Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop

Historically, second-hand in Latvia has been more commonly associated with acquisition rather than divestment. The colloquial term humpalas – derived from humānā palīdzība (humanitarian aid) – reflects the history of donated clothing arriving from abroad, particularly in the post-socialist period. In this context, second-hand goods were framed as assistance in times when access to consumer goods was limited rather than as part of a reciprocal or circular system, and organised opportunities for individuals to pass on their own items in organised ways were typically confined to informal exchanges or charitable donations.

A shift began with the emergence of more structured divestment infrastructures, such as the opening of the first Otrā Elpa charity shop in Riga in 2009. These initiatives introduced new channels for divestment, and gradually moved second-hand consumption from a one-directional flow of aid toward a more participatory system of reuse. Data indicates that second-hand acquisition remains a significant part of the textile market in the Baltic States: a 2023 representative survey found that 55% of Latvian participants currently buy second-hand clothing (Akule et al., 2023), and in 2018 second-hand accounted for around 40% of textile consumption in Latvia (Watson et al., 2020).

In recent years the landscape has diversified further, with online groups, neighbourhood swapping events, book and plant exchange shelves, digital resale platforms, and informal stall-based initiatives all forming part of a dispersed network of everyday circulation practices.

Various exchange, divestment and second hand alternatives are currently available and are routinely used by people in Riga – online groups, charity shops and textile collection containers – but what sets Brīvbode apart is the operation on a physical site, the exchange without regulated monetary transaction, and a sustained volunteer infrastructure that makes repeated visits possible and socially meaningful. It is open every week, year-round, and this regularity is central to what it offers – a route for acquisition and divestment, but also a predictable rhythm that participants can build into their everyday routines.

The contemporary Latvian reuse landscape is therefore best understood as a patchwork of routes rather than a single circular system. Some routes are institutional and increasingly formalised, such as textile collection containers, charity shops, municipal reuse points and waste-management company initiatives; others are commercial, such as Andele Mandele and Vinted, where second-hand circulation remains organised through price, platform labour and buyer–seller coordination; still others are informal and neighbourhood-based, such as Facebook groups, book-exchange shelves, ad hoc swapping events and semi-public leaving practices. These routes differ not only in what they circulate, but also in what kinds of work they require: photographing and listing, carrying bags, trusting unknown recipients, sorting for quality, or simply having access to a car, time, storage and information. Access to reuse infrastructure is therefore unevenly distributed, and Brīvbode should be situated within this wider, uneven ecology of circulation rather than treated as an isolated initiative.

Similar practices have long operated in digital environments, with specified online groups facilitating the redistribution of goods between users, e.g. “Atbrīvojies no lietām” (“Rid yourself of things”) – the names of these groups also indicate them as stemming from divestment, initiated by the giver as an opportunity to gain freedom from the burden of unwanted ownership.

In recent years more informal small scale infrastructures have become visible in urban space, such as book and plant exchange shelves located in libraries, clinics, educational institutions and cafés. Organised events, such as neighbourhood-based swapping, contribute to this landscape. Also smaller scale informal initiatives exist, for example, a participant told me about a trader who has set up a swapshop-like space in an unused stall in Matīsa market in Riga, maintaining it alongside her own activities. According to my interlocutors, such spaces attract regular users and form part of a dispersed network of everyday circulation practices.

At the same time, practices of leaving items in semi-public spaces – such as stairwells or next to waste containers – continue to operate as low-threshold forms of divestment, blurring the boundary between disposal and reuse. Second-hand retail chains remain a strong presence and provide access to low-cost goods that at times (e.g. special clearance days) approach free consumption. Other hybrid models combine elements of exchange and redistribution, such as the waste management company’s CleanR exchange point “Nomales” or the national reuse platform platform lietovelreiz.lv.

The first “library of things” in Riga was opened at the library of Goethe Institute in 2021, and this spring another two were established – in Sarkandaugava neighbourhood (currently announced as working until February 2027 within a project framework) and another in the nearby coastal town of Carnikava (running alongside a swapshop, opened by in collaboration with a waste management company).

Data indicates that second-hand acquisition remains a significant part of the textile market in the Baltic States, particularly in Latvia, where it accounts for a substantial share of total consumption. In 2018 around 40% of textile consumption in Latvia was second-hand (Watson et. al., 2020). The collection system in Latvia has undergone rapid expansion and formalization through new legislation. Latvia introduced mandatory separate textile collection in 2023, reflecting the broader EU regulatory direction established by the Circular Economy Action Plan and the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles.

A 2023 representative survey found that 55% of Latvian participants currently buy second-hand clothing, a rate similar to Estonia (61%) and Finland (56%).

Choosing the right terms to refer to Brīvbode is not straightforward. For one, no word currently exists in Latvian to describe the practice, and the available English terms each carry connotations that fit only partially.

The name “Brīvbode” is a more or less localization of the term “freeshop”: “brīv-” means “free”, while “bode” alludes to the cosy scale and affectionate oldschool character of a small shop, associated with a persona of bodnieks or bodniece – the person who attends to it and mediates the relations with visitors. Some regulars of Brīvbode use the diminutive “bodīte”, a form of endearment very common in Latvian.

However, the organizers have a complicated relationship with the term “freeshop”. As Brīvbode manager Rasa shared in an interview, the name already existed when she joined the initiative and they were trying to come up with alternative names in the beginning but did not manage to replace it. Their preferred term is “swapshop” which I also use in this thesis. “Swapshop”, as I discuss in Chapter 4, positions Brīvbode as a site of exchange rather than charity. However, as a descriptive term for “what actually happens there” I consider swapping not suitable enough, as it overstates the symmetry and implies an exchange with one to one logic, which is not the case in Brīvbode. In this thesis, I use the term “freecycling” to refer to the what is done in Brīvbode, as it emphasises the circularity aspect of the practice. While freecycling has its own specific origin, associated with the Freecycle Network, an online platform for giving things away locally, I use the term nonetheless because it captures the non-monetary circulation of goods without implying directness of swapping or the one-directionality of donation.

The thesis is organised as follows: Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature, situating the study within debates on practice theory and sustainable consumption and consumption work. Chapter Three describes the methodology, including the fieldwork context, interview approach, and analytical framework. Chapter Four, the first empirical chapter, examines Brīvbode as a site of freecycling practice: the materials flowing through it, the plural meanings and competencies that sustain giving and taking, and the non-monetary context that shapes the flows. Chapter Five turns more closely to the labour that sustains the flows described in Chapter Four, applying Wheeler and Glucksmann's consumption work framework to analyse the work performed by volunteers, participants, and the extended divestment networks that connect Brīvbode to surrounding households. The thesis concludes by drawing together the empirical findings and reflecting on what Brīvbode reveals about the conditions under which circular consumption practices can be sustained in everyday life.

The central theoretical grounding for this thesis is practice theory – or rather theories of practice – a heterogeneous cluster of approaches in humanities and social sciences in which practice serves as the primary unit of analysis for understanding human life and sociality. Shifting away from individual motivations and attitudes, behaviours and choices (ABC) based models for change, for example, practice theory rather examines how those doings are organized socially. It enables looking at the interconnectedness of the social and material realms with an emphasis on the role of objects, infrastructures and technology in practice enactment and maintenance. Evolved in a lineage from Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1984) in social sciences, in the past decades theories of practice have been influential and applied across various domains in social sciences and humanities, constituting what has been called a practice turn (Schatzki et al. 2001; Reckwitz 2002; Shove et al. 2012).

While varied definitions of social practice exist, Warde suggests a minimal definition: “An organized, and recognizable, socially shared bundle of activities that involves the integration of a complex array of components: material, embodied, ideational and affective. Practices are sets of ‘doings and sayings’; they involve both practical activity and its representations" (Warde, 2005: 134).

Practices as entities can be distinguished from practices as performances: the specific, recurrent enactments through which practices are reproduced or transformed. Transformation and change comes through recombination of the elements of practice (Shove et al. 2012) – a complex process that is constantly evolving and difficult to predict.

A particularly influential contribution, especially in anthropological approaches to practice, is the work of Elisabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson (2012) in which the authors offer a deliberately compact three-component framework for analysing practices: practice as entity. Shove and colleagues define a practice element frame consisting of meanings, materials, and competencies. “Meanings” refer to the ideas, aspirations, shared understandings and related values that give practice its purpose and make it intelligible for practitioners and guide how practices are performed. “Materials” refer to objects involved and used in practice, necessary technologies and infrastructure through which practices are enacted. It also refers to bodies and physicality. “Competencies” are the skills (across cognitive and physical realms) and practical knowledge necessary for participation in a practice, including understanding how to use objects, follow rules, and navigate social norms.

The authors acknowledge that the model sacrifices some nuance to analytical clarity, yet argue that it is analytically productive, especially for studying how practices change and develop when their elements are reconfigured. It allows looking at practices as entities with their own histories and trajectories – recruiting or losing practitioners, appearing and disappearing.

This threefold structure of elements of practice has been used widely across disciplines as it offers a clear conceptual approach for empirical research.

A further challenge for practice theory is delineation: there are no fixed procedural rules for determining where one practice ends and another begins. Nicolini (2017: 26–27) notes that, while practices can be conceived individually for analytical purposes, empirically they are always encountered in arrays and multiplicities. Shove and colleagues (2012) describe these arrangements through the metaphors of “bundles” and “complexes,” distinguished by the density and “stickiness” of their patterns. Bundles are looser associations of practices that share a site or time and shape one another without becoming tightly integrated; complexes are denser configurations whose elements have grown so co-dependent that they can constitute new practice entities. This distinction matters for the present study because Brīvbode is precisely the kind of setting where multiple practices co-occur in close proximity, and the analytical question is not only what freecycling is as a practice in its own right, but how it hangs together with the other practices it gathers around itself.

Practice theory, as developed by Elisabeth Shove, has been applied a lot to analyze stable, dominant, and largely unreflected practices that are taken for granted in everyday domestic routines (Shove 2003), particularly the inconspicuous consumption of energy and resources in affluent Western societies that drives resource use beyond planetary boundaries. Shove has even argued that “investigations into the beliefs and actions of self-confessed environmentalists represent something of a distraction. What counts is the big, and in some cases, global swing of ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted practice…” (Shove, 2003: 9).

Yet as Welch and Warde (2015) note, this strategic move away from environmentalists’ motivations has come at a cost, leading to a neglect of the cultural dimensions of sustainable consumption (Spaargaren 2013). Other authors have argued for a greater attention to non-hegemonic practices that serve as alternatives to mass consumption (e.g. Speck and Hasselkuss 2015). Practice theories are useful here too, as a tool for understanding how more sustainable alternatives might become normalised or integrated into existing consumption routines.

Brīvbode sits at an interesting angle in this debate, because what happens there is better described as a site where several ordinary practices overlap than as a single, fully stabilised routine practice in Shove's sense. The practices that converge in the shop – household divestment, secondhand acquisition, repair, sequential use of goods, sorting, sociality – are not unusual in Riga or Latvia. What is less common is their organisation in close proximity within a permanent, non-monetary exchange site, and the way the site holds them in working relation rather than collapsing them into one shared routine. Such configurations are also becoming more prevalent, as similar spaces and infrastructures appear elsewhere in Latvia.

Recent work in second-generation practice theory has begun to reintroduce questions of ethics, culture, and reflexivity into analyses of consumption (Askholm, 2024; Welch et al., 2020). Earlier approaches tended to focus on routine and inconspicuous practices, often sidelining the role of evaluative judgement and cultural meaning. This study engages with this emerging direction by examining how practices of freecycling involve not only routine forms of circulation, but also moments of reflection, valuation, and ethical consideration.

Practice theories have been widely applied in studies of sustainability and consumption. Whereas previously widespread theories of consumption in the 1980s and 1990s often treated it as a matter of individual choice and identity-making (Warde 2005; Warde 2014; Warde and Welch 2015), theories of practice enabled attending to consumption patterns that emerge from the practices in which people are engaged, rather than mainly from their preferences or intentions. This decentring of the individual marked a significant departure from both the rational-choice models of consumer behaviour research and the identity-focused approaches of consumer culture theory (Jackson 2005; Warde 2005; Warde and Welch 2015).

Warde’s (2005) paper “Consumption and theories of practice” is widely regarded as the first programmatic application of practice theory to consumption studies (Welch & Warde 2015). Its central contribution was to reconceptualise consumption as "not itself a practice but rather a moment in almost every practice" (Warde 2005: 137). Warde conceptualizes consumption not as a separate domain of social life organised around the acquisition of goods, but as an integral component of social practices through which people organize their daily lives. People consume in the course of doing other things: e.g. maintaining a household, raising children, managing seasonal change, responding to gifts received, keeping warm, eating, moving around. As Warde (2005: 146) puts it, from this perspective “the concept of ‘the consumer’ ... evaporates. Instead the key focal points become the organization of the practice and the moments of consumption enjoined.”

There is also a particular affinity between consumption and sustainability studies. Welch and Warde (2015) identify three reasons for it. Firstly, much of the environmental impact of consumption stems from routine practices – such as showering or doing laundry – that involve significant, yet often unnoticed, use of energy and resources (Shove, 2003). For such inconspicuous, resource intensive practices analysis of consumption as symbolic display and presentation of self that was more prevalent in consumption studies before is less relevant than attention to the material and social arrangements that sustain them. Secondly, because goods and services are primarily used for the accomplishment of social practices rather than for consumption per se. Thirdly, practice theory can provide a way out of discussions of the “value–action” gap – the persistent discrepancy between reportedly pro-environmental values which by contrast are not reflected in a person’s behaviour – by redirecting focus on the ways resource intensive practices capture and retain their practitioners.

This thesis aligns with practice theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption that attend to the full cycle of goods through domestic life – considering not only the goods and materials people acquire, but also divestment and disposal (Ehgartner and Holmes, 2022). For example, Evans (2020) responds to this by proposing an expanded definition of consumption as a process involving multiple moments beyond acquisition. Following Warde (2005), he identifies appropriation – the use, personalisation, and incorporation of goods into everyday life – and appreciation – the personal and symbolic frameworks through which goods are evaluated and enjoyed. To these he adds three further moments: devaluation, the loss of economic or symbolic value; divestment, the loss of personal meaning and the unravelling of attachments; and disposal, the physical act of getting rid of things (Evans 2020: 345). Taken together, these six moments constitute consumption as a full cycle rather than a single event. Evans notes that a case could be made for simplifying this further, though – replacing the three acquisition related moments with a single concept of attachment, and the three divestment related moments with detachment ¬ a formulation that captures the emotional and relational dimensions of both acquiring and letting go (Evans, 2020: 347).

This expanded definition of consumption to include detachment (divestment, disposal) is at the basis of this thesis. Brīvbode can thus be understood as a consumption site in both directions: people come to divest goods that have reached the end of their household life, and they come to acquire goods that may be entering a new phase of their biography. The swapshop is a node in the ordinary circulation of goods through domestic life, distinguished by its non-monetary character and physical permanence.

If practice theory explains how the circulation of goods is socially organised, consumption work names what that circulation costs. Practice theory’s focus on competencies – the skills and know-how through which practices are enacted – tends to emphasize how things are done rather than the effort and resources required to do them. Labor-centric views (e.g. through the concepts of consumption work or care work) instead highlight the laborious aspects of these practices, including the work of acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods and can address this gap directly. This is important in order to examine how circular consumption creates responsibilities and in what ways new forms of consumption work are distributed through populations.

Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) contend that secondhand markets involve consumption work – sorting, cleaning, repairing. “Consumption work”, for them, refers to the range of tasks required of consumers, before or after they consume, on which consumption itself is predicated – the work that must be done before or after the moment of exchange for consumption to be possible at all. Their framework encompasses technical dimensions – the allocation of tasks and skills to different people; modal dimensions – interdependencies of work across different social and economic arrangements; and processual dimensions – the connections of labour across the full span of a consumption process (Wheeler & Gluckmann, 2015: 35-36). In circular economy contexts, Hobson et al. (2021) argue, this work intensifies: responsible divestment requires more effort than simply throwing things away, and the additional demands fall disproportionately on those who are already doing most of the household management work.

In a recent study of household reuse practices, Beswick-Parsons, Evans and Jackson (2025) identify specific forms of consumption work involved in everyday circular consumption – decanting, stock management, recirculating – and argue that reuse practices are more prevalent and more varied than existing policy commentary assumes. Their analysis provides empirical precedent for examining consumption work and for attending to the range of tasks that participation in reuse practices requires. They conclude that future transitions to reuse might depend less on establishing new practices, driven by narratives of green consumerism, but rather greater attention should be paid to wider changes, including the transformation of supply chains to align with and facilitate the range of ‘reuse work’ currently observed within everyday domestic spaces.

Recent research at the intersection of practice theory and circular consumption extends this point by foregrounding care as one of the ways such labour is organised and made meaningful. Tölg and Fuentes (2025), writing on circular clothing consumption, show that keeping garments in circulation depends on practical and relational work: noticing value, maintaining and repairing items, storing them, passing them on, and accepting the obligations that come with ownership. Mesiranta et al. (2025) similarly argue that circular consumption practices are matters of care, because they require attention not only to things but also to the people, relationships and futures through which things continue to matter. This literature is useful for Brīvbode because the work of circulation there is not experienced simply as delegated waste management or as rational environmental behaviour. It is often taken on as care for useful things, imagined future users, neighbours, family members, volunteers and the site itself.

The thesis also attends to the gendered distribution of this work. Ethnographic research has demonstrated that consumption is often organised around care for others, and that women often function as moral agents in household consumption, regulating what goes in and out of households (Miller, 1998, Reno, 2016). Shopping and consumption practices can be seen as acts of care, where people choose items with loved ones in mind, reflecting their role in family and social networks.

Consumption work and practice theory in this thesis are complementary frameworks. Following the argument developed above in section 2.2., consumption work describes what practices demand from their carriers rather than what individuals choose to do. The labour is in the practice; the questions of what kind of labour and who bears it are questions about the social organisation of practice and whose bodies and time it recruits.

The argument that what happens at Brīvbode is best understood as a bundle of coordinated practices rather than a single practice entity is grounded in Theodore Schatzki’s work. Schatzki’s “site ontology” (1996, 2002) is an account of how the spatial and material organisation of a setting is implicated in the practices carried on within it.

Schatzki’s central claim is that social life always goes on as part of a mesh of practices and material arrangements. Practices are “carried on amid and determinative of, while also dependent on and altered by, material arrangements” (Schatzki 2017: 44). A practice is an organised manifold of doings and sayings; a material arrangement is composed of “interconnected human bodies, organisms, artifacts, and things” (Schatzki 2002: 38) through which practices unfold. Practices presuppose arrangements, and arrangements take their character from the practices that incorporate them. Schatzki calls these “practice-arrangement nexuses… sites of the social” (2017: 44). On this view, practices are “not merely ‘sites’ of interaction but… ordering and orchestrating entities in their own right” (Shove and Walker 2010: 471, characterising Schatzki).

Bundles of practices and arrangements connect with other bundles to form constellations; together these constitute what Schatzki calls the “plenum of practice” (Schatzki 2017: 145). Any social phenomenon “consists either in a practice-arrangement bundle or in features of such bundles” (Schatzki 2009: 55). The move from “settings where practices happen” to “settings as configurations of bundled practices and arrangements” makes the framework useful for an ethnography of a small, specific site. Schatzki’s own example is illustrative: at the Keeneland racetrack on race day, “promenading, betting, talking and watching races are carried out amid… viewing stands, concessions, the trackside holding area, the interior paddock, and the passageways, staircases and doorways that permit movement between these” (Schatzki 2009: 55). The racetrack is not a backdrop for a practice of horse-racing; it is the bundle in which several practices (betting, drinking, selling horses, corporate operations, taxi services bringing people in) are held in working relation by a distinctive material arrangement. Brīvbode is a smaller bundle of the same kind. Its sorting table, racks, fitting room, storage room, and corridor of incoming and outgoing visitors do not host freecycling as a pre-existing practice; they constitute the specific arrangement through which divestment, acquisition, sorting, repair, sufficiency, sociality, and waste management are bundled together.

This framework resonates with Hobson’s (2016) call to attend to “generative spaces” in the circular economy. Mainstream circular economy discourse, she argues, has foregrounded industrial closed-loop systems and consumer “acceptance” of practices designed by others, while obscuring “spaces where disparate forms of the CE may emerge and/or be fostered” (Hobson 2016: 95). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generativity rests precisely on the multiplicity that Schatzki’s ontology makes legible: the swapshop does not perform a single bounded practice of freecycling but holds in working relation a configuration of divestment, acquisition, repair, sewing, sufficiency, sociality and care. Its participants are, in Hobson’s terms, designer-consumer-user-repairer citizens, and the small, permanent, non-monetary site is the kind of arrangement that makes such hybrid roles practicable.

This chapter has described the conceptual tools through which the thesis examines freecycling in Brīvbode. They draw on three main streams of research to which I return in chapters 4 and 5.

First, following Warde (2005) and Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012), consumption is not itself a practice but a moment within practices, and the elements that organise a practice should be understood as travelling, recombining, and circulating across sites and carriers. Together with Schatzki’s site ontology (§2.5), this shapes how the thesis treats Brīvbode itself. Brīvbode is not a setting where the practice of freecycling occurs; it is a particular practice-arrangement bundle in which several recognisable practices (household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, craft, sociality, sufficiency, sorting, volunteering, resale, and so on) are brought together by a specific material arrangement. Freecycling, as I use the term in this thesis, refers to this bundle, which is clear enough to be recognised as a general description, but not so settled that it has integrated into a single shared routine. Following Shove et al.‘s distinction between bundles and complexes (2012: 95–101), freecycling is a bundle, not a complex; in Nicolini’s (2017: 28) vocabulary, Brīvbode is a nexus — “a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together.”

With this framing, Chapter 4 follows how meanings and competencies move through the site rather than requiring freecycling to behave as a unified routine in Shove’s (2003) earlier sense of inconspicuous, taken-for-granted consumption. Brīvbode is a site of circulation in two ways. Things move through it: a garment is detached from one practice and becomes available to be enrolled in another. But the elements of practice travel alongside the things. Competencies acquired in one practice (recognising fibre quality, judging a hidden stain, mapping a wardrobe) are recruited into others. Meanings migrate: thrift moves out of darning at home and into modes of divestment (Shove et al. 2012: 75; Gregson 2007); sustainability attaches itself to acts of bringing and taking that practitioners describe in different terms. Materials cross practice boundaries when wire offcuts become craft supplies, when a stranger’s garment becomes a costume, when an expired alcohol wipe becomes a useful object again. Shove et al.’s observation that meanings can be “unpacked” in new settings (2012: 70–71) describes a mechanism that plays out daily in the swapshop. In that way, the site is an example of what Hobson (2016) calls generative spaces: sites whose generative capacity comes from the recombining close interaction of multiple practices. Recent work in practice theory (Welch et al. 2020; Askholm 2024) has begun to introduce questions of ethics, reflexivity, and cultural meaning that the move toward routine in practice theory had set aside; this study sits within that broader tendency.

Second, following Evans (2020), consumption is best understood as a full cycle that includes appropriation and appreciation but also devaluation, divestment, and disposal, or simply: attachment and detachment. This expansion is essential for studying a site that operates both as a route for letting go and for acquiring, dependent on the willingness of carriers to disengage things from one practice so that they can be enrolled in another. Detachment from a practice is also detachment from a particular practice-arrangement bundle, and Brīvbode is a realm where elements are constantly detached and attached again.

Third, while practice theory describes how circulation is socially organised, it tends to underplay the labour that sustains it. Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) named this labour specifically as consumption work: the tasks of sorting, cleaning, assessing, repairing, transporting, deciding, and so on. They offer a framework for analysing how it is distributed: technically, across people and skills; modally, across paid and unpaid arrangements; processually, across a whole consumption process. Hobson et al. (2021) argue that this work intensifies under circular economy conditions and that responsibility falls disproportionately on those already absorbed into household management work, most often women. Recent work at the intersection of practice theory and circular consumption has begun to reframe such labour as care (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), and Bankovska’s (2020) ethnography of Latvian organic provisioning bridges the two registers by showing, after Graeber (2018), that care is not always joyful but often involves obligation, hesitation, and effort that cannot easily be put down.

These frameworks are complementary and the two empirical chapters use them together. Chapter 4, "Keep It Moving," follows the materials, meanings, and competencies through which the bundle of freecycling is sustained as a recognisable form. Chapter 5, "Hold It Together," turns to the labour and care that keep the site working. Brīvbode, I argue, is a setting in which the conditions of circular consumption become unusually visible — because the factors that ordinarily disguise this work are absent, and because of the proximity of practices at a single small site.

Brīvbode is located in the Lastādija creative quarter in Riga, Latvia, adjacent to the Central Market and the tower of the Academy of Sciences – the more central part of a neighbourhood formerly known as Moscow forstadt. The premises are situated on the ground floor of a two-storey wooden building facing Purvīša Street.

Lastādija quarter is run by Free Riga, a platform for creative and social initiatives for temporary use of vacant properties and territories in Riga, active since 2013. The quarter consists of several wooden buildings, a yard, and a former workshop building which was first acquired for use by Free Riga in 2015, offering space to various NGOs and events. Over the following years the quarter expanded gradually; the properties were bought by Linstow Baltic, an international real estate company, which reached an agreement with Free Riga for continued temporary use of the area – an arrangement that has now lasted nearly a decade. This model of temporary use is one of the main pre-requisites for running a site like Brīvbode, as it stands outside the formal economy. Both currently active Brīvbode venues in Riga are located in buildings managed by Free Riga, and the swapshops can use the spaces and sustain themselves by covering utility costs only.

Lastādija quarter has developed an uncommercial, DIY spirit that both shapes and is shaped by the character of the initiatives operating within it. Lastādija offers affordable residencies and workshop spaces to organisations, artisans, and individuals with creative and social initiatives. In exchange, residents contribute a number of volunteer hours to the quarter – collective work in the yard, various renovation tasks, event organization etc. The residents, workers, and regular visitors of the quarter also form one segment of Brīvbode's clientele, and the swapshop is open during quarter public events, however, many visitors come from a wider public who would not attend such events and are drawn instead by the practical offer of circulation of goods.

While formally linked to Free Riga, Brīvbode has for more than seven years operated as an autonomous informal structure. Brīvbode in Lastādija is open twice per week, every Thursday and Friday from noon to seven in the evening. Additionally, it operates on the first Sunday of the month to attract visitors who might not be able to attend on working days. On those Sundays Brīvbode also hosts Repair Cafe, an initiative where people bring broken household items – electronics, small appliances or clothing – and repair them with the help of volunteers. In recent years, Brīvbode has extended its activities beyond the primary location by participating with stands at various public events, including the Song and Dance Festival fair, Riga City Festival, Positivus, conversation festival Lampa, among others – promoting the practice of sustainable and circular consumption among wider public.

For most of the years of its operation, Brīvbode has been managed by Rasa, a woman in her thirties with a background in the cultural sector and a wide network of contacts in Riga's creative communities – she is the driving force of Brīvbode. A stable team of volunteers cover the shifts: every opening day has a day manager in charge of the shift and helpers who assist on a more flexible basis. Rasa manages Thursdays, and Viesturs – a resident of the quarter – covers Fridays, fulfilling his volunteer hour obligation in this way.

For the first five years, Brīvbode in Lastādija operated mainly in two public rooms of the venue. The entry room still serves as the main point of circulation, with a central sorting table, large racks holding dozens of hangers, and open boxes and shelves containing different categories of stuff: kitchen items and dishes, house appliances, books, accessories and miscellaneous items, but most of all – clothing. Next to the entry room is a dedicated room for children’s items – clothing, shoes, outdoor wear, toys, and books, as well as occasional larger items such as kickbikes, car seats, and strollers. Together, the two rooms form a compact space of around 30 square metres, organised to accommodate both the intake and redistribution of goods. A storage room holds miscellaneous items and functions as a buffer to manage overflow, seasonality, and the selective circulation of items, enabling the ongoing operation of the freeshop.

In spring 2024, Brīvbode expanded into two additional rooms, almost doubling its size. The new spaces include a room for books, textiles and women’s clothing, centred around a large round table used for gatherings occasionally, and another room with clothing and footwear for both men and women, along with a fitting room and a newly installed DIY heating system. This allowed for more visitors, more events, and, consequently, a greater volume and diversity of items in circulation.

The range of goods available at the swapshop is wide, including cosmetics, jewellery, craft supplies and household items such as dishes, cutlery, pots, pans, and lamps, as well as occasional electronics, and magazines, the majority, however, is clothing. Many items move quickly, with turnover often visible in real time as objects are brought in, sorted, and taken by other visitors.

The specific concept of Brīvbode – and the meaning attached to freecycling in this format – has been borrowed and brought to Riga from Berlin. Rasa volunteered there at an organisation running a swapshop in Neukölln which she experienced primarily as a meeting point for neighbours:

"I noticed the local neighbours, the regulars who were actually the ones who maintained the liveliness and the friendly, familiar (čomisko – lit. buddy-like, I.L.) atmosphere. In a supermarket you won't have that kind of familiar atmosphere – someone comes in once a month or so, you don't know them at all, the relations are cold, but there it was like a library where people also come in simply to talk. Because I saw that it can be like that in Berlin, I hoped it would happen here too." (Interview in March 2024)

Brīvbode is not the only initiative of its kind in Riga or in Latvia. Several swapping initiatives operate in other Latvian towns – Alūksne, Liepāja, Preiļi – independently, in different institutional contexts, but some under the same name – contributing to “brīvbode” becoming a new, common term. In Alūksne and Preiļi brīvbode initiatives operate on an event basis rather than as permanent venues, whereas (Pār)maiņu punkts in Liepāja operates in a smaller venue and is run by NGO Radi Vidi Pats.

The night before going to Brīvbode, I remind my children to set aside things they no longer need. It is never an easy task – they would rather keep them all. Even though I aspire to be cautious about things coming into our household, stuff keeps accumulating and more so – it is actually myself who brings the majority of these things in. While feeling an urge to get rid of things, I simultaneously keep wondering what more should I get in order to inhabit our place well.

In the morning, before arriving to Brīvbode, I go through the box of items I have set aside since my last visit and spend half hour sorting through the little storage room in my apartment – a space that has, over the years, become a repository for things I would rather not think about. Children’s clothes kept after they no longer fit, always at risk of new moth damage; a backpack brought as a souvenir by my mother that no one has ever used; a pregnancy seatbelt adapter that did not quite fit. Somehow getting rid of things also involves decisions about the future. There is the skirt I got secondhand online – it did not fit but is made of silk. Is it time to give it away or should I hold on to it for an unspecified creative project? For now, it sits together with other things acquired or given with good intentions and quietly set aside. Getting rid of them feels necessary in order to begin again and regain a sense of control over my environment. But are these trousers washed and good enough to pass on to someone? Would anyone need a strong plastic bag? Should I risk taking away some toys while the children are not looking?

I bring what I can carry on my bike, treating the visit as an opportunity for divestment I don’t want to waste. The first hours after opening at noon are especially busy in Brīvbode. A dozen people queue outside, waiting for the doors to open. Once inside, the sorting table quickly fills with incoming items, and volunteers and visitors constantly move through the space. Many of the visitors, at least at this hour of the day, are women, most of them older. Although soon I notice my mother’s souvenir backpack on a man’s shoulders, already on its way somewhere else. Nearby, a woman methodically works her way along the shelves of household items, selecting a grater, a small glass bowl, and several beer glasses, placing them into another bag that I recently brought. It can feel unusual to see someone unknowingly take something that used to be yours.

Viesturs, who volunteers on Fridays, stands near the sorting table, watching the room with practiced attention. He wears a small glittery brooch in the shape of a cat and a hat with long synthetic fur. By the end of the afternoon, he will have exchanged both – such playful accessories circulate frequently here, he explains, and swapping them is a small form of entertainment during his shift. During the day, some friends drop by to greet him. He comments casually on the items people bring and jokes with a regular visitor: “Look, Marija, this box will be useful for your fine jewelry.”

My task is to sort through a box of clothes, checking for holes and stains, separating what can be placed on the racks from what should be set aside for textile containers. The task is not difficult, but it requires attention: a missed stain becomes someone else’s disappointment, or perhaps reflects badly on Brīvbode itself. I set aside a top and a shirt for my son. A couple of women watch me sorting and use the opportunity to see what’s in the box without doing the digging work themselves. Viesturs encourages keeping only the best garments: “People can go to Humana for ugly clothes.”

Later in the afternoon, after the initial rush has subsided, a man enters carrying a woman’s jacket. He is a bus driver; due to construction at the main coach station, buses now stop on Purvīša Street. A passenger had left the jacket behind some time ago, and after remaining in lost and found without being claimed, he has brought it here. Looking around, he asks whether he might take a stuffed toy bear for his grandchild in exchange, pointing to one he has found, waiting for confirmation. Before leaving, he surveys the room with an expression that is neither quite sceptical nor entirely approving and asks what the point of a place like this actually is. It is a reasonable question that I will attempt to answer with some nuance.

Rather than offering a fixed methodological recipe, practice theories, as Nicolini (2017: 26) puts it, should be conceived as “a theoretical orientation towards the study of the social, where the methodological element remains central”. Various strands of practice theory share an approach that social life is best understood by focusing on what people do – through embodied routines, material arrangements, and practical knowledge – instead of emphasising attitudes, intentions or individual decisions.

Ethnographic methods, with their emphasis on participants and “being there”, suit studies informed by practice theory particularly well. To study practices best one needs to be where they manifest, to focus on the observable material doings, noticing routines, tensions and everyday dynamics that surveys and interviews alone cannot capture. Theories of practice also strongly acknowledge the significance of the material objects and infrastructures in mediating, constituting and reproducing practices – which makes a site organized around the movement of material objects a fitting location for practice theoretical fieldwork.

Michal Sedlačko (2017) writes about the friction between adhering to the ontology consistent with theories of practice while conducting ethnographic research. He offers four main principles:

1. focus on what people actually do (and what materials they converse with) – attention to actual doing, attention to interactions and sequences (as opposed to single actions or statements), attention to matter in these interactions;

2. focus on everydayness – attention to sites and situatedness of practice, attention to the aspects of social reality taken for granted by the practitioners, problematising the accounts used by the practitioners to make sense of the situation;

3. focus on assembling, structuring and ordering – action to the ongoing achievement of assembling (stabilising, structuring and ordering), attention to the multiplicities, resistances, conflicts, breakdowns and ruptures emerging and being overcome through assembling, attention to the historical and situational productivity of such assemblages,

4. and focus on reflexivity.

These four principles shape how I approached fieldwork at Brīvbode. The first orients attention to the concrete doings and the materials people work with – the sorting of clothes on shelves, the carrying of bags through the door, the brief exchanges over a particular object – rather than to stated attitudes about reuse or sustainability. The second takes the everydayness of the swapshop seriously: the unremarkable rhythms of dropping off and picking up, and the accounts practitioners use to make sense of what they do ("I thought it might be useful for someone"), which are themselves part of the practice rather than a transparent window onto it. The third frames Brīvbode as an ongoing achievement of assembling and ordering – the continual work of keeping things moving and holding the place together, and the moments when this work falters, gets contested, or has to be repaired. The fourth keeps my own position as a volunteer-researcher in view, since participation in the practice is part of how the material came to be produced. Together, these commitments orient the chapters that follow toward circulation as something that has to be done, sustained, and held together by the people, objects, and arrangements that meet at Brīvbode.

I started the fieldwork for this thesis in February 2024 by joining the weekly shifts in Brīvbode as a volunteer – for a couple of hours once a week in the beginning. This role was not entirely unfamiliar to me – for several months in summer 2021 I worked at a Brīvbode pop-up venue in the Āgenskalns neighbourhood during the Covid-19 pandemic. The visiting experience differed back then as visitors were required to book time slots in advance due to gathering restrictions. The experience of material flows that were part of Brīvbode stayed with me – both the intensity of accumulation and of objects getting stuck, the gradual familiarisation with the regular visitors and their habits and preferences, the physical effort of managing what came in and what needed to go out of the swapshop (e.g. using my cargo bike to take the ever growing number of unusable clothing bags to the textile collection bins). I still cherish certain clothing and items that remained in my household collection as favourites from that time.

Even though the principles are similar, each Brīvbode location has its specifics, and over the months of fieldwork – usually my weekly shifts in Lastādija – I renewed my competence in managing the flow of materials, evaluating and sorting donations, tidying, moving objects, witnessing and mediating occasional tensions in the shop. I took fieldnotes during and after visits, and occasionally photographed the space and its contents. As handling material objects is a kind of activity that eases conversation (Appelgren and Bohlin, 2015; Holmes, 2018), sorting things alongside someone or commenting together on an object easily opens exchanges, and I used these opportunities for informal chatting with fellow volunteers and visitors.

Consequently, I also paid more attention to public discussions e.g. among friends, family and on social media when people shared their habits, practices, as well as uncertainties and frustrations regarding divestment and secondhand acquisition, and I have occasionally used them as secondary sources.

The most of the fieldwork was done in the first half of 2024, from February to June. Repeated visits throughout 2025, several interviews in 2025 and additional two interviews were conducted and added to the corpus in the beginning of 2026.

Throughout the fieldwork period I kept a field diary for field notes during my visits to Brīvbode, as well as documenting and describing the circulation of goods in my own household – what arrived, what left, by what routes. I noted the spatial and temporal contexts for these practices, as well as the related meanings, uncertainties and frustrations.

The diary gave me space to express and make visible the mundane consumption, divestment work and care work around household objects – reviewing, evaluating and sorting children’s clothes, the early morning moments of browsing second hand portals as an enactment of care for others, the frustration with clutter and the pull of something on Brīvbode shelves, as well as thoughts about aspiring to be a good circular consumer. I treated these reflections as data, and keeping a diary allowed me to reflect on the circulation patterns in my household and to be cautious about my interpretations of what I observed in the field.

Overall, I have been and am sympathetic to the Brīvbode initiative and to the people who sustain it. This sympathy is productive – it gives me access, a certain ease of rapport, and insider understanding, while it also carries some risks. I have tried to address this by carefully attending to friction, tension, and contradiction in my data: the tensions around divestment of things from Brīvbode, the gap between Brīvbode's ideal social function and the quieter, less communal reality of many visits.

Before starting fieldwork I asked organisers of Brīvbode what questions they would find useful to have studied in more detail. One suggestion was to map the participant networks that extend beyond the direct visitors – the neighbours, colleagues and family members who are get to be involved in exchange through embedded participants without visiting Brīvbode themselves. This became one of the topics I pursued in interviews and is reflected in the empirical chapters.

During fieldwork I conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with Brīvbode visitors and volunteers, combining a pre-established topic guide with open-ended, follow-up questioning to maintain thematic consistency while following participants' own accounts (Rubin and Rubin 2012). Ten were longer conversations of 60–90 minutes; five were shorter exchanges of 20–45 minutes, some conducted on-site without prior arrangement. My first interview was with Rasa, the founder of Brīvbode and a key figure in the field with a real talent for connecting with visitors. Familiar with many regulars' stories, she introduced me to several of them; others I approached during my volunteering hours. Participants included long-term visitors who could reflect on changes in the venue and in their own practice over the years, alongside novices who offered fresh impressions of being introduced to it.

Some of the interviews in summer 2024 were conducted on site, in the yard of the swapshop. On several occasions, when the weather allowed it, I set up a table outdoors and invited visitors to sit for a conversation right after their visits. Following the principle that things are constitutive of practices, I used it as an opportunity to ask about their acquisitions and divestments during the visit, as well as their favourite and memorable objects acquired in Brīvbode as prompts to uncover material-practice relations (e.g. Mesiranta et al. 2025). This also corresponds to how Appadurai (1986) speaks of “methodological fetishism” with regards to returning our attention to the things themselves.

I also interviewed volunteers for longer conversations without interruption outside their working hours – some in Brīvbode, others in cafes. Later two of the interviews were conducted in visitors’ homes, thus offering an opportunity to observe household material arrangements, micro-infrastructures of storage and divestment, and talk about the circulation histories of specific objects in their domestic environment.

The interview guide was organized around participants' practices of acquisition and divestment, their relationships to the objects they brought and took, and the social and material dimensions of their participation in Brīvbode. While the guide included some questions on attitudes and motivations, most were designed to elicit accounts of what people actually do — how they choose what to bring, what routes objects take through their households, who does the work of sorting and transporting, and what letting go feels like. Following practice-theoretical methods, the questions sought to access the practical, embodied, and often taken-for-granted dimensions of household goods circulation: the routines, competencies, and emotional labour involved in managing the flow of things. Particular attention was paid to moments of friction and hesitation around the unregulated, non-monetary character of the exchange — whether participants felt there was a right or wrong way to do it, and how notions of ownership and value shifted in the process. Where questions touched on values and motivations, these were treated not as explanations for behaviour but as part of the meanings participants attach to their practices — one element, among materials, competencies, and social arrangements, in how circulation is organised and reproduced.

Most interviews were conducted in Latvian, with one partly in Russian; all were recorded and transcribed verbatim, and quotes have been lightly edited for readability where needed. Quotes used in the thesis have been translated into English by me. Together with fieldnotes, these interviews form the empirical basis for the analysis of acquisition, divestment, and circulation developed in the chapters that follow.

Most research participants, and the majority of practitioners in Brīvbode, are women — partly reflecting the gendered character of the practice and the division of consumption work it entails. Men do visit, and there are known male regulars, but my attempts to recruit them for interviews were not consistently successful: one interview was unusable, and another initially recruited participant withdrew. Two of the final interviewees are men: one a volunteer, the other the partner of a regular visitor, included to draw out the theme of domestic consumption work and its division within households. From observation, men and women often follow different practice careers in Brīvbode, with men appearing more frequently as sellers of used books and electronics or as collectors of CDs, DVDs and vinyl. This gendered skew should be acknowledged as a limitation of the interview corpus.

All interviews were transcribed and coded thematically on QCAmap, a web based service for qualitative content analysis. Qualitative content analysis is a systematic method for interpreting data through iterative coding, allowing patterns and themes to emerge from the material, while remaining open to revision.

Both interview transcripts and fieldnotes were coded. Open coding generated descriptive codes close to the data and themes were allowed to emerge from the data, while the process was also informed throughout by practice-theoretical concepts – particularly the elements of meanings, competencies and materials. Particular attention was paid to moments of friction and tension. QCAmap allowed the coded segments to be organised and reviewed across the dataset. The themes that emerged from this process are reported across the analysis chapters.

Participants in this thesis are identified by pseudonym. Where details could make individuals identifiable to people who know them, I have adjusted or omitted information, though some of the participants – particularly those in organisational roles – are more difficult to fully anonymise.

Before interviews, I informed the participants about my fieldwork and the purpose of the study. I asked for verbal consent prior to recording interviews and it was given in all cases.

My role as a volunteer in Brīvbode at times gave me a degree of association with the initiative that shaped how some visitors related to me. Several regular visitors who usually take larger quantities of items were reluctant about the idea of being interviewed; I respected this without pressing and interpreted this reluctance itself as data suggesting an awareness of how sequential acquisition practices might appear when observed and narrated. Those most embedded in the practice were not necessarily the most willing to talk about it.

The things entering Brīvbode are not simply donations. They are the material outcomes of other practices: clearing wardrobes, managing small homes, dealing with inherited belongings, correcting failed purchases, and working on one’s attachment to things. This follows Warde’s (2005) point that consumption is located within practices rather than standing outside them, and Gregson’s (2007) argument that ridding and divestment are active parts of living with things. Once objects arrive in Brīvbode, the outcomes of these household practices become resources for other practices: acquisition, craft, repair, resale, or waste management.

Noting how meanings migrate across practices, Shove et al. (2012: 75) mention how thrift, for example, is no longer expressed primarily through darning socks at home – now a rather rare practice – but has moved, as Gregson (2007) shows, into methods and styles of disposal and divestment. Divesting responsibly has become one of the ways people sustain and recreate identity in relation to their things.

The ideal encouraged by the organisers in Brīvbode is for participants to both give and take, yet giving and taking do not always recruit the same carriers or become part of the same practices. Giving in Brīvbode is typically structured more by the motives and capacities of givers than by the needs of receivers. It contributes to the swapshop’s stock, but it begins elsewhere: in household clearing, wardrobe management, failed purchases, moving, inheritance, or the wish to let usable objects continue. Givers assess objects through meanings of responsibility — too good to throw away — and through hopes that things will find new trajectories with other carriers. The incoming flow is therefore donor-driven: it reflects the rhythms and pressures of household life, while coordination with receivers’ needs remains indirect and mediated by the site.

Divestment in Brīvbode is distributed across time unevenly and concentrated around rhythms of domestic material arrangements and particular life events. People typically bring things in batches – no longer wanted items are set aside and accumulate at home until, e.g. a bag is full and is then divested to Brīvbode.

Moving home, renovation, seasonal clearing, and sorting through a deceased relative’s belongings generate larger pulses of divestment. Participants described sorting through an entire previous owner’s life when buying a flat, routing things to Brīvbode and to friends when downsizing, helping relatives to divest after moving home.

The size of the home is a very constitutive material element for divestment as smaller living spaces generate a more immediate need to move things out in order to fulfill, for example, the ideal of an uncluttered home – this requires both strong competency for managing household material streams and established divestment routes for what must leave. Brīvbode functions as one such route.

The ideal of a decluttered home functions both as cultural script and as embodied relief. Gundega puts on tidying consultant TV shows when she sorts at home, though the volume of advice tends to produce anxiety rather than clarity – no one person can remember it all. Viesturs is more pragmatic about decluttering methods: "I sense there are all sorts of methods and things, but it all seems like a luxury problem to me. Although maybe we should promote something like that – users of those methods would definitely supply us with better quality content."

The act of bringing things to Brīvbode performs moral work that throwing away does not – it can relieve guilt of having acquired unnecessarily, maintain the identity of a responsible consumer, and transfer some of the responsibility for what happens next to the swapshop. Gregson (2007) and Gregson, Metcalfe and Crewe (2007) argue that divestment is not simply an ending but an active practice of moving things along and reordering domestic life. In Brīvbode, divesting well and finding a route that feels appropriate to the object's remaining value has similar normative dimensions: there are right and wrong ways to let things go, and Brīvbode offers one of the right ways.

Participants who divest in Brīvbode mentioned the non-transparency of the textile container system in comparison to the freeshop. Both routes offer removal and a presumed social good, but participants expressed particular satisfaction for witnessing circulation in Brīvbode – moments when they saw someone taking the items they brought. Although giving and taking are decoupled and mediated by the swapshop, participants can sometimes observe the circulation during their visits, a characteristic noted by many with a kind of quiet pleasure. The divestment is completed by seeing or knowing an item was taken, and this visibility closes the divestment cycle affectively. The opportunity for other visitors to access the materials is valued, while the textile collection management system is deemed too distanced to imagine who benefits.

In the absence of a specific receiver, and while negotiating the appropriate value and quality standards for circulated items, givers construct a figure of a receiver. This imagined future user becomes one of the meanings that travels with objects into Brīvbode and shapes divestment decisions from the giving side. Aiga describes her hope that a homeless person from the neighbourhoods of Ķengarags or Purvciems, someone in genuine need, would use what she brings. This imagery expands what counts as worth passing on: objects that might be marginal by taste standards become appropriate if genuine need is the criterion, and the threshold for what counts as good enough shifts accordingly.

The threshold of acceptability in Brīvbode is negotiated situationally, and this uncertainty can become a source of tension. Aiga described how she continues wearing clothing that is slightly pilled and normally uses dry food items past their expiry date – her own standards of what remains usable are linked to the meaning of genuine need but she cannot know in advance whether the items she brings to Brīvbode will be acknowledged as suitable. After receiving comments once about the quality of something she brought to Brīvbode, she prefers to not linger and leave her things quickly. The imagined receiver who accepts everything gives way to the real social encounter where standards are negotiated by someone else.

The supply arriving in Brīvbode is shaped by these contested meanings – participant competencies of evaluating items as appropriate and the rhythms of domestic life. As such it is often unpredictable.

In reality, Brīvbode also functions as a divestment route for items that more regulated reuse channels would not accommodate: unfinished repair projects and textile fragments can sometimes be found, photographs and used magazines, not entirely complete jigsaw puzzles. Sometimes volunteers would remark that they already look for signs of wear and tear in suspicion about reasons an item has been brought to Brīvbode. They are aware that the swapshop can become a route of last resort for objects that are genuinely difficult to route elsewhere. What counts as acceptable and what counts as waste is decided through social judgment rather than formal criteria. I sometimes brought things in my backpack but ended up not taking them out as on second thought they seemed too worn or not suited.

Fieldwork observations reveal different versions and scales of what counts as usable and worthy: I recall a collection of single-use sugar packages; a bundle of expired covid tests (I spent time unpacking the alcohol wipes and watched a woman take them); carefully washed plastic containers that were taken to the recycling bin after all (although the sour cream containers are useful in spring for growing plantings). A regular visitor brought coloured wire offcuts generated by her husband’s wireworking practice – she imagined someone who makes art or does craft work with children could be taking them, as they were never on the shelf anymore the next time she visited. Her husband generates surplus, she routes it to Brīvbode through her domestic management, an unknown hypothetical third person absorbs it into their own. The trajectory is sustained by an imagined right-owner who may not exist, and the volunteers did not have the heart to tell her the bags of small plastic pieces were not used that way.

Yet the unpredictability of supply works both ways. The same giver who took extra effort to send Brīvbode a parcel with stained old plates, raising volunteer questions about the balance of energy invested in handling it, divested a bag full of colourful folk-style knitted mittens another time. Laid out on the table, the mittens attracted many visitors’ attention as objects of shared beauty. This uncertainty of supply is part of what keeps several practices animated around the site: divestment becomes hopeful, acquisition becomes exploratory, and meanings of “serendipity” or the magic of an unexpected “good catch” attach themselves to the flow of things. This is one small example of how meanings travel with and through materials, but are also transformed when they are “unpacked” in a new setting (Shove et al. 2012: 70–71).

The same logic that makes divestment easy also can make Brīvbode available as a pressure valve. Fast fashion sometimes arrives with tags still attached; one participant brought clothing she had purchased online – after it did not fit she arranged a return, and was told by the company to donate it rather than send it back – the retailer in this case is routing their surplus to volunteers to manage.

Divestment is normalised and sought after. As Brīvbode manager Rasa observed: "Often we're simply a place to dump it all and go buy new things." In this view, Brīvbode appears as evidence of the structural conditions it aspires to address rather than a solution to them. There is tension present in Brīvbode between the swapshop as an alternative caring system and as a low-threshold overflow channel, and this tension does not resolve easily.

On Thursdays and Fridays a queue often forms by Brīvbode before noon – sometimes more than ten people wait to be let in. The first two hours are the busiest. Rasa sometimes takes a breath before unlocking the door: "It begins."

After an item is divested to Brīvbode, it does not belong to the donor anymore, it belongs to the swapshop. This transfer of ownership is actively managed: takers are discouraged from taking things from the sorting table before they are processed, as their enthusiasm has caused discomfort to other visitors in the past.

However, sorting is done “on the spot” and in the same room, and things move fast. As Larsen (2023) observes, in thrift shops, practices are often characterized by a "reversal" of standard economic logic, where the goal is to move things along as quickly as possible rather than to maximize the profit per individual item. This can also be said about Brīvbode – there’s excitement about things moving quickly.

Physical instead of virtual co-presence shapes the quality of encounters between people and objects. As Tan and Yeoh (2024), writing about freecycling markets in Singapore, observe, “relational-material exchanges play out better as an embodied co-presence with others/things” – objects can be handled, tried on and assessed, and an item of decent quality will eventually find a taker.

The physicality and permanence of Brīvbode as a site is one of the main attributes setting it apart from other similar initiatives that often struggle with the availability of affordable rental space, especially in high-density urban areas. Tan and Yeoh (2024) note that, for this reason, organisers of Singapore freecycling markets must bin or redistribute excess items after every event. They identify rental and storage space as one of the main preconditions for functioning freecycling initiatives. In Brīvbode, regular operation in the same physical venue does not simply constitute “a practice of freecycling”; it provides an infrastructure in which multiple practices can recur and become mutually adjusted. The same rooms repeatedly bring together giving, sorting, assessing, taking, storing, chatting and discarding, allowing visitors to develop regular rhythms through which participation in Brīvbode becomes embedded in everyday life.

The space in Brīvbode is organised and decorated to resemble a retail environment with a DIY aesthetic — with hangers and shelves, and garments sometimes arranged by colour in the manner of the formerly operating secondhand chain Degas. The aesthetic is not fixed, however, as curatorial disagreements exist over the best presentation and each shift can leave its own curatorial mark. Rasa describes the tension between celebrating volunteer initiative and an aesthetic that, in her view, would communicate more value through similarity to a retail environment: leaving more space between things, signalling that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. “The emptier the shelves, the more people find,” she notes. A different aesthetic, displaying abundance and decorating with plushies, appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements are not merely questions of taste; they are negotiations over which meanings should be foregrounded in the site — abundance or quality, treasure-hunt or curated shop, playfulness or respectability. In practice-theoretical terms, material arrangements do not only support practices from outside; they are among the elements through which meanings and competences are organised (Shove et al. 2012: 14, 23). Material and meaning elements are therefore not settled properties of a single practice but are actively arranged and contested through the performance of different tasks in the shop.

The regularity of operation that the physical on-site format allows also fosters social contact among participants. Opening hours twice per week is both a way to manage the necessary volunteer labour and a social encounter catalyst – temporal tightening means that visitors are more likely to encounter each other. The volunteer in charge of the shift anchors the social experience, and the personal relationships accumulate over repeated visits. "On Thursdays everyone asks where Nadja is. And on Fridays everyone asks where Viesturs is." While Brīvbode is not a primary site for socialisation for most participants, regular visitors, especially those living in single person households, noted the meaningfulness of the social aspect of visiting, the casual contact with known “faces”, Brīvbode being a place to go and the visits giving a structure to the week.

Within the material realm, Brīvbode is also embedded in and dependent upon broader infrastructural arrangements in order to manage the overflow it cannot absorb. The swapshop passes leftover textiles – in some estimates up to 30 % of the received flow (Akule et al. 2023) – to textile collection containers. The shop would not be viable if it had to cover the costs of regular unsorted waste collection. Also, off-season clothing such as winter coats that take a lot of space are stored in collaboration with charity organisations that have access to larger storage premises. Brīvbode can sustain – in a pragmatic, improvised manner – because of this material entanglement instead of trying to resolve the full material cycle on its own.

The physical experience of overflow is a constant of volunteering, and bags often arrive faster than they can be processed. Often my task during shifts was to sort and put out children’s items. The boxes were already full, with piles forming, when I asked Rasa: 'Don't you feel like the things are just pouring down on you?' 'Yes, that's why I no longer have any tolerance for things. I realise I feel relief that these clothes are dirty, because there simply isn't any more space."

During another shift, Rasa offered me a handmade black ceramic plate someone had brought that day. I was glad to take it, but before my departure confusion arose about where it had gone. It turned out, more stuff had piled up on top of it on the sorting table as visitors kept coming with their divestment. Rasa laughed: “This is how it is here.” As a material site, Brīvbode is an active flow that requires tending and occasionally swallows its own offerings.

The pull of Brīvbode as a divestment destination persists even when the physical site is temporarily absent. For several weeks after the Brīvbode pop-up venue in Āgenskalns closed at the end of summer 2021, people kept bringing boxes and bags of belongings, leaving them in front of the empty shop. The closure of the site did not immediately interrupt the flow because Brīvbode had already become part of people’s divestment routines: a known route, a remembered address, and an imagined place where surplus could still be sent onward.

The physical site matters because it makes practices that are often separated — giving, sorting, assessing, taking, chatting, refusing, storing and discarding — happen in proximity. Brīvbode’s generativity comes from this compression, but so do many of its frictions.

The material composition of Brīvbode reflects the gendered organisation of (clothing) consumption more broadly. The majority of items circulating through the freeshop are women’s and children’s clothing – a pattern that mirrors the more feminised character of household consumption management. As noted in the methodology chapter, men do participate in Brīvbode, but on a lesser scale and with different practice career tendencies – while men’s clothing is sought after, they also look for books to circulate in second hand markets, CD’s, electronics.

If Brīvbode is a site where practices intersect, participation requires more than knowing the rule “bring and take.” It requires practical judgement about what kind of object this is, whose future practice it could enter, whether it should be displayed, repaired, removed, tolerated, or quietly redirected. Practice theory treats such know-how not as an individual attitude but as competence: practical knowledgeability acquired through participation and tied to specific material arrangements (Shove et al. 2012: 23; Nicolini 2017). These competencies are unevenly distributed and become visible especially where practices collide.

The gendered asymmetry extends to the competencies required to manage the space. Viesturs described his initial challenge of developing a workable system for sorting women’s clothing after he started volunteering: "Well, f*ck, look, where do I put it. Trying to systematize women’s clothing, it’s like a tree with many branches." The competence of sorting – especially women’s clothing as in this case – is not self-evident as the proliferation of categories resists simple organisation and has to be worked out through practice.

The standards applied to men’s clothing also operate differently. There is simply less of it, and the threshold for what is acceptable is lower – men’s clothing is assumed to be used for physical work and is assessed accordingly. One day two young women looking through the clothing boxes for film costumes picked up an undershirt and commented on how disgusting it was, while a man right next to them took it. Rasa later confirmed the shirt was not in a good condition, but she had put it out because, as she noted, everything gets taken from the men’s section. The norms of assessment reflect whose consumption practices the swapshop is organised around.

While there are explicit written rules governing exchange in Brīvbode, those are framed in general relational terms – “bring things that would bring joy to someone; bring things you would give to a friend” – and there are no formal categories of exclusion. Norms regarding acceptability are defined and enacted situationally and relationally, which can be both a strength and a source of friction about where the boundaries lie.

Being in Brīvbode is characterized by constant sorting decisions, trying to maintain an acceptable level of presentation and quality of items. The work of maintaining quality and the work of maintaining relationships sometimes pull in different directions, and the balance between lenience and care is negotiated in every shift. At times I heard people felt uneasy about Viesturs openly commenting on things they had brought.

This is observable even in the circulation of food items, which, although not central, are also present in Brīvbode. As opposed to many community-based exchange initiatives where the circulation of food is governed strictly, e.g. accepting only unopened items and carefully monitoring expiration dates, in Brīvbode the circulation is shaped less by formal regulation and more by trust and familiarity among participants. Open packages may be accepted when brought by known visitors, suggesting that assessments of safety and acceptability are negotiated socially.

A stronger boundary emerges in relation to certain categories of items, such as medicine. In one instance, a regular visitor brought various medications, explaining their uses to the day manager. While the items were initially placed on the table for taking, a while later another worker quietly removed them, remarking to me, “I don’t think I support this.” The removal was not communicated directly to the donor, suggesting a reluctance to enforce the norm explicitly. Instead of a formal refusal, workers might suggest that perhaps the giver has not noticed the defects, but items could be washed and brought back or simply delay decisions until the giver is no longer present.

"Man kaut kā mazāka vēlme ņemt visu, ko es redzu, par spīti tam, ka tas it kā ir tas 'brīv'... es kaut kā vairāk cienu to visu, kas tur ir izlikts." [I somehow feel less desire to take everything I see, despite the fact that it's all "free" – I somehow have more respect for everything that's laid out there.] Madara explicitly contrasts her response to freeness with others' – she imagines the hoarder who grabs because it's free, and positions herself as someone for whom freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition. This is the moral economy of freeshopping from the perspective of someone still in the early stages of learning the practice's norms. "Kādam varbūt tas 'brīv' rada vēlmi, ka viss ir bez maksas, tagad ņemam, ņemam, ņemam. Man tas nospēlē kaut kā tieši otrādāk." [For some, maybe "free" creates the urge that everything is free, so now we take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.] "Es to uztveru kā apmaiņu. To vārdu 'brīvu' kaut kā izslēdzu... Sākumā tas tā bišķiņ mulsināja, ka esmu kā apzagusies." [I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word "free"… At first it was a bit confusing, as if I had stolen something.] This is competency acquisition: Madara is learning how to understand and inhabit the value regime of Brīvbode, and she narrates the process explicitly.

The competencies that sustain circulation in Brīvbode are largely social and evaluative rather than technical, and none of them require formal training — but each is acquired through repeated participation and is unevenly distributed across practitioners. In Shove et al.’s terms, competence includes “skill, know-how and technique” and is one of the elements that must be linked with materials and meanings for practices to be performed (2012: 14, 23). Material literacy — recognising wool from synthetic fibres, identifying well-made construction, spotting a hidden stain — is foundational, and volunteers develop it most acutely through handling what arrives. Rasa, in the recollection of one student researcher who spent time in the shop, has “the most trained eye for the quality of things” [visuztrenētākā acs uz mantu kvalitāti]; her own acquisition criteria turn on fibre type and durability, preferring what is “more nature-friendly, ecological, and long-lasting.” Visitors develop a more limited version of the same competency. Laura describes herself as a careful second-hand user who checks everything thoroughly, though she admits she has still occasionally taken home items that turned out to be broken on closer inspection.

On the acquisition side, competence also means knowing when to come and how to navigate the space. Agate has mapped the visitor typology and times her arrivals strategically; Marta describes starting in the first room and returning when something new has arrived. Equally important is the negative competency of not taking — knowing what one needs and what one already has. Zane keeps a list on her phone of items she is actively looking for, and her stylist consultations work as an investment in self-knowledge that guards against impulsive acquisition. Agate explicitly asks herself while browsing whether a given item could be combined with what she already owns. This is cognitive work — holding a mental model of one's wardrobe and household — and without it, acquisition becomes impulsive and the divestment work follows. The competencies of acquisition and divestment are therefore inseparable: each unconsidered acquisition becomes future divestment labour.

On the divesting side, Brīvbode’s rules and volunteer judgements expect items to arrive clean and in reasonable condition, requiring washing, stain-checking, and sometimes minor repair. Yet these expectations meet the standards of other practices from which objects arrive, and norms vary: Marija leaves the washing to the recipient, while Anna says she never divests anything that has been repaired. The boundary between “ready to circulate” and “needs more work first” is therefore not fixed in advance. It is negotiated at the point where household divestment, volunteer sorting, repair, and future acquisition meet.

Practices have normative meanings: understandings about what correct participation looks like, what a practice is for, and who belongs in it. Meanings, in Shove et al.’s sense, include the symbolic significance, ideas and aspirations that make participation intelligible (2012: 14, 23). In Brīvbode, however, normative work is not simply about defining one bounded practice of freecycling. Organisers work to hold the site within a meaning of exchange rather than charity, even as it remains useful to people who need free access, absorbs overflow from households, and sometimes becomes entangled with resale. This framing is a normative aspiration — a claim about who belongs and on what terms — actively maintained against pressure from resellers and heavy-takers. It is held together by a moral vocabulary of equality and reciprocity: participants are expected to bring something, contribute in kind, or offer help at the shop, so that taking remains part of a shared exchange arrangement rather than the use of a service. This positioning work is felt as particularly necessary because Brīvbode is located near the Gaiziņš night shelter, where the boundary between exchange, need, and charity can become socially charged.

Brīvbode has to continuously distinguish itself from charity while also remaining useful to people who may need free access; distinguish itself from resale while sometimes tolerating resellers; distinguish non-monetary exchange from waste removal while depending on heavy takers to clear overflow.

As Rasa puts it: “Exchange is a very honest way of operating, it requires responsibility from both sides. When both wealthy and poor, old and young can participate, and everyone knows it's on the basis of exchange, that you are equal, nobody gets a discount, nobody is more special. To many people we simply say: “We are not a charity. It's not the case that you come and now demand that you need clean trousers. We are not a charity point, this is an exchange point. Do you actually have something with you for exchange, before you start setting the rules here?” Nadja is very good at negotiating this. “Go to the Red Cross, go to other places that are specifically a charitable institution! We are not a help institution.””

Widlok’s (2017) analysis of give boxes – small scale unattended exchange infrastructure in a German town – offers a frame for what the non-monetary arrangement achieves socially. Give boxes, he argues, separate the acts of giving and receiving – donors and recipients do not need to interact directly, and the intermediary space absorbs the social awkwardness of charity. Items move quickly, suggesting ongoing demand, while participants tend to frame their involvement in terms of giving even when they primarily take.

Brīvbode operates on a similar logic: the physical space mediates between participants, making it possible to take without performing need. At the same time, Widlok notes that give boxes are not straightforwardly sharing practices – they tend to be understood within a moral register of charity or almsgiving rather than open-ended reciprocity, and tensions arise when participants extract items for resale rather than use.

The imperative to keep things flowing to avoid overflow creates a certain tolerance in case of suspicion for such practices that formally fall outside Brīvbode’s rules. Reselling is not allowed, yet resellers are a suspected presence in Brīvbode. Volunteers mentioned situations when other visitors in Brīvbode have told them they have recognized their divested items at the Āgenskalns flea market the following weekend, which Rasa acknowledges as straightforwardly unpleasant. Yet because it is not always possible to prove, there is also a working accommodation, and Rasa’s position is one of pragmatic acceptance: “At the same time it seems – if he'll find the next user for the thing anyway, the function is fulfilled. Better they make a little money and the thing finds its person, than some hoarder takes it and the things end up in a container." She laughs: "Well, what choice do I have but to believe… We support small businesses."

This reveals a hierarchy of meanings operating within Brīvbode’s moral economy. The object’s arrival to a sequential user is weighed as more important than the forbidden monetary transaction that may or may not occur along the way. The ethos of non-monetary exchange can be subordinated to the deeper logic of circulation. Besides, if visitors come with something in return, further trajectory is difficult to control.

Viesturs frames this ecologically: "Well, I could see them now as forest sanitarians." Without moral approval, the resellers, the hoarders and heavy-takers are reframed as functional elements as they clear out the accumulation of materials that would otherwise clog the space. Viesturs response to this is tactical curatorial competency: if a person he suspects is present at the shop, he often doesn’t put new items out on the shelves until they leave. This is his practical judgement and competency to “read the room” enacted situationally.

The intensity of circulation of items in Brīvbode and its non-monetary context raise a question about the relationship between price and attachment. Evans’s (2020) framework suggests that attachment is produced through the acquisition-side moments of consumption – appropriation and appreciation, processes that are normally anchored by monetary investment. Assima et al. (2023) describe "financial myopia" – the difficulty of detaching from items one has spent significant money on, even when they are no longer used. This results in "neglected possessions" accumulating in wardrobes as disposal is deferred to avoid the feeling of wasting a significant investment.

The anchor of monetary investment is absent from acquisition in Brīvbode, and some participants articulate the shift in their own relationship to objects directly. Rasa describes how price normally operates as a binding force which Brīvbode alleviates: “You no longer have that heaviness around a thing – I bought it for €40, how can I now throw it out or give it away, not wear it. Now it's simply: if it doesn't suit, bring it back. Try it – it works, or it doesn't. It's much more free." She is pragmatic about this beyond Brīvbode too: “No matter where the garment comes from, there is that percentage of things I take or buy or acquire for myself that I always know won't get worn regardless of whether I've paid money for them or not. So the safest thing to do is to invest as little as possible, so that afterwards there are fewer regrets." This is a recalibration of what kinds of commitment acquisition is.

Fieldwork observations capture this in the dynamic of circulation. A woman arrives and leaves in different shoes than she came in: “I left mine here instead. Today with these trousers, the high heel doesn't suit. Hopefully no fungus..." Another laughs as she leaves her jacket in Brīvbode on a sunny day because she feels too hot: “I left home with clothes on but will be coming back in socks only. I don't need anything.” A third also swaps her jacket on the spot for one she prefers. The meaning of novelty comes across in these cases.

Another aspect to the quality of attachment is the possibility of a return after trial and seeing whether attachment will form. It can be difficult to assess in the moment of acquisition whether an item will settle in person’s life. Bringing something back if it does not further loosens the relationship between taking and keeping, allowing a lower stakes and a more experimental participation. This trial opportunity was appreciated by participants whose physical attributes and body shapes are not always catered to in retail: "Because for a small person it's quite hard to find trousers... But here there's the opportunity to try them for some time and see."

However, if acquisition carries less commitment, the same conditions that make divestment easier may make acquisition more frequent and less deliberate. My own divestment to Brīvbode often consists of things bought secondhand online as a preferred route of acquisition, but choosing not to invest effort in reselling when they don’t work out. The non-monetary regime does not automatically produce more careful consumption; its relationship to sufficiency depends on the meanings participants bring to it.

Elīna describes feeling a sense of responsibility toward everything she acquires – whether bought secondhand, taken from a swap event, or found in Brīvbode. Once something has come to her, she feels obligated to find it a good next home rather than simply discard it: "If this has come to me, then this material... energy and work and transport went into producing it, and I can't just throw it away. I feel I have a duty to figure out how to pass it on to hands where it will be useful." She adds, however, that this sense of responsibility sometimes feels like too heavy a burden to carry.

Managing the impulse to take because it is free. Marta describes this explicitly – learning to replace "free" with "exchange" in her mental vocabulary, developing the decision rule that if she is not sure she does not need it. This is deliberate self-regulation work, and it is not trivial. The non-monetary arrangement removes one natural brake on acquisition – financial cost – and participants who want to avoid accumulating must supply that brake themselves through conscious effort.

"Man bija ļoti daudz dažādu veidu... pēdējos pāris gadus es kaut kā esmu no tā atkāvusies, ka es tā vairs nedaru. Es tiešām ļoti izvērtēju, vai man tā lieta tiešām ir nepieciešama." [I used to have so many different kinds of things… in the last couple of years I've somehow weaned myself off it; I no longer do that. I really do evaluate whether the thing is genuinely necessary for me.] Madara describes a conscious shift away from impulse acquiring in secondhand contexts – she recognizes her own past behavior as a problem and has worked to change it. This is deliberate practice modification. Madara: "Es tiešām cenšos nebūt tā tante ar trīs maisiem, kas staigā katru dienu tur no vienas točkas uz otru. To es cenšos nepieļaut un cenšos arī sadraudzēties maksimāli ar tām lietām, kas man ir." [I really try not to be that auntie with three bags who walks every day from one spot to another. I try to avoid that, and try to make peace as much as I can with the things I already have.] Making peace with what you have – sufficiency as an active practice of relationship with objects rather than deprivation. This is a positive formulation of sufficiency that does not rely on environmental discourse.

Elīna R. "S1: Bet kā tu nonāci pie tās sajūtas, pie tās atziņas – man jau pietiek? S2: Man vienkārši skapī vairs nav vietas. (smejas) Nu, arī, teiksim, tagad ir ziema, un ir džemperu laiks, un es saprotu, ka es tāpat neuzvelku visus savus džemperus. Nu, tātad man viņu ir acīmredzami par daudz. Un man arī patīk novalkāt lietas. Tur ir kaut kāds tāds, nu, man vismaz, īpašs tā kā kaifs, ka es ar šo lietu esmu tik daudz lietas darījusi kopā, ka viņa ir tik novalkāta, ka viņu, iespējams, pat vairs nevar salabot." [Interviewer: But how did you arrive at that feeling, that realisation – I already have enough? Elīna: There's simply no more space in my wardrobe. (laughs) Well – say it's winter now, sweater season, and I realise I don't wear all my sweaters anyway. So I obviously have too many of them. And I also like wearing things out. There's a kind of – well, for me at least, a special pleasure when I've gone through so much with a thing that it's worn down to the point where maybe it can't even be repaired anymore.]

"Es esmu krājēja. Jā, es esmu krājēja." [I'm a hoarder. Yes, I'm a hoarder.] Aiga recognised hoarding tendencies in herself. She links it to scarcity experience – not having had much as a student, learning to keep things because things were hard to come by. The accumulation habit is understood as a survival response to past material insecurity, but she is actively working to change. The turning point was a month-long solo trip through Europe after her employment ended: "Es aizbraucu, un tad ar to arī sākās, ka tagad, nu, tagad tas ir izdarīts, tagad ir jādomā kaut kas par lietām, kas ir par daudz." [I went away [on the trip], and that's when it started – that now, well, it's been done, and now I have to think something about the things that are too many.] Travel – where you carry only what fits in a bag – reframed her relationship to possessions and worked as a biographical rupture that catalyzed practice change.

"Es labāk šobrīd lēnā garā atbrīvojos... man nav vienkārši žēl paņemt somu un aizbraukt." [I'd rather let go of things slowly now… I just don't want it to be hard to pick up a bag and leave.] The war anxiety dimension: she is releasing things partly because she wants to be able to leave quickly if necessary. The geopolitical context of Latvia – proximity to Russia, uncertainty since 2022 – appears explicitly in her divestment motivation.

"Pieķeršanās jautājums tiek risināts. Viņš ir procesā." [The question of attachment is being worked on. It's in process.] "Brīvbode palīdz, tā teikt, šim procesam attīstīties." [Brīvbode helps, so to speak, this process to develop.] "Šobrīd jau ir uz robežas, tāpēc es saku, ka ir jāatvadās jau no tā, kas jau ir atrasts." [I'm already at the edge now, that's why I say one has to start saying goodbye even to what one has already found.] Māra is explicitly working on her attachment to things – she names it as a problem and frames it as ongoing work. Brīvbode as a tool for developing the capacity to let go. This is the freeshop as infrastructure for a personal practice of detachment. It is a positive framing of the same phenomenon that Rasa describes as generating excess – from Māra's perspective, having a route makes it easier to release.

The generativity of Brīvbode is not limited to material circulation. By lowering the stakes of acquisition and providing a trusted route for return, the site also reshapes participants’ competencies of attachment, detachment and restraint.

Taking things in Brīvbode is sustained by a variety of meanings that do not need to be shared or mutually coherent across practitioners. This matters because meanings are not merely explanations given after the fact but one of the elements through which practices recruit and retain carriers (Shove et al. 2012: 14, 23). The heterogeneity of meanings allows Brīvbode to connect with a wide and socially diverse public. The following section examines the main meaning clusters and how they operate in the swapshop’s nexus of practices.

For Marija, the primary meaning is access and dignity as Brīvbode enables a form of self-presentation beyond her regular means: "I dressed like an absolute princess. You can’t even find things like that in a shop." She takes pleasure in the secret source as other people in her networks cannot tell the difference between her clothing originating from Brīvbode or retail. This also has a competence dimension: knowing where to look, when to come, having access to a source others do not use.

Anna frames her participation with a desire for aesthetic autonomy: “I've always really disliked it when I'm wearing something and someone else is wearing exactly the same." Instead of sustainability or thrift, this meaning is based on distinctiveness. Anna also has a sewing competency that works as an extension of the same desire – making her own clothing is the ultimate guarantee of uniqueness: the competency of sewing is sustained by the meaning. Additionally Brīvbode also enables Anna's daily performance of festivity: wearing a glitter dress as everyday wear is possible because Brīvbode provides a low-stakes supply resource.

Elīna describes a similar dynamic at a lower threshold of commitment: “You can try out different styles for free. I took a bomber jacket I would never have bought myself." The jacket became one of her most-worn items. Brīvbode enabled a style experiment that she would not have risked financially. Similarly, a practitioner who was exploring cross-dressing also described: "What gives me joy is that I can create different characters from those clothes. For example, yesterday I went to my first cross-dresser date with this beautiful purple wig. I also got these court shoes... And that somehow challenged me to put them to use."

Madara’s participation is organised around her craftsperson's gaze – a competency that allows her to notice objects as made of particular components and materials. "When I see an item, I see it not just as a finished garment, but also, for example, as a material – fabric, beads, zippers." This competency distinguishes her participation from others and allows her to find value also in objects that other people might not find useful at all: "I found an old, cut mosquito net, which I use as a base for embroidery." Something that appeared to be waste turned out to be a useful resource to her. This is a heightened version of the right-owner logic – the object finds not just a user but a user who recognizes a value in it that is largely invisible to others. Also Madara’s rugmaking practice originated in having accumulated too many secondhand clothes – material surplus became the origin of a new practice.

The craftsperson's gaze has a negative counterpart, however, when it is decoupled from valuing items as a shared resource: some visitors treat the shop as a source of free raw materials, cutting off buttons or zippers from garments, and leaving the damaged items behind – extracting the value themselves while diminishing it for everyone else.

Alongside the meanings of novelty, originality, and access runs a meaning of class-related stigma, and its presence significantly shapes who is recruited into acquiring at Brīvbode and on what terms. Some participants hinted at it subtly in conversation, but denied it when asked about it directly. Marija is the only one who explicitly named the shame associated with freecycling, and this cuts against any simple narrative of taking from Brīvbode as a normalised exchange for people of all walks of life. While actively and regularly using Brīvbode and praising the things she has managed to acquire as high quality and aesthetically pleasing, she also compares taking from Brīvbode to going through someone else's trash. Especially when a TV crew came to Brīvbode and a journalist approached her for a couple of words, she flatly refused: "I will not let them see that I've fallen so low as to come to Brīvbode." Yet in the same conversation she also reclaims the class label: "I'm common, simply common (prasta – common, plain, I.L.). I will go and get what I need." The value is privately experienced but restricted in representation – stigma differentiates which of Brīvbode's practices a participant is willing to enact openly and which remain claimed only in private.

For some potential practitioners this association with lower class status is a barrier to entry, while others manage it strategically. Several participants mentioned withholding information about the origin of items, especially when passing things acquired in Brīvbode to other people as gifts. As volunteer Anna noted, grandmothers say: “I don't tell my daughter where I got that jacket, because she wouldn't take it.”

A related strong negative meaning for second hand acquisition holds that these items carry the energy of previous – often deceased – owners. Several participants mentioned this trope but adjusted it to their practice. Viesturs, half-laughing, keeps the spiritual language but reframes it institutionally: "Others say that things have some kind of energy, or the aura of previous owners... We're able to transform that. In a way, Brīvbode is also like a kind of purgatory for things." With this adjusted meaning Brīvbode can function as a threshold space in the object biographies where the weight of previous owners can be released.

This stigma of second hand acquisition is, however, also generationally uneven and appears to be dissolving, similar to patterns reported elsewhere (Gurova, 2024). Changing meanings are shifting the practice’s recruitability. Madara notes how a broader normalization of secondhand acquisition in recent years has produced a shift within her own family, who previously held strong norms against it. Luīze, a highschooler preparing for graduation, uses the English word "thrift shops" to talk about her consumption practices, frames her participation in explicit environmental terms, and reports that her classmates are actively seeking secondhand options for graduation dresses. She attributes the negative meaning her parents hold towards second hand acquisition to “Soviet mentality”.

In our conversation, Viesturs also positions Brīvbode against charity but from a different angle than Rasa: “Our goal is not to do good for people, I think. Our goal is to do good for the planet… Charity is always related to the meaning of poverty. I think that we need to emphasize the fun factor, the joy factor – swapping, changing clothes. That it's cool, fun, that it's joyful.” He is not only describing the meanings that sustain his own participation, but also making a claim about which meanings should be foregrounded to recruit and retain more practitioners. This is a practical example of what Shove et al. (2012) describe as the circulation and reconfiguration of meanings: environmental purpose, anti-charity positioning, playfulness and style experimentation are alternative meanings that can be linked to the same material site. This orientation is present in Brīvbode and practically expressed through organising photo shoots and parties, encouraging playfulness with clothing.

When I ask Viesturs if he sees working in Brīvbode as helping visitors or helping a cause, the question turns out to be beside the point: “To me it’s so natural now, I don’t evaluate it anymore. Others should evaluate it. It’s simply a thing I do, without going into philosophical meanings.” Sorting, switching clothing, chatting with visitors and attending to the shop so that it continues operating well have become sufficiently routinised for him that they no longer require justification or explicit meaning-work. Rather than showing that one practice has stabilised, his answer shows how a bundle of tasks can become ordinary through repeated participation: the philosophical meanings recede behind the practical work of keeping the site going.

Rasa answers similarly when I enquire about the environmental and sustainability aspects of Brīvbode: “Everything else is so intense… It has remained somehow, in a way, a little secondary.” While the sustainability framing remains present – and is foregrounded e.g. when writing project funding applications or designing info materials – it does not need to be actively held by every practitioner in every performance. For both Viesturs and Rasa philosophical meaning-making has receded. This is what Smith and Jehlička (2013: 155) describe as quiet sustainability: practices that produce beneficial environmental or social outcomes but are not represented by practitioners as directly environmental or sustainability-oriented.

Sustainability as a meaning is present for practitioners, and e.g. Luīze is at the other end of the spectrum for whom it is expressed as primary rather than peripheral. She explicitly framed her participation in terms of ecological responsibility and the wider politics of avoiding fast fashion and microtrends.

Līva discussed how the environmental meaning is present for her, but in tension with her actual acquisition practices. She identifies textile consumption as probably one of her most environmentally problematic behaviors, yet was open that knowing it does not resolve it. She estimates she buys an item of clothing every month and frames this as more than she used to in adolescence. The meanings she uses to evaluate her consumption patterns are in tension with the meanings that sustain the acquisition, and neither cancels the other one out. Researching household textile disposal, Sigaard (2026) concludes that even while sustainable consumption is ideally endorsed, disposal is very normalized because it is strongly embedded in identity work, relational considerations and in facilitating other practices.

Also, as I argue, most participants come to Brīvbode for practical and social reasons instead of self-professed environmental conviction. This resonates with Smith and Jehlička’s (2013) concept of quiet sustainability, developed through their research on Czech urban gardeners: sustainable practices that can be widespread and effective but are not articulated in terms of sustainability by their practitioners. Smith and Jehlička define quiet sustainability as practices “that result in beneficial environmental or social outcomes, that do not relate directly or indirectly to market transactions, and that are not represented by the practitioners as relating directly to environmental or sustainability goals”; they add that “cultures of sharing, repairing, gifting and bartering” characterise it (2013: 155). Latvia provides a productive context for this concept – several participants trace their orientations towards reuse and frugality to generational experience rather than sustainability aspiration.

Some participants do find meanings for their participation in explicit sustainability terms, though, and this difference should not be overlooked. The thesis holds both the quiet and the articulated dimensions without collapsing them into a single category, treating the variation between them as empirically interesting. In practice-theoretical terms, what practitioners say about why they do what they do is only one element of practice, but it is still an element: meanings help organise participation together with materials and competences (Shove et al. 2012: 14, 23). The point is therefore not to dismiss stated motivations, but to avoid treating them as the sole explanation for circulation.

Several participants in this study trace their orientations toward thrift and reuse to generational experience of the scarcity of the early post-Soviet period, or to upbringings in which resources were used carefully as a matter of practical necessity rather than environmental commitment.

The “activists” are part of the visitors, yet a large part do not frame their participation in Brīvbode primarily in environmental terms: they come because they have things to give away, because they sometimes find things they need. Their practices have sustainable dimensions that they do not necessarily name or claim.

This framing does not require flattening the diversity of participant orientations. Some visitors do articulate explicit sustainability motivations – concerns about fast fashion, about waste, about the environmental costs of overconsumption. The thesis holds both the quiet and the articulated dimensions without forcing them into a single category, and treats the tension between them as empirically interesting rather than theoretically problematic. One question that remains open is whether explicit articulation makes sustainable practices more effective at retaining practitioners – more resistant to disruption when material or social conditions change. This is beyond the scope of the present study but worth noting as a direction for future research.

Māra: "Mammai to lietu nebija daudz, un tās lietas tika visas, nu, ļoti labi uzturētas. Bet tad, kad jau parādījās tie humāno preču veikali, tad savukārt bija otrā drusku galējība." [My mother didn't have many things, and those things were all, well, very well looked after. But then, once the second-hand goods shops (humāno preču veikali, lit. "humanitarian goods shops") appeared, the other extreme came.]

Brīvbode’s significance lies not in resolving the contradictions of circular consumption, but in making them practically workable. It is at once a route for domestic divestment, a source of acquisition, a sorting and curatorial workplace, a social meeting point, a space of style experimentation, a source of craft materials, a threshold between use and waste, and sometimes a pressure valve for overconsumption. These practices intersect without becoming one coherent moral project. The site holds them together just enough for things to keep moving.

Sustainability can be an outcome without being a requirement or a conscious orientation for all practitioners. Because Brīvbode coordinates multiple practices, it can recruit and retain participants through meanings that have little to do with environmental concern: access, novelty, social contact, decluttering, craft materials, care for things, or the relief of getting objects moving again. This is why quiet sustainability is useful here: beneficial environmental outcomes can emerge from ordinary practices that practitioners do not necessarily frame as environmental (Smith and Jehlička 2013: 155). The circulation enabled by the site can therefore have sustainable dimensions, but these emerge from the situated coordination of practices rather than from a single shared sustainability motivation.

Brīvbode is sustained by volunteers for many of whom participation is only possible because their lives are organized around sufficiency – a practice cluster in its own right, characterised by flexible time, low monetary consumption, and small combined income streams. As Tan and Yeoh (2024) note, while material inputs in freecycling markets are readily available, the human labour required to organise and run them is consistently short in supply. As Viesturs puts it: “I understand that the lifestyle I live is complete luxury these days, at least for this part of the world. To have free time, to decide myself what to do with my time – that is the main resource. The most important thing that a person can donate to Brīvbode is their time.”

The sufficiency orientation is visible in how volunteers approach the management of resources in Brīvbode as well. When a new stove was needed, Rasa and her partner welded one themselves using upcycled components: gas canisters, springs from an old sofa, a drain fitting. Rasa framed it matter-of-factly: “What do you do if you don’t want to pay €1000 for a stove? You pick up the angle grinder yourself.” In the spirit of mutual exchange, in return for her partner’s invested time, she promised him a week of help with the tedious final sanding phase of his own DIY motorboat project.

This is repair and upcycling competency, sufficiency orientation and collaborative volunteer labour combined in prioritising making do with what is available as both a practical skill and life orientation. Rasa described a similar approach to her own consumption practices: it is more advantageous for her to work less in formal employment and rather invest time in planning meals, researching purchases and visiting secondhand shops than to earn more and consume more easily to keep her preferred level of wellbeing.

The volunteers’ time-rich, sufficiency-oriented lives make Brīvbode’s unpaid consumption work possible. They are also what makes possible a form of community-based care that non-profit organisations and local communities can offer to “balance marketised care,” with “clothes-swapping events” listed alongside repair cafés and community fridges as exactly this kind of arrangement (Mesiranta et al. 2025: 26). Sufficiency is the structural condition for both consumption work and care work: it is what makes the labour Brīvbode requires possible, and what allows that labour to be undertaken as care.

Valuation work is the ongoing effort of assessing what is worth taking and bringing, and what should be left or discarded. Tölg (2025) describes valuation as comprising both evaluation — judging whether something is valuable — and valorising — the process of making it so — and shows that consumers rely on a range of valuation devices such as garment tags, retail staff knowledge, and resale platforms to perform this work. In retail, the price signal is the most legible such device, quietly slowing acquisition and supplying a shorthand for worth. When it is removed, that work does not disappear; it shifts onto participants and volunteers, drawing on moral and relational registers instead. As Beswick-Parsons et al. (2025) note, those committed to reuse develop the ability to perceive value where others do not, and this evaluative skill is a key competence of circulation work.

The shift is most acute for volunteers, who absorb the valuation labour donors and visitors do not. Anna describes how she has developed her intuition for the gap between donor self-assessment and actual quality: “I really know it won’t be good even before I’ve opened the bag. I ask them: ‘Is everything really okay in there?’ ‘Yes, yes, only the best!’ And you open it, and there are moth-eaten pillows, piss-soaked blankets.” This competency has been developed over years of handling what arrives. The work of maintaining quality — assessing, sorting, deciding what goes out and what does not — is a form of consumption work that in commercial retail would fall to paid warehouse or quality-control staff; here it is absorbed by volunteers as a constant and largely invisible competency that visitors, who see only the finished presentation, mostly miss.

Curation extends valuation work beyond sorting into knowing and managing people’s needs. Rasa describes it as having “a filter.” She sometimes holds specific items for specific regular visitors based on accumulated knowledge about their life circumstances: a particular colour of top for a visually impaired visitor, a wedding gift set aside for a regular who recently moved from homelessness into social housing. This is care work and consumption work simultaneously — the kind of matching labour that in retail is performed automatically through pricing, display, and inventory systems, but here depends on Rasa’s relational knowledge of specific people, which cannot be systematised or delegated, and which makes Brīvbode function as something more than a drop-off point.

For visitors, the absence of price requires a new framework for what counts as legitimate taking. Madara recalled how disorienting the freeness was on her first visit: “At first it felt a bit like I was stealing.” She resolved this by reframing the transaction: “I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word ‘free’.” For her, freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition: “Someone maybe sees ‘free’ and thinks – everything is free, let’s take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.” Her self-imposed restraint is itself valuation work — a moral framework constructed in the absence of the device that would otherwise supply one.

Divestment, too, is shaped by valuation. When an item retains monetary value, participants take on the labour of online selling — photographing, writing descriptions, communicating with buyers, arranging meetings. As one participant noted: “you have to pull yourself together, photograph it and put it somewhere.” Brīvbode lowers this work considerably: it is a known, walkable destination that absorbs some of the divestment labour through volunteers and releases participants from finding a buyer or judging a recipient.

Across donating, curating, taking, and divesting, valuation in Brīvbode is at once consumption work — the labour of sorting, assessing, and redistributing — and care work, in the form of attention to what specific things will mean for specific people. Without the shorthand of price, both come into the open.

If §5.2 traced the valuation work the absence of price creates, this section turns to the kind of arrangement in which that work takes place. Wheeler and Glucksmann’s modal dimension names how labour is distributed across different socioeconomic arrangements — paid and unpaid, formal and informal, market and non-market, household and institution — and how the same task takes on a different character depending on which arrangement it is embedded in. The same act of sorting used clothes is paid retail work in a thrift chain, contracted labour at a municipal textile collection point, unpaid domestic labour at home, and something else again at Brīvbode. The question this section asks is what kind of arrangement Brīvbode is, modally speaking, and what difference its form makes for the labour that runs it and the people it recruits.

Brīvbode is indirectly embedded in wider textile collection infrastructure, but the chain of work usually connects one household to another. Objects leaving one home pass through the swapshop and arrive in someone else’s home where a new set of consumption work tasks begin – storing, integrating, eventually deciding what to do when the object might no longer be wanted.

Along this chain, unpaid volunteering, household management, neighbourly help, care work, and informal exchange come together in ways that blur distinctions between market and non-market activity and make the labour difficult to recognise as work at all, even though the system depends on it. This is precisely the kind of community-based care that, as Mesiranta et al. (2025) argue, marketised arrangements cannot perform: sequential reuse depends not on material availability alone but on what Hobson (2020) calls social circularities — the relational labour that keeps things moving between people.

Some participants choose Brīvbode precisely because they do not want to perform labour for formal waste management institutions – they prefer the more relational, informal route. This is a modal choice: the same divestment work takes a different socioeconomic form depending on the route chosen, and Brīvbode's modal distinctiveness is part of what recruits and retains its participants.

The modal choice is therefore also an ethical one. Brīvbode’s particular configuration of unpaid, informal, household-to-household labour is what allows consumption work to be performed as care, and care to be performed as a recognisable mode of circulation.

Wheeler and Glucksmann's processual dimension attends to how labour is distributed across the full span of a consumption process. In Brīvbode, this dimension is most visible in the extended divestment networks through which household surplus reaches the swapshop. The work that sustains Brīvbode is continuous with domestic consumption work which is consistently organised through women's labour.

Miller's (1998) research on shopping demonstrates that consumption is often organised around care for others rather than individual satisfaction, and that women frequently function as moral agents in household consumption as they are the ones acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods in relation to the needs of children, partners, and wider social networks. Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) find the same gendered pattern in recycling: women typically take responsibility for sorting while men handle transport. The fieldwork conducted for this thesis reflects this consistently. Anna states it directly: "It's on me. I'm the one who supplies everyone with clothes and shoes." Silvija organises all divestment decisions in her household and says her husband "would just throw it in the bin." Men's role, where it appears, is typically transport and carrying the bags that women have sorted, selected, and prepared.

The reach of Brīvbode extends considerably beyond those who physically visit it. Several of the most embedded participants perform substantial divestment work not only for themselves but for neighbours, colleagues, and family members, functioning as logistics nodes through which others' surplus flows to the freeshop. Marija's neighbours give her things to take to Brīvbode as she is a frequent visitor and the role has naturalised into her social identity in the building. Māra coordinates pickups from at least five neighbours, takes requests for specific items, and is the only one of her immediate network who actually visits – the rest route their divestment through her. Anna's work colleagues prepare parcels for her to deliver: "They use me. They prepare the bags I need to bring to Brīvbode. And then they say: 'Can you look for something for my teenage daughter?'" What looks like consumption work performed on behalf of others is, in Tölg and Fuentes’s (2025) terms, also care for neighbours and for the imagined future users of the things — the logistical labour and the relational orientation are inseparable.

Madara does divestment work for her aunt whose belief that worn objects carry the energy of previous owners prevents her from donating. In order to get to Brīvbode, the objects must pass through Madara first. "I know that most likely they would simply be thrown away or burned." The most laborious divestment case came from Aiga, who spent months coordinating the recirculation of her relatives' possessions after a relocation, making thirty trips to Brīvbode. A single call to a clearance firm would have resolved everything in one visit, Aiga says, but she chose the harder route because she could not allow things to be discarded: “Sometimes you really do want to just throw it out, but that inner feeling simply won’t let me.” This is consumption work in Bankovska’s (2020) sense of care not-work — labour that is unremunerated, hard to see as work from the outside, and yet performed because the alternative is unbearable. It is care as obligation that cannot be put down.

Consumption work is both currently gendered and being transmitted along gendered lines. Kristīne takes her daughters to Brīvbode and uses the visits as occasions for explicit moral education: discussing why they are giving things away, what makes a good divestment decision, what is too worn to donate. She sometimes goes without them to avoid the tears when they want things back; other times the difficulty is the point. "It's also an opportunity to talk about things." The children are learning material quality, the ethics of giving, and the difference between good enough to donate and good enough only to discard — competencies that are simultaneously consumption-work skills and the dispositions of care that Bankovska (2020) shows being transmitted across generations in the everyday work of provisioning.

What neither sufficiency nor valuation quite revealed, the processual dimension makes visible: the labour of Brīvbode is gendered not only structurally but ethically — women carry it because they have always carried care, and the consumption-work skills it requires are inseparable from the care dispositions through which they are taken on.

This chapter has examined the labour that sustains freecycling in Brīvbode, finding it distributed across structural, ethical, and gendered dimensions that existing circular economy frameworks tend to overlook. Wheeler and Glucksmann’s consumption work concept names the structure: tasks that paid institutions would perform in formal retail or waste management contexts are here absorbed by unpaid volunteers and participants, distributed across modal and processual dimensions that stretch well beyond the freeshop itself. The feminist ethics of care and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), together with Bankovska’s (2020) care not-work and Graeber’s (2018) account of work as what just needs to be done, name the orientation: much of this labour is not transferred from institutions onto reluctant consumers but self-imposed through ethical commitment and care – activities people perform because they cannot bring themselves not to. Miller (1998) names who bears it: consistently and disproportionately women, from household sorting and routing to managing others’ generosity to transmitting these competencies to the next generation.

Circular consumption requires substantial labour, and that labour is unevenly distributed. Sustainability of initiatives like Brīvbode depends on a structural condition – the sufficiency-oriented, time-rich, predominantly female volunteer and participant base that circular economy policy rarely names or supports (Hobson et al., 2021). Some of this labour is unreflexive and habituated – Aiga's inner feeling that prevents easy disposal, Marija's building logistics naturalised into her social role. Some is deliberate and effortful – Kristīne's category-by-category method, Madara working on her impulse-acquiring. Both are labour, but they are differently visible, and the unreflexive forms are the hardest to see and the hardest for policy to reach.

What Brīvbode reveals — and what makes it analytically valuable for circular economy debates — is that the absence of price does not produce a frictionless flow of materials. It produces a different kind of work: gendered, ethically motivated, absorbed into household routines, and sustained by people who have organised their lives to be able to do it. Recognising this work as both consumption work and care work is the first step toward circular economy policy that can see it, support it, and not depend on its invisibility.