Pop the bubble – 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 29, 2024February 13, 2025 by Ian Cook

Blood, Sweat & Takeaways

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Grocery

CHANGE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

TELL A STORY

MAKE A WEBSITE

“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 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

iPod

followthethings.com
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 19, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Connectivitea Of Britain And Sri Lanka

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Grocery

“The Connectivitea Of Britain And Sri Lanka“
A dissertation by Sarah Wrathmell, submitted as part of their BA Geography degree at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Sample pages from its findings chapters are embedded in the slideshow above. Click them to read the dissertation.

Undergraduate Geography student Sarah Wrathmell has an ambitious idea for her dissertation research. She wants to travel to Sri Lanka to find the people who grow her morning cup of tea on a plantation in Kandy, Sri Lanka. She plans to ‘follow the thing’ and to undertake some multisited ethnographic fieldwork along the supply chain of ‘Tillings’ (a pseudonym) loose breakfast tea. She ends up writing about six places: the tea garden where the tea is grown, its collection spaces, its production factory (all in Sri Lanka), its blending factory, a specialist tea shop, and a tea garden where she shares a pot of tea with a group of friends (all in the UK). She talks to pickers, packers and drivers; visits factories and talks to people tasting, processing and packaging it to exacting standards; and finally drinks that tea with those drinkers. This is embodied, sensory work that she has to – somehow – get on the page. What she wants to understand is what, and who, are the ingredients in her tea? And how are the lives of the people involved in making and drinking it interrelated? As a reader, your job is to follow her on her travels as she tries to make sense of this. Its assessors say it’s a fantastic piece of work. So, it’s submitted for a national dissertation prize. It wins this unanimously. We have a grainy .pdf copy that you can download and read. It’s important to show that not only are there high profile films, publications, and other forms of trade justice research and activism to pay attention to. Students have been doing this work too, for much smaller audiences, for years. What can this work look like?

Dissertation reference: Sarah Wrathmell (2003) The Connectivitea of Britain & Sri Lanka. BA Geography Dissertation: University of Birmingham, UK (followthethings.com/the-connectivitea-of-Britain-and-sri-lanka.shtml last accessed <insert date here>)

Page reference: Sarah Wrathmell (2024) The Connectivitea of Britain & Sri Lanka. followthethings.com/the-connectivitea-of-Britain-and-sri-lanka.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 60 minutes.

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

Sim*Sweatshop

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Sport & Fitness

2006

UNBRANDED

SPORTS SHOES

MADE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

REACH NEW AUDIENCES

CHANGE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

EMBODY EXPLOITATION

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

“Sim*Sweatshop“
An online video game by Jonny Norridge (concept and game programming) & Gavin Courtney (back end development) for NOW Nottingham and The Arts Council UK.
Gameplay video by WahWahQueenMew embedded above. Available to play free of charge on the Sim*Sweatshop website here (Adobe Flash needed).

Designer Jonny Norridge creates a game to simulate the experience of the shoe factory work that he’s been reading about. You slide shoe panels into place with your mouse. It ‘pings’ when one’s made. Then you make the next one. The clock ticks. Your energy levels fall. Your pay is terrible. It’s not enough to buy the food that you and your family need. You are interrupted by your boss talking about targets. He doesn’t like it when you want to join a union. It’s a simple, repetitive game that you – as a factory worker – can’t win. The idea is to put gamers in the shoes of the people who make the things that they buy. For them, there’s a familiar task sequence and reward structure. But this is real. It’s kind of fun to play, but also sucks. It’s the kind of game that’s given to school students as a quick and vivid way to explain sweatshop production. If they hate it, the lesson has worked. For those who want to know more, its website suggests further reading. There are other examples of trade justice activism in which consumers go to work in the factories and farms where their things are made (see, for example, the TV series Blood, Sweat & Takeaways on our site here). With these, you’re invited to empathise with someone supposedly like you – the contestants are often pitched ‘as typical’ consumers – trying to do that work. In this game, you’re all doing it yourself. So how effectively can a game-based simulation of factory work can be? What can it convey of the poverty and working conditions of show factory workers? It turn out that the answer is ‘a lot’. Sim*Sweatshop catches on. German and Hungarian versions are created, and it becomes part of other mainstream anti-sweatshop campaigns. But are young consumers the ones responsible for these sweatshop conditions? Should company executives, investors and politicians be playing this game too?

Page reference: Declan Coakley, Jack Johnson, Josh Li, Georgie Mitchell, Jack Saxton & Tom Weake (2024) Pipe Trouble. followthethings.com/sim-sweatshop.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 25 minutes.

Posted on December 16, 2024January 8, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Nike Email Exchange (NEE)

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Sport & Fitness

2001

NIKE

PERSONALISED ‘ID’ SHOES

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

PLAY WITH BRANDING

RE-DESIGN THE COMMODITY

MAKE IT PROVOCATIVE

MAKE IT META

INCLUDE SUFFERING KIDS

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

“The Nike Email Exchange (NEE)“
An email exchange between student Jonah Peretti and the Nike Corporation.
The full email exchange was posted online on shey.net. Screengrab above. Read the whole exchange here.

Student Jonah Peretti experiments with Nike’s offer to customise its shoes with words you type into its ID website. Most people would add their name or their team’s name but he wants to add the word ‘sweatshop’ to a pair of running shoes. He wants to do this so that he can ‘remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes’. Nike say no. Peretti replies, arguing it’s OK. They say no. He replies again, saying he hasn’t breached their ID guidelines. They say no again. They just won’t let him do it. So he forwards the conversation to friends by email. They forward it to friends, who forward it to their friends, who …. It’s posted on a website called shey.net (above) and, within six weeks, millions have read it. Next, he’s invited onto national US TV to debate sweatshops with a Nike executive. This is one of the most iconic examples of viral online trade justice activism that happens 3 years before facebook is founded. It’s also an iconic example of the activist tactic of ‘culture jamming’ – turning a brand’s values and identity against itself. Peretti didn’t consider himself (or what he did) to be ‘activist’, he was just messing around with the opportunity that Nike gave its customer to personalise their shoes. What he did became known as the ‘Nike Email Exchange’ (or NEE) and was a important part of a swarm of public criticisms of Nike’s record on labour rights – including Indonesian Nike factory worker Cicih Sukaesih’s North American speaking tour [see our page here] – that cemented its sweatshop reputation in the late 1990s and 2000s. It’s also an iconic example in trade justice activism research. Peretti gave researchers Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti the email addresses of everyone to whom he sent the email string, and everyone who replied to it. They got in touch to ask them about the impacts that it had had on them as citizens and consumers. The publications that emerged from this helped establish a significant body of scholarship on what’s called ‘political consumerism’. After becoming a public figure through the NEE, Peretti continued to experiment with viral online media before setting up Buzzfeed in 2006.

Page reference: Edward Jennings, Alex Hargreaves, Matt Goddard, Amy Joslin, Millie Whittington & Charles Bell (2024) The Nike Email Exchange (NEE). followthethings.com/the-nike-email-exchange-nee.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 73 minutes.

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

Who made my clothes?

followthethings.com
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 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.