Tagged: commodities

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.

Continue reading →

New project goes public: Museum of Contemporary Commodities

This is the project that Ian founded with Exeter-based artist and PhD student Paula Crutchlow in 2013. It  involves a whole host of collaborators now. It is going public this weekend in London’s Finsbury Park. And its website is now live. Please check out what it’s about and take part in person and/or online. Here’s what it’s about. Click the logo to get to the webpage. 

Screen Shot 2015-06-11 at 12.57.49The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is neither a building nor a permanent collection of stuff – it’s an invitation. To consider every shop, online store and warehouse full of stuff as if it were a museum, and all the things in it part of our collective future heritage.

Imagine yourself as this museum’s curator with the power to choose what is displayed and how. To trace and interpret the provenance and value of these things and how they arrived here. To consider the effects this stuff has on people and places close by or far away, and how and why it connects them.

What do we mean by things or stuff? Everything that you can buy in today’s society. The full range of contemporary commodities available to consume.

Please join us on our journey by browsing and adding to our collection, attending an event, becoming a researcher. We are currently curating connections between trade-place-data-values in Finsbury Park, London, and here online. Welcome to MoCC!