What if Easter bunnies knew the truth about chocolate?

Animation and humour can play powerful roles in trade justice campaigning. Perhaps the most well known example is the peanut who criticises the regulation of world trade in The Luckiest Nut in the World.  See our page on that film here.

One recent example of this genre was launched In March 2013 in Switzerland. To make public the findings of their report on the sourcing of raw materials by Swiss chocolate manufacturers, Swiss NGO the Berne Declaration (aka Erklärung von Bern) commissioned animators / filmmakers Kompost to imagine what Chocolate Bunnies would do if they knew more about themselves. As Kompost state:

Easter in Switzerland is a busy time for the chocolate industry. Billions of delicious chocolate bunnies are produced by the grand masters of chocolate. Unfortunately, still many Swiss chocolate companies and retailers are producing their chocolate under exploitative conditions; a third even refuse to make a statement to this issue. EvB, a Swiss NGO responsible for fairer globalization, tries to put an end to this with the help of these ads.

The two commercials Kompost designed, directed and animated, show the EvB-chocolate bunny trying to take his life, as he simply cannot live knowing these shocking facts. With the help of a hair dryer and a hotplate, the chocolate bunny tries to melt his sorrows away. His attempts however fail, and he is left with the bitter reality.

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Follow your dreams [sorry] Barbies

This week’s Times Educational Supplement featured a Barbie movie-inspired post by the Royal Geographical Society’s Steve Brace. He set out 4 lesson ideas for young people who may have watched the film: on carbon footprints (CO2 emissions and recycling), geopolitics (the film’s controversial map), gendered spaces (its patriarchy storyline), and trade (mentioning our follow the things project). It’s a short article and Steve has shown really nicely what following Barbie dolls along their supply chains might look like.

This post is a follow-up, highlighting a couple of ideas / approaches that teachers may like to bring into their classrooms to encourage their students both to find out more and to find creative ways to think through and present what they find.

Sweatshop Barbie

In December 2013, a life-size ‘Sweatshop Barbie’ was unveiled in Paris.

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Fashion transparency trump card game: data activism to play with.

Hello shoppers! We have some news. CEO Ian is presenting this week at the Geographical Association’s annual conference at the University of Surrey, UK. You might like to get the lowdown, find all the resources in one place. Here they are…

On Wednesday this week, Ian is debuting a trump card game that you play with your own and other people’s clothes. He will set it up and a tournament will take place right in the room. The start is not not exciting. The cards are blank…

– click image to download the template –
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WATCH THIS: fashionscapes – a living wage

“On the day that marks the 8th anniversary of the Rana Plaza tragedy, Andrew Morgan (director True Cost) and Eco-Age founder Livia Firth, release Fashionscapes: A Living Wage, the fourth in the investigative short documentary series available on Eco-Age TV. In this latest addition to the Fashionscapes series on fashion’s just and ecological future, the pair follow the story of the activists and change-makers calling time on the poverty wages that trap millions of garment workers in never-ending poverty. For the first time the industry, that allows its workforce to live in destitution for its own ends, faces a coordinated, structured challenge through international law.”

Thanks to @kieranspeaks for the post

Decolonising ‘follow the things’ teaching and learning? Defeated

In the summer of 2020, Geographies of Material Culture, the undergraduate module behind our website, was totally reorganised for online teaching and learning. As detailed in our recent post announcing the launch of its public archive, it brought together 10 ‘follow the thing’ films and 10 followthethings.com pages about their making, discussion and impacts.

This module was also redesigned – from the selection and sequence of these films to the content and appearance of its website – to try to decolonise its pedagogy. Over the past couple of years a brilliant decolonising network has taken shape at our university with all kinds of exciting initiatives involving staff and students all over the place. The changes made to our module were informed and inspired by this wider movement. Some were generic strategies for decolonising a module and others were more tailored to the module, its materials and its aims. Module leader and followthethings.com ‘CEO’ Ian has been trying to channel his white privilege through anti-racist education for over 20 years now (see this from 2000). But this felt like a step change for his research and teaching about the ‘follow the things’ genre of commodity activism which simply asks ‘Who made my stuff?’

If you check the module’s public archive, you will see how the following decolonising strategies helped to shape it. There were five aims:

  • to disrupt the ‘white saviour complex’ of ‘guilty’ Northern (white) consumers wanting only to shop more ‘ethically to help exploited (POC) workers by trying to shift responses to ‘who made my stuff’ filmmaking ‘from guilt to solidarity’ (Young 2003).
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Guest post: when you read everything on the followthethings.com website

For the past six weeks, Exeter Geography graduate Natalie Cleverly has been working as a nicely paid intern on the ‘follow the things’ project. She took the Geographies of Material Culture module that’s generated our site since 2008, but in its new 2020-21 online iteration. And, this summer, she read every ‘compilation’ page on our website, looking for timely events about each page to post on our Twitter and Instagram because they happened ‘on this day’. As Natalie was finishing up, we asked her what it had been like to read the whole site. We don’t know anyone else who has done this! What do you learn? What’s been happening to ‘follow the things’ activism since we first opened our store ten years ago? Here are her thoughts.

Last September, I began the Material Cultures module at Exeter University. Since I’d chosen the module five months prior, the world had turned so upside down and inside out that I’d forgotten what I’d even signed up for. But I was fascinated. Particularly by followthethings.com itself. It wasn’t like any research project I had seen before. I reached out to Ian – who ran the module and the website – ‘Is there any way I can help?’.

And here we are. I’m not a followthethings.com expert, but after reading through 70+ pages of the website (almost the whole thing!) I’ve gained a good insight. So, what did I take away from sifting through all these years of content around activism / filmmaking / grassroots organising / following-the-thing?

A lot.

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Geographies of Material Culture: public module archive launched!

We have some exciting news. We’ve just posted this thread on @followthethings twitter. Here it is again with added whole films and/or trailers.

1/ Hello public archive!

If you’re teaching ‘who made my stuff?’ or if you want to find out more yourself, here’s our Geographies of Material Culture module archive. This is the module behind our website, fresh for 2020-21. 10 epic films. 10 epic http://followthethings.com pages.

Click the cats to get there.
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‘Provocations & interventions’: cultural activism and the UCU strike

At followthethings.com we’re fascinated with ways in which cultural activism can contribute to trade justice campaiging. Over the past month, our work has ground to a halt as our CEO Ian – in his guise as a UK-based academic – has been on strike. He has returned to work today as the Coronavirus crisis in the UK is beginning to bite. This post is primarily for students at the University of Exeter taking the MRes Critical Human Geographies module on the ‘Geographies of culture, creativity and practice’ . It’s posted here as part of the social distancing digital alternative to a seminar that’s scheduled to take place later this week. But we’re making it public rather than putting it on the university’s ELE system. If anyone visiting wants to add thoughts and links, the comments are open. Thanks!

There are three parts to this post: a) a starter reading for everyone, b) an intro to 2020 UCU strike activism with some allocated readings for each person, and c) an outline of our Skype session later this week.

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Video: ‘Brands are scared of these organisations’

What’s the role of labour rights NGOs in mediating relationships between brands, workers and governments? How do they make a difference to the lives and working conditions of the people who make our things? In this ‘Labour Behind the Label’ video, a labour union president from Bangladesh visiting the UK provides some answers…

Video: how pig parts make the world turn.

We love the work of Dutch artist Christien Meindertsma, and have drawn on her work to explain what the ‘follow the thing’ approach is all about, and how to do it well on our Classroom Resources page. We were reminded of her work today in a seminar in the Exeter Geography series by Ray Chan called “Capitalist pigs: politics of meat production and animal diseases in China.” We’re posting her 2010 TED talk today because it’s awesome. Enjoy!

I think that, in order to take better care of what’s behind our products — so, the livestock, the crops, the plants, the non-renewable materials, but also the people that produce these products — the first step would actually be to know that they are there. 

Christian Meindertsma 2010 | TED Talk

Guest Blog: bright smiles, dirty secrets.

This post is by Talisker Alcobia Cornford, a student who took the Exeter University Geography module that is behind our website last term. At the start of the module, everyone to choose an everyday commodity, zero in on one or more of its ingredients, search online for human and other stories of its making, and then experiment with forms of cultural activism to make these relations public. It’s often more interesting to choose something we have absolutely no idea about, no preconceptions about, like something whose ingredients are chemicals, with names we don’t recognise, listed in tiny writing that’s hard to read, especially when we use them bleary-eyed, first thing in the morning. Like toothpaste. Whose lives are in these kinds of things? Once Talisker finds out, why isn’t her response to shop for a different brand? Why’s she making these spoof ads? Who does she want to see them? Where?

Every morning I clean my teeth, pick up my toothbrush, squeeze injustice onto the bristles and brush, blissfully unaware that my daily routine is part of a wider routine of injustice. The complex network of interrelations branching from my sink is unimaginable, all congregating to produce a tube of Colgate toothpaste. The irony is, the product that is supposed to make my teeth sparkly clean, is riddled with dirty secrets. My 5 minutes of brushing twice a day is a lifetime of suffering for supply chain workers.

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