Category: new campaigns
Everything is (not) awesome: Greenpeace, Shell & Lego activism.
Greenpeace & Lego
Greenpeace want Lego to end its links with Shell, and are currently campaigning through the medium of imaginative Lego re-creation. This video is one of a number of examples, whose aim is to encourage people to sign this petition. In the wake of the hugely successful Lego Movie (whose stars make a cameo appearance) this campaign is becoming perhaps the most lavish and high-profile example of Lego activism to date.
followthethings.com & Lego
On a much smaller budget, we’ve been making, photographing and posting online re-creations in Lego of (imagined) scenes from trade justice films, art and activism for a while now. See, for example, our recreations from and around the BBC Panorama documentary ‘Primark on the rack’. Continue reading
Our 4th #followtheteachers post: on subvertisement workshops
“What the §^*! are we doing here?”
A couple of weeks ago, we published a guest post from Eeva Kemppainen describing the ways in which her work for followthething.com and her masters thesis on trade justice pedagogy in the UK and Finland, had led to her work on a ‘Closing the Gap’ project with Finnish pro-ethical trade NGO Eetti . This is Eeva’s second post, in which she describes how she works with diverse groups of students (using followthethings.com as a resource) and shows the kinds of subverts that her students create.
Sodastream studies…
Overnight, [Scarlett Johansson] has become the Marie Antoinette of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, smiling regally and offering: “Let them sip soda.” (source)
We’ve been following carefully how actor Scarlett Johansson (a.k.a Scarjo) was forced last week to choose between her role as an Oxfam Global Ambassador and as the face of soft-drink machine maker Sodastream.
This is the banned TV advert that was due to be shown at half time during Superbowl 2014, the ‘most watched’ TV show in the US. What values are expressed here?
Commodity activism & making things: the Fairphone.
Earlier this year, journalist George Monbiot wrote about the next mobile phone he was going to buy. It was a difficult decision:
If you are too well connected, you stop thinking. The clamour, the immediacy, the tendency to absorb other people’s thoughts, interrupt the deep abstraction required to find your own way. This is one of the reasons why I have not yet bought a smartphone. But the technology is becoming ever harder to resist. Perhaps this year I will have to succumb. So I have asked a simple question: can I buy an ethical smartphone? … I haven’t yet made a decision. There are all the other issues to investigate, including the remarkably short life of these phones … Perhaps I will wait until FairPhone manufactures a handset. Or perhaps I won’t bother. I might resign myself to less immediacy, less accessibility and a little more space in which to think. George Monbiot 2013 [link]
This is the ad for the Fairphone he was talking about. It’s just been posted online. Please press play.
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We love this project. It starts with the argument that we start with. But they’re not exposing exploitation (see here). They’re not making a banned smartphone game that shows how it’s made (see here). They’re not spoofing the existence of a conflict free phone (see here).
Like these other examples, however, they are putting pressure on manufacturers. By showing that conflict free phones can be made. By making and marketing one. That’s cool and affordable as other smartphones. €325. That you can buy and use (in Europe first). They need 5,000 orders. Here.
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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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Adidas + sweatshop work: how would you feel?
War on Want’s Adidas sweatshop campaign was launched today with this text & video:
As Adidas take centre stage as the official sportswear partner of London 2012, the harsh reality of life for the workers who make their clothes is being exposed.
Workers making Adidas clothes around the world are paid poverty wages, have little or no job security and face harassment or dismissal if they try and organise trade unions to defend their rights.
This is exploitation. It’s not ok for Adidas to treat workers like this in the UK, and it shouldn’t be ok anywhere else.
Exploitation. It’s not ok here. It’s not ok anywhere.
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For more information, visit the campaign website here.
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