Academic writing

Publications
Presentations

Behind the “follow the things” website and its publications are many many presentations, at converences, seminars and other events, where CEO Ian tried out ideas and told stories about the project that never made it into print (often written word for word, sometimes filmed).

Please click the paper titles for the text and the images for the slides, and check back. We’ll add more when we find them.

Cook et al, I (2021) A cultural geography of trade in 60 objects: developing the pattern language for a handbook of follow the things activism. Paper presented at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) annual conference. [text to be added when we find it].

Cook et al, I. (2020) How to be a Fashion Revolutionary? Be Curious. Find Out. Do Something. Invited keynote for the Young Fashion Revolutionaries Education Programme, São Paulo, Brazil [text to be added when we find it].

Cook et al, I (2018) Minifigurative politics. Inaugural lecture, University of Exeter, UK

I’d researched what happened after a man in the UK had turned on his brand new iPhone in 2009 to find 5 photos already on it, the most iconic of which was of a young woman smiling and making peace signs at the camera. He shared them on an Apple fan site. Asked if other people had found them too. Who was she? Why were those photos on the phone? Weren’t those Apple factories in China supposed to be miserable places to work? Why does she look so happy? Why were these photos taken? Who took them? Why were they left on the phone? Were they some kind of advertising gimmick by the manufacturer? Or an accident? Would she get in trouble if they found out? That’s what hundreds of people from all over the world were asking online as this so-called iPhone Girl became an internet phenomenon. This image was my attempt to capture in LEGO the moment when that photograph was taken. To locate that actual phone. Held up, blurred, at the bottom right of the picture. Taking the photo. In the factory. In quality control. Phones having their cameras checked before they’re shipped. Workers smiling because they’re having their photo taken. They’re supposed to delete them, but these weren’t deleted. An accidental, it seems, example of the ftt tactic of shop-dropping: leaving traces of human labour in or on commodities for others to find while shopping, to encourage thought about who makes our stuff. I ask students to put the original photo on their phone’s home screens for a term, to see how they feel about this and what others ask about it. I’ve had it on mine since 2012

Cook et al, I (2016) [more about this talk here]

Cook et al, I (2015) Here we re-create in Lego… everyday commodity relations on followthethings.com. Paper presented at the Department of Geography, University of Bristol, February 4 (text), and in (2013) in the Human Geography seminar series, University of Exeter, Tremough (slides)

Many scholar activists have argued that it is no longer enough to train researchers to become ‘discerning, detached and critical so that we can penetrate the veil of common understandings and expose the root causes and bottom lines that govern phenomenal worlds’ (Gibson-Graham 2008, 618). Additional training is needed in a ‘range of … practices that apply and express critique through physical artifacts and material-technical practice’ (Ratto et al 2014, 86). In the ‘follow the things’ genre of commodity activism, experiments in ‘critical making’ have generated powerful critiques of, with, and alternative to the injustices of ‘free market’ capitalism. Many of these experiments have been researched and catalogued on the trade justice activism website followthething.com, whose aim is also to inform, inspire and publish new work in this genre. One example of this new work is a series of 64 photos of re-creations in Lego of scenes from films, art works, and events documented on the site’s pages. This paper will explain the principles and flow of the process through which these re- creations came to be made, as well as the lives they have been able to have in the the new media ecology of web2.0 after being posted online with Creative Commons licenses.

Cook et al , I. (2007) Following publication: defetishising commodities in a humid tropics biome? Paper prepared for the seminar on Critical Fetishism, Amherst College, USA, October 19-20

In December 2005, I went with a colleague to a conference at the London Mayor’s building on World Food Day. It was called: “If food could talk: hidden stories from the food chain.” During a coffee break, he introduced me to a man he’d met called Andrew Ormerod, who would be interested in my research on papaya commodity chains and in what I knew about a social sculpture about the international banana trade by the artist Shelley Sacks. Andrew, it turned out, was the economic botanist in charge of the humid tropics biome at the Eden Project, in Cornwall in South West England. I’ll say more about the Eden Project later, but all we need to know now is that this is a botanic garden, designed to re-connect people with the plants, people and environments that they rely upon unknowingly in everyday life, a millennium project, built in part with European money targeted at poorer regions, the largest greenhouse in the world in an abandoned china clay pit, a runaway success story and, very quickly, a national and international icon (used, for example, as a set in the latest James Bond film). Andrew was at the conference because the tropical fruit display in his biome was being revamped. He was interested in these ‘hidden stories’ and asked if I could send him some of my work.

Ian Cook & Philip Crang (1996) Commodity systems, documentary filmmaking & new geographies of food: Amos Gitai’s Ananas. Paper presented at the 1996 annual conference of the Insitute of British Geographers / Royal Geographical Society annual conference, Glasgow, January

… although [Gitai] has stressed the need to do research in preparation for the making of such a documentary, he does not argue that this should rigidly structure its filming or editing as, in chance (and sometimes deliberately structured) encounters, “sometimes people give you a sort of jewel and they reveal something you didn’t know or express it in an incredibly compact way” (ibid.:43) and this can lead to unexpected leads and interpretations which can and should be followed up as the filming process develops. This is very much the kind of impression which commentators on the film have identified as central to how it ‘works’. Here, according to Dubrule (in BFI 1985), “Pineapple addresses its subject with a tone of casual innocence startling the viewer expecting a film about imperialism and exploitation. It pretends not to know the story it is about to unfold. It demands that the viewer watch with the naivety of the supermarket customer” (46; Willemen 1992). Indeed, it could be said that the intended viewer participates in the film as the ‘missing link’ in the chains of associations represented.