ABSTRACT
How can students study the geographically dispersed and socially and culturally disparate worlds of resources from the confines of the classroom? This chapter describes a collaborative in-class research project that brings together critical geographical analysis with critical librarianship to analyze resources and commodity chains using data sources available through the university library and the Internet. The assignment asks students to trace commodity chains from start to finish, an approach that helps elucidate the human and more-than-human relationship that make local and global economies. Chain tracing, we believe, can also prompt students to consider what resources are and how they are made. In this chapter, we outline the pedagogical underpinnings and the nature of our collaboration and then describe some of the key data sources we use. We detail our use of short written memos to encourage critical analysis of both the resources in question and the sources of data that the students draw upon. While this assignment has been used in a broad economic geography course, we conclude with a discussion of how the assignment has and potentially should evolve to reflect contemporary trends amongst critical resource geographers. As such, the chapter can serve as a starting point for instructor-librarian collaboration intended to help students develop skills in both the critical analysis of resources and the critical consumption of data and information.
