKE IT A MYSTERY

USE MYTHS & LEGENDS

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“McLibel“
A documentary film written by Franny Armstrong and directed by Franny Armstrong & Ken Loach for Spanner Films.
First released in 1998, extended version released in 2005 (the trailer for the latter version is embedded above). Search online to stream the whole film here. DVD extras Youtube Playlist is here. Original protest leaflet is here. Campaign website here.

Gardener Helen Steel and postman David Morris hand out leaflets outside McDonald’s restaurants in London. They tell consumers what’s wrong with the company and its food. Especially the cruelty in its meat supply chains. McDonald’s sues them for libel. What follows is the UK’s longest libel trial. An extraordinary ‘David vs Goliath’ drama in which the defendents defend themselves against McDonald’s highly paid corporate lawyers. When it’s over, it’s called it the ‘biggest public relations blunder in the history of public relations blunders’. It’s the earliest example we have found of the ‘Streisand Effect ‘in trade justice activism: where efforts to silence a critique of corporate misbehaviour backfire so spectacularly that the critique is amplified! Millions of people around the world got to know about Steel and Morris’ leaflets because McDonald’s sued them in court and because Franny Armstrong filmed what happened! TV channels couldn’t show her film because they feared McDonald’s will sue them. But McLibel film became a ‘cult classic’, nevertheless. The 2005 remake – with added courtroom re-creations – was released on DVD after films like Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me focused mainstream criticism on McDonald’s. In 2016, Armstong’s production company released McLibel in full on YouTube. Everybody could see it now. In 2024 it gained renewed attention when the young lawyer who gave Steel and Morris legal advice became the UK’s Prime Minister: Keir Starmer.

Page reference: Hannah Doherty, Rosie Benbow, Philippa Day, Meike Schwethelm, Hannah Griffiths and Alice Nivet (2013) McLibel. followthethings.com/mclibel.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 59 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

Louise Mensch On Occupy London-LSX (HIGNFY)

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Grocery | Electronics | Home & Auto

DISTRACT FROM REALITY

CHANGE CITIZEN BEHAVIOUR

PUT YOUR BODIES IN THE WAY

HOPE FOR A Q&A

MAKE IT FAMILIAR

INVOLVE SOME CELEBRITIES

“Louise Mensch On Occupy London-LSX (HIGNFY)“
A discussion on BBCTV’s satirical news panel show Have I Got News For You (HIGNFY), featuring Louise Mensch, Danny Baker, Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, chaired by Alexander Armstrong.
Discussion embedded above on YouTube HIGNFY highlights reel.

The Conservative MP Louise Mensch and the comedy writer Danny Baker are guests on a Friday night satirical news panel show in October 2011. The Occupy camp outside London’s St Paul’s cathedral has just become front page news. The host Alexander Armstrong asks the panellists to comment on what’s happening. Mensch argues that these Occupy protestors can’t be against capitalism when they’re enjoying its fruits – like the ‘fancy tents’ they’re living in, the iPhones they’re tweeting from and the Starbucks coffees they’re queuing for. The other panellists disagree and mock her argument. She seems to be saying that anyone who participates in capitalism should not be criticising it. And, if people are critical of capitalism, you don’t have to listen to what they say. This is the ‘hypocrite’ accusation that even the mildest anti-capitalist can expect. It’s a strategy for dismissing criticism of trade injustice , and was quickly labelled the ‘Mensch Fallacy’. Taken to its extreme, it means that only people with zero involvement in capitalism can criticise it. And that’s nobody on earth! Here at followthethings.com, we love to spot patterns in audiences’ responses to trade justice activism. This is a big one. This page looks at the only example on our site that is a response, and the way that the panellists and audiences online challenged it. Read on.

Page reference: Jon Chick, Matt Bhol, Dee Wood, Tom Lyle, Olly Woodford & Henry Owen (2012) Louise Mensch On Occupy London-LSX (HIGNFY). followthethings.com/louise-mensch-on-occupy-london-lsx-hignfy.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 49 minutes.

Posted on September 16, 2024January 9, 2025 by Ian Cook

Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story

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Recycle my waste

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story“
A documentary film written by Jenny Rustemeyer Grant Baldwin, directed by Grant Baldwin for Silvapark Films.
Trailer and on-demand Vimeo stream embedded above. Search the internet for other streaming options here.

Most trade justice activism looks back down the supply chain from the point of consumption. It looks at all the materials, human and other lives bound up in commodities. It asks how they could be brought together in more sustainable, more ethical, ways. The sheer volume of resources inside even the most basic thing can be astonishing. Just as astonishing are the mountains of unsold commodities that go to waste. All those resources and all that work that went into making commodities that aren’t consumed! It’s shocking. So, filmmakers Jenny Rustemeyer and Grant Baldwin challenge themselves to live on thrown-away food for six months. They document how they get on with this experiment in a diary-like film. All the little details of their life, the decisions they make, are shared with the audience. People throw perfectly good food away at home, so maybe rummage through their bins. Then they discover the hidden world of supermarket dumpsters that contain discarded out-of-date food. They find and join local networks of dumpster-divers who specialise is finding, emptying, distributing and eating what’s in them. But what kind of diet do you end up living on when this is how you shop? How many lasagnes can you squeeze into your freezer? Do you fancy eating lasagne every day? Would you try this zero cost ethical food shopping? What can audiences learn about the food industry’s inevitable production of waste? They call on some experts to explain.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story (holding page). followthethings.com/just-eat-it-a-food-waste-story.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: tbc minutes.

Posted on September 14, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Find Your Doppelganger

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Apps

2015

UNBRANDED

PHOTO APP

DOPPELGANGERS WORLDWIDE

USED WORLDWIDE

PHONE APP CONCEPT

POP THE BUBBLE

ENCOURAGE DETECTIVE WORK

BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

“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>)

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes.