Dear followthethings.com shoppers
Due to imagined popular demand, we’re posting this year’s revamped ‘module behind the website’ – Geographies of Material Culture at the University of Exeter – week by week between now and the end of the year.
Why? Because we’ve had to totally redesign this longstanding beast for online pedagogical purposes this summer. The in-person module had virtually no lectures, lots of group table-work and meetings, lots of office hour queues, and was a virus-spreading liability.
The module is organised around 10 provocative ‘follow the thing’ films, short and long, each with a newly published, or updated, followthethings.com page documenting its making, discussion and impacts. Where previously, we have tasked our students with researching new pages, this year’s students are analysing them, looking for patterns, lessons from and for ‘follow the thing’ trade justice filmmakers to follow.
What we will be publishing here each week are the ‘asynchronous’ elements of the module we’re running this term at the University of Exeter: the set work that it’s 80 students are getting through each week to prep for a weekly, live, ‘synchronous’ Zoom session (which are just between us, thanks!). These posts will be published when our students are done with them You’ll be one week behind.
We hope you like what we’re up, how we’re doing this digitally. There are pluses and minuses, and being able to share this new approach to our work is – we hope – one of the former!
We start today with the module outline. Week 1’s post will follow later today.
Shop safe everyone
Ian et al x
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