The Follow the Things website has had a facelift (perhaps in Malaysia) and some new teeth from Turkey, and looks fresh.
This is the site by Ian Cook et al which is one of the most essential sites to explore the stories of commodities, with links to Fashion Revolution and Lego recreations.
Links to education
Many of the ideas in the background of this site come from many years of work with school Geography teachers, teacher trainers, the Geographical Association (a professional association for teachers of Geography in the UK), and the Royal Geographic Society (with the Institute of British Geography: the professional association of Geography academics in the UK).
The GA and RGS(IBG) were awarded funding for a joint initiative called the ‘Action Plan for Geography’ (2006-2011) whose ‘Young People’s Geographies’ project involved CEO Ian as a participating academic [see the project website archive on the Wayback Machine
here].
This involvement drew, among other things, on his joint publications in teacher-facing journals with ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ students who researched and wrote about the human stories in their
socks,
iPods,
chewing gum,
ballet shoes and other things.
Ian subsequently continued to work with YPG participants and organisers including Dan Raven-Ellison (through the Mission Explore website [Wayback Machine archive
here]), Mary Biddulph (through the PGCE in Geography at the University of Nottingham, some of whose students and graduates took part part in a
#followtheteachers project) and Alan Parkinson (Geography education consultant, blogger and school teacher with whom Ian has written and published specialist ‘follow the things’ teaching and learning resources [see Alan’s ‘follow the things’ blog posts
here]).
These projects, pages and resources have emerged from conversations, interest and ideas with the school geography education community within and beyond the UK. A number of comments from school teachers are featured on our ‘peer review’ pages, including one American teacher who describes our site as ‘Like IMDB for everything’. The classroom aspect of our project has been funded by the Department of Geography and the University of Exeter. We hope to continue developing resources for, and stories from, school classrooms in the future. Please get in touch via i.j.cook@exeter.ac.uk if you have ideas or experience you would like to share.
‘Follow the things’ is a phrase coined by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in 1988 and elaborated by anthropologist George Marcus in 1995. Both encouraged academic researchers to undertake multi-site research with people whose lives were (often unknowingly) intertwined through, among other factors, the making, trading, purchase, use and disposal of things. All of the work showcased on this website does this, in one way or another.
In 2004, followthethings.com CEO Ian published a paper called ‘Follow the thing: papaya‘ in an academic journal called Antipode. It was based on his multi-sited ethnographic PhD research along the papaya supply chain linking Jamaica and the UK. In 2017 he explained how this led to the creation of followthethings.com in the Journal of consumer ethics (download here).
I first met Ian in 2006 at the Young People’s Geographies project meeting which he was involved with as an academic - and I was one of the teachers involved.
If you haven’t had a look at Follow the Things before, check it out.
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