For International Women’s Day: Maquilapolis – city of factories

It’s International Women’s Day tomorrow, so we’ve picked out a documentary that’s soon to be featured on our site: Maquilapolis – city of factories. This is a preview of its page in our Electrical Department. It’s unique in the ‘follow the things’ genre because its both about, and made with and by, factory working women.

Maquilapolis – city of factories

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Year: 2006

Type: Documentary film (68 mins, in Spanish with Spanish or English subtitles)

Directors: Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre, in collaboration with the factory workers.

Production Company: Independent Television Service (ITVS).

Availability: DVD (California newsreel $24.99 for home use), transcript (English & Spanish, free), online (sections & whole film, search).

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Guest blog: Avocado Story author Freddie Abrahams gets back in touch

It’s great when you get an email out of the blue. Especially if it’s from a former student whose ‘follow the thing’ dissertation is available from your website. And especially if it is, to date, its most viewed example of original student work on the site. Fred was a BA Geography student at the University of Birmingham. I’d supervised his dissertation. He’d enjoyed researching and writing it. Then he graduated and went off into the ‘real world’… but why’s he back?

FTT Awards: Lego Fred graciously accepts his award.

FTT Awards: Lego Fred graciously accepts his award.

He returns my email, eventually. He says it’s good to hear from me, especially so given how eager I am to get back into this writing malarkey.

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Our 4th #followtheteachers post: on subvertisement workshops

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“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.

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‘Great to hear from you’: guest post by ftt intern Aidan Waller

T-shirt: 'Made in Thailand'

T-shirt: ‘Made in Thailand’

It’s great to hear from former students who took the Exeter Geography module that creates so much of our site’s contents. A few weeks ago, we heard from Aidan Waller. He graduated in 2011, and worked as an intern when we were designing and ordering our shopping bags, and getting the site ready for its opening. He was in Thailand, doing some business, when following things came to mind. Here’s what Aidan wrote (published with his permission!).

Whilst travelling through the north of Thailand I stayed in the old capital of the north, Chiang Mai for a week. Whilst in the city I stumbled across a small back street shop with a big dayglo hand drawn sign saying “T-shirts 100 baht”. That caught my eye instantly, brilliant cheap T-shirts, I’d been looking for some for a while now and this place looked perfect.

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Show us your @fash_rev trump cards!

Today, we started to play with the Fashion Ethics Trump card game we’ve made for, and with, Fashion Revolution Day.

We ended up tweeting some #fashtrumps selfies and a step by step guide for anyone who wants to join the #fashtrumps conversation.

We present to you here: some examples of #fashtrumps selfies, those guiding tweets and a twitter box that will show the ones that you have made…

Give this a go!

Some examples

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Our 3rd #followtheteachers blog post: from Finland

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The Geographies of Material Culture module that I took at Exeter University in my Erasmus year triggered a fascination about trade justice education and culture jamming. Quite an effect? Yes… and let me tell where this has led.

I’m one of the interns who helped to develop the followthethings.com website. I also worked with the site’s #followtheteachers group. My Masters thesis at the University of Helsinki focused on creative teaching of commodity geographies, young people’s geographies and culture jamming – a research field in which academics are narrowing school-university-NGO-gaps. My aim was to introduce these mindboggling ideas in Finland.

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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?

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This Valentine’s Day, let’s show some love to everyone in its supply chains

Buying gifts to give to loved ones presents unique dilemmas to those who are concerned about who made them, under what conditions. Can you express your love for another person by buying them conflict jewelry, or child labour chocolate? And what are the alternatives?

Teaching and learning resources

If you’re looking for resources to help creatively discuss the controversial issues in Valentine’s Day supply chains, here’s a selection.

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