# Assistant conversation 8YW5MM - Canonical URL: - Resource IRI: - Type: assistant conversation - Mode: quick ## Transcript ### 1. User look at the 4V8VH7 thesis draft, and talk about how/whether it tries to treat brivbode or swapshop participation as “a practice”, versus as something like a bundle or nexus or site where practices intermingle and so on ### 2. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "4V8VH7" } ``` ### 3. Tool result: get_document THESIS #4V8VH7 Title: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia Outline: - 1 #ZF9EYF Introduction - 1.1 #LAR465 Latvian context and research - 1.2 #MUKRGA A note on terms - 1.3 #FVXBEK The structure of the thesis - 2 #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework - 2.1 #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice - 2.2 #WULWDF Theories of Practice to Study Alternative Practices? - 2.3 #HQ4PZX Consumption practices - 2.4 #23NMLX Consumption Work - 2.5 #ULSUAX Conclusion - 3 #LYTS7L Research methodology: A Practice Freecycle - 3.1 #ZXRYYU The site - 3.2 #3CQF69 Setting the scene: A day in Brīvbode - 3.3 #U3GSXB Ethnography of Practice - 3.4 #VMQSHJ Participant observation - 3.5 #GU86TB Interviews - 3.6 #BRBBF9 Data analysis - 3.7 #TGAMBJ Research ethics - 4 #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation - 4.1 #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home - 4.2 #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow - 4.3 #QP7HMF Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation - 4.4 #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange - 4.5 #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price - 4.6 #W2WRDC What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition - 4.7 #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability? - 4.8 #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations - 5 #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode - 5.1 #N8D3HT Time to Give: Volunteers and the Sufficiency Lifestyle - 5.2 #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care - 5.3 #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route - 5.4 #L38KUE It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care - 5.5 #75D5UH Conclusion - 6 #M9WQLY CONCLUSION - 7 #FTE3UX SUMMARY - 8 #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES - 9 #TY2EB4 KOKKUVÕTE ### 4. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "Q2WXHP", "WULWDF", "HQ4PZX", "ULSUAX" ], "expand": true } ``` #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "9XAKTW" ], "expand": false } ``` ### 5. Tool result: read THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice PARAGRAPH #H7MB3H 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 (reference). PARAGRAPH #A2ACVP 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). PARAGRAPH #B4MLVB Different frameworks have been articulated to account for the elements constituting practices. PARAGRAPH #ZA3SED Practice-as-performance - “doings and sayings”, embodied actions. PARAGRAPH #G5LFQA Practice-as-entity - materials, meanings, and competencies. PARAGRAPH #ZALK38 Practice-as-bundle (practice-as-system) PARAGRAPH #JCD8P5 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. PARAGRAPH #KSLB7G 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. PARAGRAPH #8MU8D5 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. PARAGRAPH #RG72B3 This threefold structure of elements of practice has been used widely across disciplines as it offers a clear conceptual approach for empirical research. PARAGRAPH #QPWYY6 Delineating a practice and setting it apart from adjacent practices can be one of the challenges in practice theory, as there are no fixed procedural rules for determining exactly where one practice ends and another begins. Nicolini (2017: 26-27) notes that, while for analytical purposes, practices can be conceived and examined individually, empirically they are always encountered in arrays and multiplicities. Practices “hang together” in bundles and complexes (Shove et al. 2012), distinguished by the density and “stickiness” of their patterns. Practice bundles refer to the more loose-knit relations between practices, often gathered around the same site or time – practices that are related and shape each other but not strongly. Complexes refer to more integrated combinations that can also constitute new practice entities if the relations become significantly denser. In this thesis, I analyse freecycling in Brīvbode as a practice entity and as performed, while recognising the emerging state of freecycling as a practice in Latvia. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #WULWDF Theories of Practice to Study Alternative Practices? PARAGRAPH #N4RD83 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). PARAGRAPH #3RASYG 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. PARAGRAPH #QTER48 Freecycling at Brīvbode sits at an interesting angle in this argument – it has both conventional and unconventional elements. It is not a widely shared, fully stabilised routine practice in Shove’s sense. Yet the practices it draws on – household divestment, secondhand acquisition, sequential use of goods – are not unusual in Riga or Latvia; what is less common is their organisation within a permanent, non-monetary exchange site. It is also a practice that is becoming more prevalent, as similar spaces and infrastructures appear more in Latvia. PARAGRAPH #6SSXMN 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. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #HQ4PZX Consumption practices PARAGRAPH #X4S4S5 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 (reference to illustrate these approaches), 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 (reference). PARAGRAPH #C6LN2K 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.” PARAGRAPH #437SCH 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. PARAGRAPH #N7QTYJ 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). PARAGRAPH #VLCJ6H 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. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #ULSUAX Conclusion PARAGRAPH #7RYKMT This thesis brings together practice-theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption and consumption work for a study of non-domestic site of goods circulation within a context of non-monetary exchange. Brīvbode is a site where the ordinarily private and dispersed practices of domestic material life become visible. The continued existence of the swapshop – sustained through regular volunteer labour, participant labour, and a relatively stable social and material infrastructure – can be read as evidence of the demand that household goods circulation generates: a demand for routes of divestment that, while taking some degree of effort, are socially acknowledged. PARAGRAPH #2G2WSX PIEVIENOT PARAGRAPH #MHZQUS “Pinning down the actual practice and its scale, identifying overlaps with other practices or deciding which actions belong to which practice registers as a tricky task, further complicated by the fact that practices change over time.” (Sedlačko, 2017: 53) PARAGRAPH #CE4SN6 consumption as a middle class sustainability “issue”? PARAGRAPH #A3Q9XS A central conclusion is that textile disposal has become normalized. – “Sustainability transitions in textiles therefore require systemic reconfiguration of what is considered ‘normal’ in household practices.” PARAGRAPH #LZ9SHB “this dissertation conceptualizes disposal as a material, cultural, and social practice central to consumption, rather than a peripheral or undesirable act. PARAGRAPH #D3N7FX Disposal is treated not simply as the act of discarding but as a meaningful practice that enables and intersects with the reproduction of broader everyday activities. PARAGRAPH #ER4VSA In sociology, the study of consumption has evolved through three major phases: an early focus on economistic models prior to the 1980s; the ‘cultural turn’ of the early 1980s, which emphasized meaning-making, identity, and symbolic value; and, more recently, a ‘practice turn’ that reorients attention toward the routines, materialities, and shared norms of everyday life (Warde, 2014, 2015). PARAGRAPH #YK565D in clothing consumption research consumption of clothing is viewed as a habitual and socially embedded activity rather than a constant, deliberate process of choice and identity construction (Chamberlin & Callmer, 2021; Miller & Woodward, 2012; van der Laan & Velthuis, 2016). PARAGRAPH #FT8AED “In their classical taxonomy for describing consumer disposition behavior, Jacoby et al. (1977) illustrated that disposal may involve keeping, donating, selling, recycling, or throwing away, and even within each category, multiple practices exist. Disposal is thus not inherently destructive or wasteful and cannot be reduced to simply ‘throwing something away’, but is an active social practice embedded in ethical, cultural, and material contexts (Hetherington, 2004). This perspective recognizes disposal as an active, meaning-making practice. As Gregson et al. (2007b) argue, divestment is not simply a negative or absent moment in consumer life, but a practice that enables other practices. To sustain certain routines and identities, other objects must be removed. In this sense, disposal is not the final step in a linear production-consumption-waste chain but a recursive moment that helps reorder consumption itself (Gregson et al., 2007a; Hetherington, 2004). Following Douglas (2002), disposal can be seen as part of the ‘ordering work’ of everyday life, where waste becomes threatening not by its material properties but by its symbolic disruptions of social and domestic order (Gregson et al., 2007a; Heidenstrøm & Hebrok, 2021).” PARAGRAPH #5TXWXW “What we discard reflects who we are but also helps constitute who we become. In this way, waste is both expressive and constitutive of identity (Lucy, 2023).” PARAGRAPH #D3J7AD Maldini et al. (2019), for instance, found that garments are often retained long after they stop being worn, while new items are added without replacing old ones, highlighting the entanglement with disposal and accumulation. Furthermore, as with disposal in general, textile disposal is not merely a matter of getting rid of unwanted things, nor is it a straightforward or linear process. PARAGRAPH #M53GUY “This theoretical approach shifts the analytical focus away from individual behavior to practices allowing textile waste to be understood not as the outcome of isolated decisions but as a meaningful and situated activity embedded in everyday domestic routines.” PARAGRAPH #W5NCU9 “Social phenomena are understood as emerging from, and being embedded within, interconnected networks of practices and the materials that sustain them (Schatzki, 2019).” PARAGRAPH #8Z9KL4 “Dressing is viewed as a dynamic, lifelong everyday practice comprised of three interdependent elements: materials (e.g., clothing, wardrobes, washing machines), meanings (e.g., symbolic notions such as cleanliness or fashion), and competencies (e.g., dressing, laundering, repairing skills) (Maguire & Fahy, 2022; Skjold, 2016).” PARAGRAPH #U87FBB “Textile disposal is conceptualized as a social practice embedded within everyday routines and shaped by normative expectations, identity work, and material needs.” PARAGRAPH #2MV3XY Schatzki’s site ontology PARAGRAPH #FZHH6H “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” PARAGRAPH #MR6SKV ​​For example, textile disposal emerges from the intersection of multiple practices, such as cleaning, organizing, shopping, and caring, even when disposal appears as the main activity. PARAGRAPH #3JUPW7 Shove conceptualizes material entities as one of the core elements of practice, alongside meanings and competencies (Shove et al., 2012; Shove et al., 2007). Acknowledging the different roles that material entities can play, three categories of materiality are proposed: resources (consumables used up in practices), devices (objects directly mobilized during practices), and infrastructure (supporting systems not directly engaged) (Shove, 2016). PARAGRAPH #96FRVP Practice as entity – how does the threefold model PARAGRAPH #AHYBAR Looking at a practice as entity – materials, meanings, competencies. MESOLEVEL. PARAGRAPH #MBE4PM Individual level of practice – practice as performance – doings, sayings, embodied experiences, movements, everyday parts… PRACTICE AS PERFORMANCE. PARAGRAPH #WQZYJP practice as bundle or practice as entity… PARAGRAPH #Z769KE Acknowledge these three levels, focusing on practice as performance and practice as entity. ### 6. Tool result: read SECTION #9XAKTW Document: #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia Context: #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation Children: - #PL9BXR paragraph - This chapter examines freecycling as a practice constituted by a physical venue and the materials flowing through it, the meanings that recruit and retain participants, and the co… - #EKYQ3W paragraph - Following the trajectory of things moving through Brīvbode, I trace the incoming flow of things into Brīvbode, starting with the decisions of divestment in the households of parti… - #XYAHKP paragraph - Turning towards the acquisition side, I show how the value and usefulness of Brīvbode is experienced through a plurality of meanings, and how participants negotiate between concep… - #L252MY paragraph - Across the chapter, I sustain the view that the character of Brīvbode as a non-monetary site of exchange is held together less by a single definition than by the moral economy tha… - #2JEZWG section: Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home - #PBFQ5E section: Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow - #QP7HMF section: Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation - #PZH45P section: Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange - #7Z8WUY section: Letting Go: Attachment Without Price - #W2WRDC section: What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition - #GTJY22 section: Quiet or Reflected Sustainability? - #A3X9XX section: Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations ### 7. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "PL9BXR", "EKYQ3W", "XYAHKP", "L252MY", "A3X9XX" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 8. Tool result: read THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia PARAGRAPH #PL9BXR This chapter examines freecycling as a practice constituted by a physical venue and the materials flowing through it, the meanings that recruit and retain participants, and the competencies that order the exchange. Throughout the chapter I move between analysis of freecycling as practice-entity and as performance, especially attending to moments of friction and tension where the two pull against each other. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia PARAGRAPH #EKYQ3W Following the trajectory of things moving through Brīvbode, I trace the incoming flow of things into Brīvbode, starting with the decisions of divestment in the households of participants. I look at how Brīvbode is positioned among possible routes of divestment, and turn to the site itself to see how its material elements sustain the practice of circulation, as well as how the competencies and norms at play let the swapshop cope with the constant pressure of overflow. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia PARAGRAPH #XYAHKP Turning towards the acquisition side, I show how the value and usefulness of Brīvbode is experienced through a plurality of meanings, and how participants negotiate between conceptions of charity and exchange. I also examine how the absence of price reshapes participants’ attachment to objects, and the competencies of letting go that the practice both requires and cultivates. Finally I consider the range of participant orientations towards freecycling as a practice of sustainability. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia PARAGRAPH #L252MY Across the chapter, I sustain the view that the character of Brīvbode as a non-monetary site of exchange is held together less by a single definition than by the moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations PARAGRAPH #M3VCHH Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space. Givers come to resolve the moral weight of unwanted things, the site’s permanence and visibility offer a trusted route for it. Takers come for dignity, experimentation, craft materials, social contact or simple convenience. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogenous orientations together, as it is actively maintained against the pressure of resellers, heavy takers and people looking for charity, yet flexible enough to accommodate them when the alternative is overflow. PARAGRAPH #4V448P Sustainability can be an outcome without it being a requirement and a conscious orientation for practitioners. The practice recruits and retains carriers through meanings that also have little to do with environmental concern and yet the circulation it enables has sustainable dimensions that persist regardless of how participants frame their involvement. PARAGRAPH #MHM9Q5 This does not resolve the tension running through the chapter of Brīvbode functioning simultaneously as a moral circularity infrastructure embodying an alternative value regime of exchange and responsible material life – and as a low threshold overflow channel that absorbs the surplus generated by the consumption patterns it aspires to counter. This tension just reflects the observed dynamic of how sustainable practices are embedded in contemporary life. ### 9. Assistant # How the draft positions brivbode: practice, bundle, or site? The draft holds the question open, but **its dominant move is to name a single practice — "freecycling" — and analyse Brīvbode as the place where that practice is performed.** The slippage between the two framings is, however, very visible, and arguably one of the unresolved tensions in the theory chapter. ## Where it commits to "a practice" - The cleanest commitment is in #QPWYY6: *"In this thesis, I analyse freecycling in Brīvbode as a practice entity and as performed, while recognising the emerging state of freecycling as a practice in Latvia."* Freecycling is the unit of analysis; Brīvbode is its site. - Chapter 4's framing paragraph #PL9BXR repeats this: "freecycling as a practice constituted by a physical venue… meanings… competencies." The Shove-style threefold model is applied to freecycling-as-entity. - The chapter title itself — "Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation" (#9XAKTW) — leans on the singular. ## Where it leaks toward bundle / nexus / site Several signals push the other way: - #QPWYY6 already concedes Nicolini's point that "empirically [practices] are always encountered in arrays and multiplicities" and introduces the bundle/complex vocabulary — but doesn't then say Brīvbode *is* a bundle, only that freecycling is an entity that hangs together. - #QTER48 effectively describes a bundle without naming it as such: *"the practices it draws on – household divestment, secondhand acquisition, sequential use of goods…"* This is closer to a nexus framing — freecycling at Brīvbode as a *recombination* of pre-existing practices that happens to be organised around one site. - #VLCJ6H frames Brīvbode as *"a node in the ordinary circulation of goods through domestic life"* — a node-in-flows image, not a single practice. - The conclusion paragraph #L252MY explicitly says Brīvbode is *"held together less by a single definition than by the moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist"* — which is structurally a bundle/site argument, not a single-practice argument. - The orphaned notes in #ULSUAX show Ieva already circling Schatzki: #2MV3XY ("Schatzki's site ontology"), #FZHH6H quoting that *"actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices"*, and the Sedlačko epigraph #MHZQUS about how hard it is to pin a practice down. These are exactly the resources for a site/nexus framing, but they aren't yet integrated. - Even #H7MB3H's appeal to Warde's "minimal definition" cites practice as a *"bundle of activities"* — Warde's wording itself blurs the singular/plural line. ## What seems to be actually happening empirically Reading Chapter 4's section list (#2JEZWG divestment from home, #PBFQ5E the site, #QP7HMF norms and competencies, #PZH45P moral economy, #7Z8WUY letting go, #W2WRDC plural meanings of acquisition, #GTJY22 sustainability orientations) and the conclusion #A3X9XX, the analysis is genuinely doing nexus work: divestment practices, acquisition practices, curation/sorting (handed off to Ch. 5 as care/consumption work), volunteering, plus a moral economy that lets *"incompatible orientations coexist"* (#M3VCHH). The argument that freecycling at Brīvbode is held together by a moral economy rather than a single shared meaning is more naturally an argument about a bundle stabilised at a site than about one tightly-integrated practice-entity. ## The honest tension There's a small contradiction sitting in the draft: the theory chapter uses Shove's practice-as-entity model, which works best on a relatively bounded, singular practice; the empirical chapters increasingly describe Brīvbode as a site where divestment, acquisition, curation, sociality and ethics interweave, held together by infrastructure and moral economy rather than by a tight integration of meanings/materials/competencies. The framing "freecycling is the practice, Brīvbode is the site" papers over this — it lets her keep the Shove apparatus while doing what is in effect site/bundle analysis. ## Concrete options 1. **Stay with "freecycling as a practice", own the site dimension explicitly.** Add a paragraph after #QPWYY6 saying something like: "I treat freecycling as a practice-entity, but one that exists only in bundle relations with household divestment, secondhand acquisition, sorting/curation and volunteering, all anchored at one physical site. The thesis therefore moves between practice-as-entity analysis (Ch. 4) and bundle/site analysis (especially Ch. 5)." That formalises what the draft is already doing. 2. **Promote Schatzki's site ontology from the orphan notes (#2MV3XY, #FZHH6H) into the framework.** Frame Brīvbode as a *site* in Schatzki's sense — the constitutive milieu where a bundle of practices (divestment, acquisition, curation, volunteering) intermingle — and use Shove only for the internal analysis of freecycling-as-performance. This is more theoretically ambitious and would resolve the tension, but it's more rewriting. 3. **Smallest change: tweak language in #PL9BXR and the chapter title.** "Brīvbode as a site of circulation, where freecycling emerges from the bundling of divestment, acquisition, and curation practices" — keeps the structure, sharpens the claim. If you want, option 1 is probably the cheapest path to a defensible answer for the thesis committee: it doesn't require ditching Shove, it just names what the draft is already empirically doing. ### 10. User ah, that's what schatzki's sites are? yeah, i think that's pretty key. i've also been starting to think along these lines: Brīvbode can be understood as a site where elements of domestic consumption practices are detached, reclassified, and re-linked into new practices of circulation. Materials physically move from one household practice into another; competences of sorting, evaluating, restraining, and letting go are performed and learned; meanings of waste, generosity, need, thrift, dignity, care, and sustainability are negotiated in the open. ### 11. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 8, "query": "Schatzki site ontology practice" } ``` ### 12. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #ULSUAX Conclusion Matching paragraph #FZHH6H: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #ULSUAX Conclusion Matching paragraph #2MV3XY: Schatzki’s site ontology 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Matching paragraph #XMLDYN: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Matching paragraph #4364QB: Schatzki’s site ontology 5. Source: Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption (#KWZ2A4), Alan Warde, Daniel Welch, p. 8 Context: #STMANK Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption #6U6DVD 5.1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF PRACTICE #UQZN9F 5.4 AGENCY, CHANGE AND CONVERGENCE Matching excerpt #ET8H3W: Central to the further development of theories of practice for sustainable consumption has been the work of Schatzki (especially 1996, 2002). Schatzki has rigorously elaborated a social ontology of practice, in critical dialogue with the practice theories of Bourdieu, Foucault and Giddens, by way of the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. This ontology establishes a 'strong' version of practice theory in which both social order and individuality result from practices. It asserts that there is no macro level beyond the realm of social practices, which are 'not merely "sites" of interaction but are, instead, ordering and orchestrating entities in their own right' (Shove and Walker 2010, p. 471). 6. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 24 Context: #LSJS5V I. Introduction #R9MPHV 1.2 Problematizing Consumption #779H37 1.2.2 Consumption in relation to production #ARAQ4Q 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #Y9F68Q: In this view, practices become the site for studying consumption and its entanglement with production. As Schatzki (2005, 468) puts it: “Practices are the site, but not the spatial site, of activities.” Based on this line of thought, Warde (2005) and Schatzki (2005) highlight the organization of practices as the focal point for analysis. This allows framing of both consumption and production as taking place within the site of practices. Thus, a practice-based approach suggests that a focus on practices allows a view of consumption and its entanglement with production as deeply embedded in the practices of everyday life. 7. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 197 Context: #5CGWLY HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND 'GENERAL UNDERSTANDINGS'? #4DNBXU The category of general understandings Matching excerpt #VXBA6L: Nicolini plausibly suggests general understandings constitute 'external understandings' of the overall project in which the practice is engaged (2012: 167). How should we think about that externality? Where , external to the focal practice, does the general understanding lie, or rather, come from? The external here hints at a supra-practice level which threatens to undo the 'high order ontological sameness' of Schatzki's flat ontology of the social (2011: 4). Thus Caldwell (2012) suggests that the notion of 'general understandings' potentially leads Schatzki back to the position from which his work aims to escape: 'the "social" conceived as "general understandings" may presuppose an object of enquiry that goes beyond the practices in which it is carried or enacted' (2012: 291). However, Caldwell evinces a widely held misunderstanding that Schatzki's general position amounts to a kind of 'Il n'y a rien en dehors du pratique'. Caldwell assumes either that general understandings presuppose a distinct ontological level (perhaps implied by the relative coherence that complexes of general understandings may assume) or that they are carried in discursive formations exhibiting forms of organisation other than that of integrative practices and therefore debarred from Schatzki's ontology. To take the latter possibility first, as Schatzki makes clear in his contribution to this volume, discursive formations exhibiting their own forms of organisation are entirely compatible with his ontology. Schatzki shows that various forms of discursive organisation intersect with integrative practices in the form of sayings and texts incorporated into and carried by them. It is an empirical matter how more or less integrated those discursive formations are with specific configurations of practices. As for the former, no distinct ontological level is necessarily implied by the category of general understandings. The 'external' or 'beyond' in which general understandings subsist simply is configurational, whether found specifically in discourse 4 or in heterogeneous assemblages of practice and discourse. A number of ontologically compatible concepts of such assemblages are already common conceptual currency, such as Foucault's 'dispositif', Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) 'orders of worth' or Hajer's (1995) 'discourse coalitions'. 8. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 195 Context: #5CGWLY HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND 'GENERAL UNDERSTANDINGS'? #3GLKAJ Introduction Matching excerpt #YULEJL: Practice theory is increasingly prominent in social scientific analysis. Hence, its virtues and its defects are being subjected to greater scrutiny. As part of that exercise, we examine the conceptualisation of widespread cultural understandings in the social scientific use of practice theory. Schatzki's (1996; 2002) schema of practice components has proved generative, particularly as adapted by Warde (2005) and Shove et al. (2012). However, virtually no attention has been paid to Schatzki's (2002) concept of 'general understandings', which is one potentially relevant instrument to address this challenge. 1 In The site of the social , Schatzki (2002) introduces the category of general understandings into his schema of components of practice, an addition to his earlier tripartite model of 'practical understandings', 'rules' and 'teleoaffective structures' (1996). In this chapter, we seek to open up issues posed by general understandings as a category within a schema of generic practice components. The concept of general understandings promises to deal with broad cultural conceptions which transcend the boundaries between 'integrative practices' (Schatzki, 2002). Approximate matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #ULSUAX Conclusion Score: 0.911 Related paragraph #2MV3XY: Schatzki’s site ontology 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #ULSUAX Conclusion Score: 0.583 Related paragraph #FZHH6H: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Score: 0.911 Related paragraph #4364QB: Schatzki’s site ontology 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Score: 0.583 Related paragraph #XMLDYN: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 5. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 50 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #ASYK8A 2.2 A Practice-theoretical Approach to Consumption #F8J2JD 2.2.2 Tenets of practice-theoretical ontology #KGFTXJ Unit of analysis #Z2FUGL 2. Theoretical perspectives Score: 0.645 Related excerpt #EDT6KV: (Schatzki 2005, 480) 6. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 57 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #ASYK8A 2.2 A Practice-theoretical Approach to Consumption #FKB7N6 2.2.3 Types of practices #3Y3QX4 Interpersonal practices Score: 0.631 Related excerpt #A7UHUT: (Schatzki 2005, 472) 7. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 115 Context: #RYNGP9 IS SMALL THE ONLY BEAUTIFUL? #NYECJK Three theory method packages through which to study large-scale phenomena from a practice-based perspective #SFYGWW Large-scale phenomena as a fabric of interconnected practices: from metaphor to method Score: 0.658 Related excerpt #WF6NML: (Schatzki, 2011: 8) 8. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 44 Context: #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE #JWCJBK Introduction #57NT24 Material-spatial qualities5 Score: 0.634 Related excerpt #BLBQBG: (Schatzki, 2010b: 130) ### 13. Assistant Yes — and your formulation is really good. Let me nail the Schatzki bit first, then push back gently on one piece. ## What Schatzki actually means by "site" Two things to keep separate, because they often get conflated (and the orphan paragraph #FZHH6H in the draft conflates them a bit): 1. **"The site of the social"** — Schatzki's general ontological claim: social life only exists *as* a mesh of practices and material arrangements. Practices are themselves *the site* of the social — there's no macro-level "society" hovering above them. Hartmann states it crisply in the corpus: *"Practices are the site, but not the spatial site, of activities"* (Schatzki 2005, in #Y9F68Q). 2. **A site (lowercase)** — a particular bounded mesh: a hospital ward, a household, a swapshop. Here the spatial/material location *does* matter, but only because practices and material arrangements are mutually constitutive there. Brīvbode in your sense. The useful move is (2): **Brīvbode is a site in Schatzki's sense — a constitutive milieu where multiple practices and a particular material arrangement (the building, the shelves, the bins, the donations, the volunteers' bodies, the phone for ringing up resellers) hang together.** Not a backdrop, not a "context," but the thing itself. Worth noting: Schatzki, Shove and Hui's *Nexus of Practices* (#R49AUC) is sitting right in the corpus, and that volume is largely a development of exactly this — how practices connect across sites and form bundles, complexes, constellations. That's your friend here. ## Your formulation > *"Brīvbode can be understood as a site where elements of domestic consumption practices are detached, reclassified, and re-linked into new practices of circulation. Materials physically move from one household practice into another; competences of sorting, evaluating, restraining, and letting go are performed and learned; meanings of waste, generosity, need, thrift, dignity, care, and sustainability are negotiated in the open."* This is genuinely strong. Three things it does well: - **It uses the Shove triad you already have** (materials/competences/meanings) but applies it to the *traffic between* practices rather than to a single bounded practice. That elegantly resolves the tension I flagged in the previous turn — you don't have to abandon Shove, you just relocate where the analysis cuts. - **"Detached, reclassified, re-linked"** is doing the work that Evans's expanded consumption cycle (#N7QTYJ) and Gregson on divestment (#FT8AED) are pointing toward. Things lose their place in one practice (laundry, dressing, gifting, hosting) and have to be re-placed somewhere — Brīvbode is where that re-placement is socially organised. - **"Negotiated in the open"** captures something important and ethnographically distinctive: Brīvbode makes *visible* the meaning-work that in households happens privately at the bottom of a wardrobe. That's a publication-worthy point. ## One small caution I'd be careful with *"new practices of circulation"* (plural-becoming-singular). It risks reintroducing the "freecycling-as-one-practice" framing through the back door. A safer wording: > *"…detached, reclassified, and re-linked, sometimes into onward household practices, sometimes into craft, resale, or charitable circuits, and sometimes into the ongoing practice of swapshop participation itself."* That keeps the *site* doing the holding-together rather than asking a single new practice to do it — which lines up with your conclusion #M3VCHH about the moral economy holding *heterogeneous orientations* together. ## Where this lands in the draft - The orphan notes #2MV3XY and #FZHH6H in the conclusion of Ch. 2 are obvious adoption sites — promote them into a real subsection, maybe between #WULWDF and #HQ4PZX, called something like "Brīvbode as a site: from practice-entity to practice nexus." - Then revise #QPWYY6 so that instead of "I analyse freecycling in Brīvbode as a practice entity and as performed," it reads roughly: "I analyse Brīvbode as a *site* in Schatzki's sense — a constitutive mesh of practices and material arrangements — within which freecycling emerges as an integrative practice that re-links elements detached from domestic consumption." - #PL9BXR (Ch. 4 opener) gets the same treatment. - Cite Hartmann #Y9F68Q for the "practices are the site" formulation, and pull from *Nexus of Practices* #R49AUC for the bundle/nexus vocabulary so you're not leaning on Shove et al. 2012 alone. This is a real upgrade and not a huge rewrite — mostly a relabelling of what the empirical chapters are already doing. ### 14. User i like it also because it points to a resonance where the swapshop's object level activity is mirrored on the practice level...? i mean, it's a swapshop! elements coming into a shared space, etc etc ### 15. Assistant Yes — and I think this is more than a pleasing coincidence. It's a genuine **structural homology**, and naming it could give you a really sharp through-line for the thesis. ## The mirror, made explicit - **Object level:** things are detached from one household's practices, pooled in a shared space without price tags fixing their value, re-evaluated by passers-by, and re-linked into someone else's household. The shop is the liminal in-between where decontextualised stuff sits available. - **Practice level:** elements (materials, competences, meanings) are detached from the practices that gave them their original sense — laundry, dressing, gifting, hosting, parenting, crafting — pooled in a shared space where they become available as resources, re-evaluated, and re-linked into other practice configurations (freecycling itself, but also home making, resale, charity, craft, sufficiency lifestyles). The same logic — **detach, pool, re-evaluate, re-link** — runs at both levels. Brīvbode is a swapshop of objects *and* a swapshop of practice elements. It's swap all the way down. ## Why this is analytically useful, not just cute The risk with a nice isomorphism is that it stays decorative. Yours actually does work: 1. **It explains the moral-economy tension you flag in #M3VCHH and #MHM9Q5.** What's contested at Brīvbode isn't only what an object is worth — it's *which practice frame governs the encounter* (charity? exchange? gifting? resale? circulation?). The site pools competing practice-frames and lets them rub against each other. That's why "incompatible orientations coexist": the swap is happening at the level of meanings too. 2. **It explains why people leave changed, not just supplied.** Visitors take home competences (sorting, restraining, letting go, appraising without price) and meanings (dignity, thrift, sufficiency) that get re-linked into their domestic practices. The shop doesn't just redistribute objects; it redistributes practice-elements that travel back into households. This gives you a clean way to argue for Brīvbode's transformative effect without overclaiming about "behaviour change." 3. **It gives the absence of price a deeper role.** Decommodification at the object level (no price) mirrors a kind of denaturalisation at the practice level (things get pried loose from the practices that stabilised their meaning). Price is one of the main devices by which objects stay locked into specific practice-bundles — removing it is what makes the practice-level swap possible. This is a properly theoretical point, not just an ethnographic one. 4. **It justifies the Schatzki framing non-arbitrarily.** Brīvbode isn't a site-in-Schatzki's-sense merely because every social activity happens at some site. It's a site in a stronger, ethnographically specific sense: it's a place whose *purpose* is to be the locus of detachment-and-relinking. The site form and the site function coincide. ## Possible labels / framings - **"Structural homology between object circulation and practice-element circulation"** — the precise sociological term, probably what you want for the theory chapter. - **"Brīvbode as a swap at two scales"** — friendlier for an introduction or chapter opener. - **"A site that mirrors its own logic"** — for a literary moment in the conclusion. If you want a quote to lean on, *Nexus of Practices* (#R49AUC) is full of language about how practices "connect, disconnect, and reconnect" through sites and material arrangements — that's almost your detach/re-link vocabulary already. Worth a search there if you want a concrete citation. ## Where to put it I'd plant the homology twice: - **Once in the theory chapter**, near the new Schatzki subsection, as a *claim about the case*: "Brīvbode is a particularly tractable site for practice-theoretical analysis because the object-level activity it organises — the detachment and re-linking of things — mirrors the practice-level dynamic by which it constitutes itself as a site." - **Once in the conclusion of Ch. 4 (#A3X9XX)**, as the punchline that ties #M3VCHH's "plurality of meanings" and #MHM9Q5's tension together: the swapshop is constitutively the place where detached elements coexist before being re-linked, and that's *why* incompatible orientations don't have to be resolved. Honestly, this might be the single best framing device I've seen in the draft. It earns its keep. ### 16. User yeah i feel like it brings a clarity to the focus of the project, if a swapshop isn't just any arbitrary site but one that's really quite peculiar in its kinda concentrated or intensified or blatant example of relinking and so on ### 17. Assistant Exactly. And this is the bit that gives the project its methodological backbone — it's not just *a* site, it's a site selected because of what it *concentrates* and *makes visible*. ## What you're really claiming Practice-element circulation — detachment, pooling, re-linking — happens *all the time*, but mostly: - **Dispersedly** (across households, bins, gifts, attics, FB Marketplace, charity bags), - **Privately** (at the back of the wardrobe, between two friends, in a moment of "I'll deal with this later"), - **Asymmetrically** (charity shops only take, retail only gives, landfill only swallows), - **Mediated by price** (which fixes objects back into stable practice-frames before they can drift), - **Episodically** (garage sales, Kondo purges, moving house). Brīvbode collapses all of that into **one permanent, public, bidirectional, price-free space**. It's the same dynamic running through ordinary domestic life, but pulled out of the wardrobe and laid on a shelf where you can watch it happen. The site doesn't just host the dynamic — it *concentrates* it. That gives you a really clean answer to the "why this case?" question, and it doubles as a theoretical claim, not just a methodological one. ## The neat inversion of Shove This actually flips Shove's classic move on its head in a productive way. Shove argued (#N4RD83) that what matters is *inconspicuous*, routinised, taken-for-granted practice — and that studying self-conscious environmentalists is "something of a distraction." Practice theory's whole methodological problem since has been: *how do you study inconspicuous things?* They're hard to see precisely because they're naturalised. Brīvbode is your answer. It's not that you're studying self-conscious environmentalists (you're explicitly not — see #4V448P on sustainability-without-orientation). It's that you've found a site **where the inconspicuous becomes briefly conspicuous** — where the silent detach/re-link work that usually happens in private is, in your own earlier phrase, *negotiated in the open*. The swapshop is a magnifying glass for ordinary practice-element circulation. That's why it's worth a thesis. ## Vocabulary you might borrow A few options for naming this, depending on register: - **"Revelatory case"** (Yin) — bog-standard methodology vocabulary, low-risk. - **"Paradigmatic case"** (Flyvbjerg) — slightly stronger: a case that crystallises something widespread. - **"Heterotopia"** (Foucault) — riskier, but genuinely fits: a site that gathers in one place multiple incompatible orderings (charity, gift, exchange, sufficiency, scavenging) which can't normally coexist. This would also give a theoretical home to your #M3VCHH "incompatible orientations" point. - **Or just your own words: "concentrated," "intensified," "made visible."** These are honestly fine and don't require borrowing anyone's apparatus. ## Where this lands in the draft Two natural homes: 1. **Methodology chapter, #ZXRYYU "The site"** — this is where you currently introduce Brīvbode physically; it should also do the work of justifying *why this site* in terms of what it concentrates. Right now I'd guess that section is more descriptive than argumentative; this gives it an argument. 2. **Introduction** — a sentence or two on the swapshop as a place where ordinarily dispersed circulation becomes locally observable would frame the whole thesis cleanly. Something like: "*Brīvbode offers a rare empirical foothold on a dynamic that ordinarily plays out invisibly across thousands of households: the detachment and re-linking of objects and practice-elements as goods move through everyday life.*" You've talked yourself into the spine of the thesis over the last three messages, honestly. Schatzki's site + the structural homology + the case as concentration — that's a coherent theoretical-methodological frame, and it's much sharper than "freecycling as a practice." Worth writing down before it dissipates. ### 18. User say you wanted to introduce this whole research and thesis, and you take this as a basic framing... write a few paragraphs like that! ### 19. Assistant Sure — here's a draft. Treat it as raw material, not a finished intro; chop and rewrite freely. I've tried to keep it in your register and your vocabulary. --- On a weekday afternoon in Brīvbode, a former bakery on the ground floor of a Riga apartment building, the floor is busy. Someone arrives with a cardboard box of children's clothes and pauses by the door, deciding which shelf they belong on. Two women sort through a pile of dishes, weighing one mug against another and putting both back. A volunteer breaks down a bag that has been left full of unwashed bedding, sliding the salvageable pieces onto a rack and the rest into a corner labelled for textile recycling. Someone leaves with a ceramic vase under one arm and a half-apologetic grin: nothing was paid, and yet something has clearly been exchanged. Brīvbode is a swapshop — a permanent, free, non-monetary space where Riga residents bring things they no longer want and take what they need, like, or might use. It is small, unassuming, and easy to underestimate. This thesis takes Brīvbode seriously as an ethnographic and theoretical site. It does so on the premise that swapshops are not merely convenient infrastructures for secondhand exchange but unusually concentrated, visible expressions of a dynamic that runs, mostly invisibly, through ordinary domestic life: the continuous detachment of things from one set of household practices and their re-linking into another. Across countless households, objects drift loose from the practices that gave them their place — a sweater no longer dressed in, a kettle replaced, a child's toy outgrown — and have to be sent somewhere: to a friend, a charity bag, the bin, the basement, or, increasingly, a swapshop. Most of this work happens privately, episodically, and dispersedly, cushioned by the rhythms of households and mediated by the friction of price. Brīvbode collapses it into one permanent, public, price-free space, where the otherwise silent ordering work of domestic divestment and acquisition becomes visible, social, and negotiable. I approach Brīvbode through theories of practice, drawing in particular on Schatzki's understanding of a site as a constitutive milieu in which social life unfolds through the interplay of practices and material arrangements. From this perspective, Brīvbode is not a backdrop against which the practice of freecycling is performed, nor a single tightly-bounded practice in itself, but a site where multiple practices intersect: divestment from home, secondhand acquisition, sorting and curation, volunteering, gifting, scavenging, sometimes reselling, projects of sufficiency, and ordinary getting-by. What the swapshop does at the level of objects — gathering things detached from one household's life so they can be re-linked into another's — it also does at the level of practice elements. Materials, competences, and meanings drawn from different domestic and ethical practices are brought together in one space, where they are performed, observed, contested, and recombined. The shop is, in this sense, structurally homologous to its own activity: a site whose form reproduces the logic of the swap. This framing shapes both what the thesis argues and how it proceeds. Empirically, it follows the trajectories of things and people through Brīvbode — the incoming flows of divestment, the labour that holds the site together, the moments of acquisition and letting go, and the quiet consumption work that sustains the whole arrangement. Theoretically, it contributes to ongoing discussions in practice-theoretical sustainable consumption research about how to study circulation, alternative economies, and the everyday work that maintains them. Methodologically, it treats Brīvbode as a revelatory case: a small, peculiar place from which the larger and more dispersed dynamics of household material life become locally observable. In the Latvian context, where freecycling and similar non-monetary exchange spaces are a recent and growing phenomenon, the site is also a useful vantage point for thinking about how alternative practices of circulation take root, how they articulate with existing patterns of thrift and sufficiency, and how they hold together under the pressure of incompatible orientations. --- Notes on what's doing what, in case it's useful for editing: - **Para 1** is the ethnographic hook — concrete, specific, ends with "easy to underestimate" so para 2 can correct that. - **Para 2** is the case-selection rationale: dispersed/private/episodic → concentrated/public/permanent. This is your "magnifying glass" argument. - **Para 3** does the theoretical lifting: Schatzki's site, the list of intersecting practices (so the reader knows you're not collapsing everything into one practice), and the homology. - **Para 4** is the standard "what the thesis does" move, plus the Latvian context anchor. Things you'll probably want to change: the opening scene should be a real one from your fieldnotes, not my invented composite. The list of intersecting practices in para 3 should match what you actually argue in chapters 4 and 5. And "revelatory case" is a placeholder — swap in whatever vocabulary you settle on. ### 20. User let's also think about how the "care work" perspective gets brought in... ### 21. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "23NMLX", "82G2QE" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 22. Tool result: read THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #23NMLX Consumption Work PARAGRAPH #WCS3TZ 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. PARAGRAPH #ZBGB9J 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. PARAGRAPH #Q26XE6 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. PARAGRAPH #92SD6X [“Recent research at the intersection of practice theory and circular consumption has begun to foreground the labour involved in sustaining material circulation. Drawing on a practice-theoretical approach, Réka Tölg shows that circular consumption – particularly in the context of clothing – relies on the ongoing enactment of care in everyday practices. This involves not only acquiring and using garments, but also maintaining, repairing, and eventually parting with them in ways that enable their continued circulation. Such practices require the development of skills, awareness, and a sense of responsibility, and are often shaped by socio-material arrangements in both household and retail contexts. At the same time, Tölg highlights that these practices are not straightforward to accomplish, but are characterised by tensions, dilemmas, and constraints within systems still largely organised around linear consumption. In this sense, circular consumption can be understood not as a simple behavioural shift, but as an ongoing accomplishment that entails effort, coordination, and engagement – what has been conceptualised elsewhere as “consumption work” (Hobson et al., 2021).”] PARAGRAPH #2RA8WL 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. PARAGRAPH #HWS5KX [Second hand source that I should check] (Lindsay et al. 2024) Lindsay et al. (2024) and Organo et al. (2013) find that women consistently spend more time on sustainable household practices than men, and that “sustainability labour” tends to be more absorbed into existing patterns of gendered domestic work rather than redistributed.] PARAGRAPH #AXVP4C 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. THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode PARAGRAPH #DM28T4 Rasa, the principal manager of Brīvbode, compared the swapshop’s operation to the flight of a bumblebee: while seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics, it nevertheless continues to fly. This chapter examines the work that keeps Brīvbode running. Where the previous chapter examined freecycling as a practice – its venues, materials, meanings, and competencies, and the moral economy through which they cohere – this chapter turns to what that practice costs and to the people who pay it: in time, skill, and effort, and in the relational and ethical attention that the tasks of circulation demand. That labour is largely unpaid, unevenly distributed, and absorbed into existing practices of household management. PARAGRAPH #EF5DET The chapter is organized by two complementary registers. Consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann 2015) names the tasks the practice demands – acquiring, sorting, maintaining, divesting, transporting – and tracks how they are distributed across technical, modal, and processual dimensions of the division of labour. Care work, in the feminist tradition and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), names the relational and ethical orientation through which participants take this labour on, often without recognising it as work at all. PARAGRAPH #S6HFAC Bankovska’s (2020) ethnography of the Latvian organic food movement bridges the two: drawing on Graeber (2018: 156), she observes that care is not always a joyful act but often involves unanticipated effort, obligation, hesitation, and disgust. The boundaries between consumption work, care work, and volunteer work are difficult to maintain in practice, and that is precisely what allows the labour that sustains Brīvbode to remain invisible to participants and to circular economy policy alike. SECTION #N8D3HT Time to Give: Volunteers and the Sufficiency Lifestyle PARAGRAPH #5SHEQN 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.” PARAGRAPH #BTZ4RL 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. PARAGRAPH #KSB7XK 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. PARAGRAPH #FT6K3G 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. SECTION #SLFJ9K Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care PARAGRAPH #U7QJHT 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. PARAGRAPH #KWPAYN 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. PARAGRAPH #7X9BV4 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. PARAGRAPH #4HW9DD 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. PARAGRAPH #4EZCAK 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. PARAGRAPH #A2APRY 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. SECTION #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route PARAGRAPH #SZG4E8 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. PARAGRAPH #QQ9MKA 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. PARAGRAPH #EW2HC4 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. PARAGRAPH #VA7PZF 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. PARAGRAPH #RCC9LM 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. SECTION #L38KUE It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care PARAGRAPH #8JYYXC 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. PARAGRAPH #PNGSGT 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. PARAGRAPH #3BY9GH 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. PARAGRAPH #Y344XY 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. PARAGRAPH #VCEUP7 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. PARAGRAPH #SZVP2G 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. SECTION #75D5UH Conclusion PARAGRAPH #5YXGE6 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. PARAGRAPH #HM56MD 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. PARAGRAPH #RX9JDU 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. ### 23. Assistant Good — this is the part that, in the framing we've built, needs a little extra thought, because chapter 5 is doing analytical work the intro framing doesn't yet account for. ## How the care/labour angle fits the framing A few ways it can plug in, in increasing order of ambition: **1. The site has to be held together.** The detach/pool/re-evaluate/re-link dynamic doesn't run on its own. Concentrating circulation in one space also concentrates the labour required to sustain it: what was previously distributed across countless households' invisible domestic work becomes one site's still-largely-invisible volunteer and participant work. Rasa's bumblebee (#DM28T4) is exactly this — the swapshop shouldn't fly, but someone is doing the flapping. So the case-selection argument has a counterpart: the same site that magnifies circulation also magnifies (some of) the labour that makes circulation possible. **2. The labour resists the magnification it depends on.** This is a productive tension worth flagging. Brīvbode is a place where the otherwise dispersed work of household material life becomes visible — but the labour that *sustains* the site is itself largely unrecognisable as work, even to the people doing it (#EW2HC4, Bankovska's care not-work). So the site is a magnifying glass for circulation, sustained by labour that resists magnification. This gives chapter 5 its own job: not just describing the work, but bringing it into view. **3. The homology arguably extends to care.** This is the more speculative move. Just as objects and practice elements are detached from particular households and re-linked into others, *care orientations* get detached from their domestic anchors (care for one's own family, one's own things) and re-extended outward — toward strangers, toward imagined future users, toward "the things themselves." Aiga's compulsion to recirculate her relatives' belongings, Rasa holding a wedding gift for a regular, the colleagues who "use" Anna as their divestment node — all of these are domestic care being routed through a public site. I'd be cautious about pushing this too hard in the intro (it might be more at home in the conclusion), but it's there if you want it. **4. Sufficiency as the precondition.** The volunteers' time-rich, sufficiency-oriented lives are not incidental — they're the structural condition for the site to exist at all. The "concentrated case" argument has to acknowledge that the concentration is only possible because a particular ecology of practitioners — gendered, time-rich, ethically committed — happens to exist around it. ## Inserting it into the draft intro Here's a paragraph to slot **between current paragraphs 3 and 4** of the intro draft. It picks up the homology and extends it to labour and care without overclaiming: > Concentrating dispersed circulation in one site also concentrates the labour that sustains it. The detachment, evaluation, and re-linking of things does not happen on its own: someone sorts the bag of unwashed bedding, someone holds a particular ceramic vase aside for a specific regular visitor, someone makes thirty trips to the swapshop rather than calling a clearance firm. This labour is the focus of the second analytical register of the thesis. Drawing on Wheeler and Glucksmann's (2015) concept of consumption work and on the feminist tradition of care work and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025; Bankovska 2020), I trace how the work of running Brīvbode is distributed — across volunteers and participants, across paid and unpaid arrangements, across the full chain from household to swapshop and back. Much of this labour is gendered, absorbed into existing patterns of household management, and motivated by ethical commitments that resist being recognised as work at all. The same site that brings the circulation of things into the open keeps much of the labour that sustains it unrecognised. Brīvbode is thus a useful vantage point for two questions at once: how things and practice elements are re-linked in one space, and what kind of labour, in what kind of lives, the re-linking depends on. And then paragraph 4 (now 5) can be lightly adjusted so the "theoretically, it contributes to…" sentence names *both* contributions: > Theoretically, it contributes to ongoing discussions in practice-theoretical sustainable consumption research about how to study circulation and alternative economies, and to debates in consumption work and feminist care scholarship about the labour that sustains circular practices and how it is unevenly distributed. ## A small consequence for chapter 5's framing If the intro is set up this way, the opener of chapter 5 (#DM28T4) becomes a bit easier to land — instead of just "the previous chapter examined freecycling as a practice; this chapter turns to what that practice costs," you can say something like: "If the previous chapter showed Brīvbode as a site where the circulation of things and practice elements becomes visible, this chapter turns to the labour that makes that visibility possible — labour which, by contrast, is not made visible by the site, and has to be brought into view analytically." That keeps the two chapters in clear relation: chapter 4 = what the site makes visible, chapter 5 = what the site depends on but obscures. Symmetrical, and it gives chapter 5 a sharper raison d'être than "and now also labour." ### 24. User let's just reflect a bit on "keeping things moving" and "holding it together" ### 25. Assistant Good pair to dwell on — they're doing more architectural work than they might look like. ## What the two verbs are doing Both are gerunds. Both are present-progressive, ongoing, effortful, never finished. Neither names an achievement-state. Brīvbode is in both titles cast as something that is constantly *being done*, never something that simply *is*. That's a small but real theoretical commitment — it's a Schatzkian site through and through, an ongoing accomplishment rather than a place. And then the verbs themselves do almost-opposite work: - **"Keeping things moving"** is about flow, transit, passage. Things come in and have to go out. The threat is *blockage*: overflow, stockpile, the slide from swapshop into junkyard or hoard. - **"Holding it together"** is about structure, containment, persistence. The arrangement has to stay upright. The threat is *dissolution*: volunteers burn out, the moral economy collapses, the place quietly stops being what it is. Movement and holding look like opposites, but at Brīvbode they're each other's condition. Things have to keep moving so that the place can hold (otherwise overflow eats it). The place has to hold together so that things can keep moving (otherwise there's no site, just a heap). The two chapters describe the same site from two angles, and the angles only make sense in pair. ## The bumblebee, again Rasa's bumblebee (#DM28T4) is precisely the joint figure: flying = keeping things moving, shouldn't fly = the constant work of holding it together against the laws of aerodynamics. The pair of chapter titles is the bumblebee written out as analytical structure. ## A small architectural feature you may or may not have planned "Holding it together" is already migrating between the two chapters. The conclusion of Ch. 4 is titled **"Holding Together Incompatible Orientations"** (#A3X9XX), and Ch. 5 picks up *holding it together* as its own keyword and extends it from orientations to labour. So the thesis builds a small staircase: - Ch. 4 body: keeping things moving (circulation, flow, practice) - Ch. 4 conclusion: holding together *incompatible orientations* (the moral-economy turn) - Ch. 5: holding together *the site itself* (the labour and care turn) That's a graceful escalation of one verb across two registers. If you didn't plan it, claim it; if you did, lean into it. You could even close Ch. 5's conclusion with a gesture back to Ch. 4: orientations and labour are held together by the same people, in the same lives, often in the same gesture. ## How they map onto the framing we've been building - **Keeping things moving** = what the site *makes visible*: the otherwise dispersed detach/pool/re-link work pulled into one observable space. - **Holding it together** = what the site *depends on but obscures*: the labour and care that resist their own magnification. So the chapter pair encodes the magnification/labour duality from the previous turn. Visible flow / invisible upkeep. Magnified circulation / unrecognised work. The titles are quietly already arguing what we've just been arguing. ## A bonus: the affect of the phrases It's worth noticing that both phrases have an ordinary, slightly worn-out, slightly humorous register. *Keeping things moving* is what a manager says when nothing exciting is happening but everything is still working. *Holding it together* is what a person says when they are nearly not. Together they read as the kind of understated, mildly self-aware idiom that sits well with the ethnographic material — Rasa with her angle grinder, Aiga's thirty trips, Anna's "it's on me." The titles match the texture of the labour they describe. Don't change them. ### 26. User ok one thing i wonder, "circulation" is used so much all over somehow, in the literature i think too, and it's making me slightly dizzy lol, nah but like, is it just a nod to circular economy? is it a shovean term referring to elements of practices and so on? what's the deal with circulation ### 27. Assistant Fair complaint — "circulation" is doing a *lot* of work in this literature, often without anyone clarifying which version they mean. Let me check the corpus and then disentangle. #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 10, "query": "circulation things goods objects" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 8, "query": "circulation practice Schatzki Shove" } ``` ### 28. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #LYTS7L Research methodology: A Practice Freecycle #GU86TB Interviews Matching paragraph #D2HJZP: The interview guide was organized around themes: participants' practices of acquisition and divestment, their relationship 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 the process of letting go feels like. Following the principles of 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 labor involved in managing the flow of things. Where questions touched on values and motivations, these were treated not as explanations for behavior but as part of the meanings participants attach to their practices – an element among materials, competencies, and social arrangements in shaping how circulation is organized and reproduced. 2. Source: The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (#83R4U2), Gay Hawkins, p. 12 Context: #Y4M56L Contents #GLVGJ3 An Overflowing Bin #E2YN67 HABITS AND ETHICS Matching excerpt #HJXHML: The world of things and the pragmatic demands they make on us are central to the formation of an ethos . And with the rise of consumer cultures we have come to live with an enormous number of things. The scale of goods for sale and the amount of objects people accumulate have produced very distinct personal and domestic habits. Caring for the self has become complicated and intensified by the sheer density and diversity of possessions. While analyses of the social and economic impacts of consumption have been great for understanding the dynamics of exchange, circulation, and use, they have been less valuable for understanding our relations with the things we get rid of. For all the talk about how we occupy consumer culture there has been a cavalier disregard for the all wasted things that form an enormous part of this way of living. This book argues that it is crucial to make sense of the distinct ethos of waste that underpins consumption, to acknowledge that how we eliminate things is just as important as how we acquire them. 3. Source: On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair & Care (#CUWPC9), Cindy Isenhour, Joshua Reno, p. 4 Context: #3YJ9P3 On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair & Care #LLPBZ4 Contributions & Organization of the Collection Matching excerpt #R453P2: But if we understand reuse, in part, as an expression of care for the meaning and materials embodied in goods, what happens when people decide to part with objects of affection? Does the act of ‘letting go’ signify the termination of care? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork tracing circuits of second-hand acquisition and divestment in Sweden, Anna Bohlin argues that the acts of caring for and letting go of objects are not necessarily contradictory. Contrary to Bauman’s observation that contemporary consumption is fleeting, ambivalent, and as short lived as our shifting identities, Bohlin observes that many people come to understand second hand objects as things-in-motion—and perform care as they pass them on for reuse, rather than disposal. Indeed, many of the interlocutors participating in Bohlin’s study were fundamentally concerned with the wastefulness of contemporary consumption and had thus come to see the ongoing circulation of objects as a fundamental moral concern. Their commitment to these objects is therefore a particular expression of ‘serial care’ extended over time and through networks of reuse. As Bohlin writes, ‘by dispersing the care for objects across a series of imagined owners, the concern with the longevity of objects can be combined with benefits of transience for the individual owner’ (Bohlin, this issue). 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #YNEV47 Research methodology: In The Field To Freecycle #KVQFHZ Interviews Matching paragraph #CVWV55: The interview guide was organized around themes: participants' practices of acquisition and divestment, their relationship 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 the process of letting go feels like. Following the principles of 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 labor involved in managing the flow of things. Where questions touched on values and motivations, these were treated not as explanations for behavior but as part of the meanings participants attach to their practices – an element among materials, competencies, and social arrangements in shaping how circulation is organized and reproduced. 5. Source: Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets (#MBXQXR), Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren, p. 1 Context: #3U9XEW Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets1 #TY8WTD Introduction Matching excerpt #Y6XUMS: Commercial markets 2 for retro-, vintage and second-hand objects have undergone a dramatic expansion in the last decade across the globe (Franklin 2011: 157). Factors contributing to this expansion have been described in the introduction as well as in some of the contributions to this thematic issue (notably Fischer). In this article we suggest that a significant aspect of the new importance of second-hand and reuse concerns the meaningfulness of circulation in social life. Revisiting the long history within social anthropology of studying the mutual entanglement of material objects and human subjects, we explore circulation as an analytical tool. Circulation does things to people and objects, particularly within the field of second-hand, and we suggest that it can be seen as a culturally generative force that reconfigures objects into objects-in-motion, enabling particular forms of subjectivity. Indeed, circulation seems to be a defining aspect of second-hand objects, distinguishing them from other classic categories of objects in anthropological thinking about person-thing relationships, such as gifts, commodities, sacrifices or art objects. We hope to show that classic anthropological insights, drawn from ethnographic fieldwork there and then, married with recent anthropological contributions on people-thing relationships, have much to offer when making sense of the socio-economic significance of circulation here and now. We are intrigued by how recent writing on the concept of growing, as distinct from making (Ingold & Hallam 2014), can elucidate how circulation transforms things in motion within second-hand worlds. Developing the idea that objects have cultural biographies (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986), we propose a theoretical perspective that sees the circulation of used and second-hand things as involving a form of growth, akin to that of a living organism, in that it results from the interaction between qualities and forces both internal and external to the object. Doing this allows a view of the circulating objects not merely as things that events happen to, but as having agential capacities (cf. Gell 1998), actively contributing to shaping their fate. 6. Source: Disposal and Simple Living: Exploring the Circulation of Goods and the Development of Sacred Consumption (#MNFABA), Hélène Cherrier, p. 9 Context: #EQEY4S Disposal and simple living: exploring the circulation of goods and the development of sacred consumption #E3HJRJ The study #EX99B7 Moving toward the sacred Matching excerpt #DM8466: For Angie, disposal is analogous to sharing and is enacted through a process of circulation. Her narrative shows sharing goods as a way to connect to people, to nature and to her inner self. Through sharing, Angie participates in the circulation of the objects. This circulation of the material conveys in her a "sense of wholeness and oneness and unity." It is evident here that Angie does not perceive disposal as a departure of goods from her life. On the contrary, disposal reflects a flow of objects. As a flow, disposal circulates the objects between hands and allows for potential return. Further on in the interview, Angie assimilates disposing of her belonging to "placing the placenta in the earth, that it would regenerate naturally and would remain 7. Source: Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices (#SJ3K7R), Dharma Arunachalam, Jo Lindsay, Rob Raven, Ruth Lane, p. 2 Context: #GBBDLC Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices #TDQ98Q Introduction Matching excerpt #6TT73E: Informal sharing of goods with friends, family and housemates has received only limited attention in sustainability literature with notable exceptions such as Burningham and Venn's research on intergenerational exchanges at key points in the life course (Burningham and Venn 2020; Venn and Burningham 2022) and geographers who have explored conduits of consumption and disposal (Gregson, Metcalfe, and Crewe 2007; Horne, Maller, and Lane 2016; Lane, Follett, and Lindsay 2018; Lane, Horne, and Bicknell 2009). However, there is a rich vein of research on sharing within the sociology of family and personal life that provides some useful insights for this study on the circulation of goods. A major insight from this literature is that 'things matter' in families, relationships and everyday life (Holmes 2019). Reciprocity and exchange are part of everyday life and embedded in social networks (Holmes 2018; Pahl 1984). Goods can be understood and perceived as simply useful 'objects' or as meaningful 'things' – particularly when they are entangled with relationships with family and friends (Ingold 2010; Venn and Burningham 2022). On the one hand, objects can be understood to have 'profound relational significance' but on the other they can be seen as 'troublesome', 'problematic' or failing to 'spark joy' (Ouellette 2019; Venn and Burningham 2022). 8. Source: Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices (#SJ3K7R), Dharma Arunachalam, Jo Lindsay, Rob Raven, Ruth Lane, p. 10 Context: #GBBDLC Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices #RCTQHW Conclusion Matching excerpt #DJFFHY: We now conclude our paper by drawing together and extending conceptual arguments from family sociology, consumption and sustainability outlined earlier. Kinship involves a set of relational practices where material objects or 'things' matter every day and particularly at times of life stage transition – such as having a child, retiring or at death (Burningham and Venn 2020; Finch and Mason 2013; Holmes 2019). It is well established that consumption is a relational practice too – people buy goods to 'make and do' family – to create relationships and care for each other through linked lives across households (Burningham and Venn 2020; Lindsay and Maher 2013; Venn and Burningham 2022). In this paper, we have shown that informal social connections within households and relationships with friends and family enable the circulation of goods and may be a useful mode for reducing consumption and achieving sufficiency (Sandberg 2021). Goods are received and borrowed from friends and family by large proportions of people – particularly the young across all product streams and by young women with clothing. This informal sharing through friend and kin relationships has been largely overlooked in the sustainability literature, with some key exceptions (Collins 2015; Horne, Maller, and Lane 2016; Yates 2018). 9. Source: ‘It will Keep Circulating’: Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets (#ZJUEY4), Anna Bohlin, p. 0 Context: #SSAEUN 'It will Keep Circulating': Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets Matching excerpt #R3D4QX: Using the case of Sweden, this article examines the growing sector of reuse and second-hand activities from the perspective of how people express and practice their relationships to objects that they acquire from second-hand markets. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in flea markets, second-hand shops, homes and recycling depots, it explores how people relate to and handle goods which, instead of becoming waste, enter new life cycles through reuse. It suggests that buying, using and passing on certain kinds of second-hand things involves particular forms of affection and 'serial' care for the objects as things-in-motion. At the same time, part of the attraction of these objects is how they enable the practising of a particular kind of subjectivity: that of an informed, moral and caring consumer. Part of such reuse subjectivity is the capacity to form close bonds with, and care for objects, but also to untie these bonds in order to carefully and responsibly let go of them. The article suggests that paying attention to the affective orientation and disposition that form part of such consumer subjectivity may provide keys to understanding what drives second-hand consumption and the accelerated circulation of goods it may entail. Offering an opportunity to examine assumptions of reuse and circulation as inherently 'sustainable', it also provides perspectives on practices of care. 10. Source: ‘It will Keep Circulating’: Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets (#ZJUEY4), Anna Bohlin, p. 6 Context: #SSAEUN 'It will Keep Circulating': Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets #9JA8BQ Discussion: Caring Deeply But Serially Matching excerpt #KH4GUQ: The observations above are of people who, in different ways, interact with second-hand markets in the role of shoppers, sellers or donors. Even though examples are drawn from very different contexts and moments in people's lives, they point to the existence of certain norms and ideas that recur across these contexts. One emerging theme concerns the general belief in the goodness of keeping things in circulation. Regardless of whether acquiring or discarding objects, there is a widespread notion that passing things on, and extending their lives, is a good thing, while destroying them or throwing them away, is bad. For many people, active in these circles, the benefit of circulating things is a self-evident truth. When probed further, most would cite affordability and environmental aspects, such as saving resources, reducing waste, and bringing consumption levels down, or providing goods to those who need it. Second-hand shopping in other words perfectly combines what Miller has referred to as the morality of thrift and concern for the household with the ethics of caring for broader issues affecting humanity, two values that often clash (2012: 88; cf. Isenhour 2012). Approximate matches 1. Source: Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets (#MBXQXR), Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren, p. 19 Context: #3U9XEW Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets1 #S79WNG Conclusion Score: 0.609 Related excerpt #KK94LL: While this article has sketched out some explorative perspectives on circulation as an analytical tool within the specific field of second-hand things, one can note that the broader topic of circulation deserves further attention. The analytical and theoretical affordances of the concept of circulation need to be refined and clarified. The handling of second-hand objects is a promising arena for further developing the notion of circulation and its generative capacities. Another fruitful area of research concerns the recent popularity of the term in contemporary society. Circulatory ideals and practice play an increasingly important role across a number of different social fields, reflected in discourses on circular economies and circular strategies for sustainability, from waste recycling to emerging sharing cultures and sustainable consumption. Notions of circularity seem 'good to think with' and operate as powerful idioms, promising solutions to a range of pressing social issues. From the need to de-clutter over-filled homes, while keeping consumption levels intact, to challenges of social inequalities and environmental degradation, circulation seems to offer solutions. It also interlocks with powerful moral conceptions of fitness in an ever changing world, where not only objects are in motion, but also subjects, who should never embrace anything firmly, but be prepared to swiftly engage in and disengage from social and material constellations (cf. Bauman 1998/ 2005:25). Associated with modern Enlightenment ideas of movement, change, progress and freedom, circulation is also related to non-modern forms of societal organization in which things and people are thoroughly embedded in time and place by the rationalities of connections, returns and reuses. Perhaps the current interest in circulation, and circulating things, rests on precisely the elasticity of the term, with its capacity to conjure up modern hopes and fantasies of change and progress by reawakening non-modern sensibilities of reuse, return and reappearance. 2. Source: Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets (#MBXQXR), Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren, p. 4 Context: #3U9XEW Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets1 #DSNHBJ Unpacking Circulation Score: 0.596 Related excerpt #3CA6FP: Traveling along circuits through shifting social contexts also impacts the object in question. A special issue in Cultural Anthropology (2002) devoted to the topic of ‘Value in Circulation’ argues that ‘value must be understood from a circulatory perspective’ (italics in the original, Eiss & Pedersen 2002: 286). The volume contains theoretical and empirical explorations of the notion of value as a shifting dimension of objects in motion. However, as circulation primarily comes to denote a mode of tracing ‘the continual metamorphoses of value in diverse social contexts’ (Eiss & Pedersen 2002: 286), the transformative role of circulation itself is somewhat downplayed. Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, on the other hand, give circulation a greater theoretical gravity (2002). Their notion of a ‘culture of circulation’ echoes Tsing’s approach when they state that ‘more than simply the movement of people, ideas, and commodities...circulation is a cultural process’ (Lee & LiPuma 2002: 192). Their point is that circulation of people, capital, commodities and media messages in a global world do things to the societies and the markets they circulate through, performatively reconstituting them (Lee & LiPuma 2002:192-195). While this perspective is useful for understanding how the infrastructure of the second-hand market is recreated through circulation it has less to say about how circulation is constitutive of the objects themselves. Circulation acts performatively – ‘extrovertly’ – on the social contexts they circle through, as is argued by Lee and LiPuma, but it also reconfigures the inherently mutable object of circulation, acting ‘introvertly’ 5 . 3. Source: Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets (#MBXQXR), Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren, p. 3 Context: #3U9XEW Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets1 #DSNHBJ Unpacking Circulation Score: 0.591 Related excerpt #A7JK4G: Circulation thus played an important role in Malinowski’s analysis. Regarded as important primarily for how it functioned to integrate and organise society, circulation was studied in terms of the negotiation of its political, social and economic dimensions. As a theoretical phenomenon in its own right, however, circulation and, more specifically, what it does to the objects, remained somewhat in the background. 4. Source: Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets (#MBXQXR), Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren, p. 3 Context: #3U9XEW Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets1 #DSNHBJ Unpacking Circulation Score: 0.584 Related excerpt #BVNVN7: Circulation has gained new relevance in the study of globalisation, but is within this context associated with a slightly different set of issues, especially outside anthropology. Retaining its analytically imprecise character it has focused on the state of flux between the nodes of the circuit, concerned with the flows of people, objects and capital across the globe, thought to constitute a deterritorialized global condition. Circulation in the globalization discourse is thus associated with a set of rather vague analytical notions of transience, such as flows, fluidity, intensity, extensity and velocity (Scholte 2005). Embedded in this shift of focus lies the essentially liberal idea of circulation as the setting loose of natural forces of human activity through political deregulation, especially the erasure of ‘unnatural’ political constraints on markets. Circulation in the anthropology of exchange cen- 5. Source: Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets (#MBXQXR), Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren, p. 1 Context: #3U9XEW Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets1 #TY8WTD Introduction Score: 0.583 Related excerpt #Y6XUMS: Commercial markets 2 for retro-, vintage and second-hand objects have undergone a dramatic expansion in the last decade across the globe (Franklin 2011: 157). Factors contributing to this expansion have been described in the introduction as well as in some of the contributions to this thematic issue (notably Fischer). In this article we suggest that a significant aspect of the new importance of second-hand and reuse concerns the meaningfulness of circulation in social life. Revisiting the long history within social anthropology of studying the mutual entanglement of material objects and human subjects, we explore circulation as an analytical tool. Circulation does things to people and objects, particularly within the field of second-hand, and we suggest that it can be seen as a culturally generative force that reconfigures objects into objects-in-motion, enabling particular forms of subjectivity. Indeed, circulation seems to be a defining aspect of second-hand objects, distinguishing them from other classic categories of objects in anthropological thinking about person-thing relationships, such as gifts, commodities, sacrifices or art objects. We hope to show that classic anthropological insights, drawn from ethnographic fieldwork there and then, married with recent anthropological contributions on people-thing relationships, have much to offer when making sense of the socio-economic significance of circulation here and now. We are intrigued by how recent writing on the concept of growing, as distinct from making (Ingold & Hallam 2014), can elucidate how circulation transforms things in motion within second-hand worlds. Developing the idea that objects have cultural biographies (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986), we propose a theoretical perspective that sees the circulation of used and second-hand things as involving a form of growth, akin to that of a living organism, in that it results from the interaction between qualities and forces both internal and external to the object. Doing this allows a view of the circulating objects not merely as things that events happen to, but as having agential capacities (cf. Gell 1998), actively contributing to shaping their fate. 6. Source: Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets (#MBXQXR), Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren, p. 4 Context: #3U9XEW Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets1 #DSNHBJ Unpacking Circulation Score: 0.58 Related excerpt #59SDYX: tred on the moments of transaction and was regarded as integrating society and reproducing social order and hierarchy. The usage of circulation in the broad field of social scientific analysis of the globalized world predominantly seems to denote disruption, disembedding and disassociation of people, objects and capital from their social and territorial contexts. 7. Source: Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets (#MBXQXR), Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren, p. 2 Context: #3U9XEW Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets1 #DSNHBJ Unpacking Circulation Score: 0.577 Related excerpt #FVV73K: Before turning to the ways that contemporary exchange and consumption of used material culture can be approached from the perspective of circulation, we will unpack the concept of circulation through some of its uses within social anthropology and social sciences in general. 8. Source: Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices (#SJ3K7R), Dharma Arunachalam, Jo Lindsay, Rob Raven, Ruth Lane, p. 1 Context: #GBBDLC Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices #TDQ98Q Introduction Score: 0.604 Related excerpt #5UU5US: about the circulation of goods. The national survey we discuss in this paper is novel because it captures circulation practices across product types – clothing and accessories, furniture and homewares, and white-goods and appliances – for the first time. 9. Source: Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices (#SJ3K7R), Dharma Arunachalam, Jo Lindsay, Rob Raven, Ruth Lane, p. 3 Context: #GBBDLC Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices #TDQ98Q Introduction Score: 0.587 Related excerpt #BA5TXG: In this paper, we explore the environmental and social significance of the circulation of goods between 10. Source: ‘It will Keep Circulating’: Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets (#ZJUEY4), Anna Bohlin, p. 6 Context: #SSAEUN 'It will Keep Circulating': Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets #9JA8BQ Discussion: Caring Deeply But Serially Score: 0.575 Related excerpt #TAU8L4: One aspect of the emphasis on circulation as inherently good is that it allows for, and elevates to a virtuous activity, the continuous replacement of goods in the home, as we saw in some of the examples. Getting rid of something is not simply a divestment practice, but also becomes a generous act of care when the thing is donated to a second-hand market, just as buying something from a charity shop supports a good cause. Second-hand consumption thus offers great opportunities for immediate gratification ### 29. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: If I Don't Do It, It Feels Wrong: Embodying Environmental Ethical Reflexivity through Cultivation and Enactment of Practices (#EDFB5G), Anne Sofie Møller Askholm, p. 2 Context: #LSKR5Q “If I don’t do it, it feels wrong”: embodying environmental ethical reflexivity through cultivation and enactment of practices #5N8WU9 Conceptual framework Matching excerpt #LYRQZP: Second-generation practice theories define consumption as happening while everyday practices are performed (Warde 2005). Practices are organized nexuses of actions that are socially shared across space and time and are linked and held together by different elements (Gram-Hanssen 2011; Roepke 2009; Schatzki 2002; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). In Schatzki's (2002) practice-theory model, these elements consist of practical understandings , meaning abilities or competences required to perform the actions of a practice; rules that instruct people to perform particular actions; teleoaffective structures that describe the ends, tasks, and projects normatively and hierarchically arranged and connected to normativized emotions to varying degrees; and general understandings that span different practices and define the manner in which practices are carried out according to certain convictions or beliefs (Schatzki 2002, 2019). While Schatzki analytically separates materiality from practices, some theorists understand materiality as a constituting element (Gram-Hanssen 2011; Shove and Pantzar 2005; Warde 2005). Within this configuration of elements, practices are produced, reproduced, and changed, 2. Source: Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing (#EPZXEW), Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa, p. 6 Context: #LVDEMW 3. COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION AND PRACTICE THEORIES Matching excerpt #XC3KN6: Practices as entities are thus founded or made up of three elements: materials, competences, and meanings; such elements are dynamically interconnected by qualified practitioners, through regular and repetitive performance, thus constituting the practice (Shove & Pantzar, 2005; Hargreaves, 2011; Shove et al., 2012; Spurling et al., 2013). Inspired by the viewpoints of Schatzki (2002, 2012) and Reckwitz (2002), Shove et al. (2012) proposed a sociotechnical approach for understanding the essential elements of practice and how they relate to each other. In this perspective, both human agents, that is, individuals, made up of bodies and minds (Schatzki, 2001), as non-humans (objects/artifacts), are indispensable requirements for the practice (Reckwitz, 2002; Spaargaren & Oosterveer, 2010). The human body itself is considered a material element, and the mind a component of meaning (Shove et al., 2012; Süßbauer & Schäfer, 2019). Next, Figure 1 details the three elements that make up the practice. 3. Source: Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption (#KWZ2A4), Alan Warde, Daniel Welch, p. 2 Context: #STMANK Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption #6U6DVD 5.1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF PRACTICE Matching excerpt #MPFAVR: Recently Nicolini (2012) has surveyed in magisterial fashion the full and wide range of practice theories now in circulation. He distinguishes between: the praxeological theories of Giddens (1984) and Bourdieu (1977); practice as tradition and community (Wenger 1998; MacIntyre 1981); practice as activity (Vygotsky and cultural and historical activity theory); practice as accomplishment, in the manner of ethnomethodology; practice as the locus of the social (as in Schatzki's 1996, 2002 reworking of Heidegger and Wittgenstein); and practice as discourse, which he elaborates via conversation analysis and a review of Foucault. It is difficult to specify what these theories have in common. Nicolini (2012) concurs with Schatzki (2001) that there is no unified practice approach. Nevertheless he notes 'a number of family resemblances' among theories from which he isolates some suggestions for how to undertake empirical studies (Schatzki 2001, p. 11). Reckwitz (2002) helpfully observes that while all cultural theories oppose both the utilitarian or rational-choice models of social action and order, and the classical sociological norm-orientated model of social action and order (that is, Durkheim and Parsons), what unites the heterogeneity of practice theories is the contention that social order and action is a feature of, and established through, the field of human practices. Practice theories' central claim is to move beyond problematic dualisms like structure and agency, methodological individualism and holism, determinism and voluntarism, and subject and object. Moreover, as Schatzki (2001, p. 14) suggests, 'these accounts all undermine the traditional individual-nonindividual divide by availing themselves of features of both sides'. Social practices, then, rather than individuals (and their attitudes and preferences), norms, cultural codes, discourses, macro-level trends or social structures become the central unit of analysis; and in policy-oriented accounts of sustainable consumption, they become the central unit of intervention (Shove 2010; Shove and Walker 2010; Spurling et al. 2013). 4. Source: Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption (#KWZ2A4), Alan Warde, Daniel Welch, p. 9 Context: #STMANK Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption #6U6DVD 5.1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF PRACTICE #UQZN9F 5.4 AGENCY, CHANGE AND CONVERGENCE Matching excerpt #YFRLU6: Any brief summary of the field would be incomplete without acknowledging the important recent book by Shove, Pantzar and Watson, The Dynamics of Social Practice (Shove et al. 2012), which is both an important general contribution to the application of practice theory and explicitly orientated to promoting transitions in practice. It presents an avowedly 'radically simplified' account of practice theory, the better to elucidate complex dynamics. Central to this project is to model practices as composed as three generic elements: meaning, competence and material. It stresses the relative independence of the trajectories of these elements of practices from practices themselves. Practices come into being and are transformed through the circulation and recombination of elements. Shove et al. (2012) elaborate Giddens's (1984) notion of the 'reproduction circuit' or feedback between the self-monitoring of actors and social structure. 'Circuits of reproduction' include: the reproduction of practice through the integration of elements; cross-practice configurations of elements that affect the former; and inter-practice circuits (Shove et al. 2012, p. 114). 5. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 21 Context: #LSJS5V I. Introduction #R9MPHV 1.2 Problematizing Consumption #32NPCZ 1.2.1 Consumption in relation to practice #MRS3X3 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #79WK5B: Warde's point of view resonates with research that demonstrate how consumption objects are utilized in and for the conduct of a specific practice (Magaudda 2011; Reckwitz 2002; Schatzki 2001; 2002; Shove and Pantzar 2005; Whittington et al., 2006; Watson and Shove 2008). This means not only that the practice requires and necessitates consumption, but also that individuals engage in moments of consumption required by the practice. Consumption in this view becomes an element of practice. This can be illustrated by Shove and Chappells' (2001) study showing how water and electricity is typically consumed in the course of the routines of daily practices; and Watson and Shove (2008) demonstrating how screws, nails, and tools are consumed in the course of DIY practices. Tools, raw materials, water, and electricity are not consumed for their own sake, but their consumption is steered by routine activities of everyday life or specific practices. In other words, engaging in a certain practice necessitates the consumption of certain objects. Thus, the needs for these objects are less 'consumer needs' than practice needs (Warde 2005). In Watson and Shove's (2008) reading of Warde (2005), consumption thus is an outcome of practice. 6. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 95 Context: #8UPZTD TECHNOLOGIES WITHIN AND BEYOND PRACTICES #7Y5ZUN Materials as elements of practice and beyond Matching excerpt #3VHTH2: In this respect, Schatzki's (2002; 2010a) framing of materiality as material arrangements that are linked to, but conceptually distinct from, practices is of interest. Here, practices and material arrangements each provide a context for the other and are accordingly bundled together, persisting over time in interlinked patterns. While 'practice-arrangement nexuses' (Schatzki, 2010a: 130) or 'bundles' (Schatzki, 2012) are not dissimilar from Shove et al. 's (2012) notion of practices (Schatzki, forthcoming), 7. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 64 Context: #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES Matching excerpt #SU4DRD: To develop an account of how practices vary, I draw upon a range of previous writing. For contemporary theories of practice, as developed by authors such as Giddens, Bourdieu, Schatzki, Shove and Reckwitz, ‘the social is a field of embodied, materially interwoven practices’ (Schatzki, 2001a: 3) that is ‘ordered across space and time’ (Giddens, 1984: 2). Multiple practices come together as a nexus with diverse links and relationships that contribute to the production of variation within the social field or plane. Some research traditions resist the move to name and codify practices within this field – as in actor network theory’s hesitancy to use summary categories outside the specific empirical contexts in which phenomena have been observed and enacted. However, I follow Schatzki (1996; 2002), Shove (Shove et al. , 2012) and Reckwitz in identifying and discussing specific practices – Praktiken (Reckwitz, 2002b: 249) – that can be recognised as patterns created through the bringing together of a set of activities, materials, understandings and skills. Links and relationships therefore exist between both the components within a practice and between practices themselves. 8. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 195 Context: #5CGWLY HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND 'GENERAL UNDERSTANDINGS'? #3GLKAJ Introduction Matching excerpt #YULEJL: Practice theory is increasingly prominent in social scientific analysis. Hence, its virtues and its defects are being subjected to greater scrutiny. As part of that exercise, we examine the conceptualisation of widespread cultural understandings in the social scientific use of practice theory. Schatzki's (1996; 2002) schema of practice components has proved generative, particularly as adapted by Warde (2005) and Shove et al. (2012). However, virtually no attention has been paid to Schatzki's (2002) concept of 'general understandings', which is one potentially relevant instrument to address this challenge. 1 In The site of the social , Schatzki (2002) introduces the category of general understandings into his schema of components of practice, an addition to his earlier tripartite model of 'practical understandings', 'rules' and 'teleoaffective structures' (1996). In this chapter, we seek to open up issues posed by general understandings as a category within a schema of generic practice components. The concept of general understandings promises to deal with broad cultural conceptions which transcend the boundaries between 'integrative practices' (Schatzki, 2002). Approximate matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #ULSUAX Conclusion Score: 0.499 Related paragraph #2MV3XY: Schatzki’s site ontology 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Score: 0.499 Related paragraph #4364QB: Schatzki’s site ontology 3. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 50 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #ASYK8A 2.2 A Practice-theoretical Approach to Consumption #F8J2JD 2.2.2 Tenets of practice-theoretical ontology #KGFTXJ Unit of analysis #Z2FUGL 2. Theoretical perspectives Score: 0.589 Related excerpt #EDT6KV: (Schatzki 2005, 480) 4. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 57 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #ASYK8A 2.2 A Practice-theoretical Approach to Consumption #FKB7N6 2.2.3 Types of practices #3Y3QX4 Interpersonal practices Score: 0.572 Related excerpt #A7UHUT: (Schatzki 2005, 472) 5. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 44 Context: #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE #JWCJBK Introduction #57NT24 Material-spatial qualities5 Score: 0.576 Related excerpt #BLBQBG: (Schatzki, 2010b: 130) 6. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 115 Context: #RYNGP9 IS SMALL THE ONLY BEAUTIFUL? #NYECJK Three theory method packages through which to study large-scale phenomena from a practice-based perspective #SFYGWW Large-scale phenomena as a fabric of interconnected practices: from metaphor to method Score: 0.543 Related excerpt #WF6NML: (Schatzki, 2011: 8) 7. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 138 Context: #GX3BZC SAYINGS, TEXTS AND DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS Score: 0.504 Related excerpt #X2XFFB: Theodore Schatzki 8. Source: Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (#VKBZ23), Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 5 Context: #T3ERFF SOCIAL PRACTICES Score: 0.551 Related excerpt #ZR4WHZ: Schatzki, Theodore R. ### 30. Assistant Your dizziness is well-founded — the word is genuinely overloaded, and even Bohlin and Appelgren admit it. In their own conclusion they say *"the analytical and theoretical affordances of the concept of circulation need to be refined and clarified"* and observe that it's "good to think with" precisely because of its elasticity (#KK94LL). That elasticity is doing real work in your literature, but it also means readers — including you, at 11pm — get vertigo. Let me sort out what "circulation" is actually doing in the corpus you're drawing on. There are at least four registers, and they're not the same thing. ## The four "circulations" **1. Anthropological circulation (Bohlin, Appelgren, Cherrier, Isenhour & Reno, all the way back to Mauss/Malinowski/Appadurai/Kopytoff).** Things move between people, and the movement is socially and culturally generative. Objects acquire biographies; circulation "does things to people and objects" (#Y6XUMS). The key claim is that circulation is not just transport but a transformative process — second-hand things become a distinct *kind* of thing because they are things-in-motion. Bohlin's "serial care" (#R453P2) belongs here. This is the register closest to your ethnographic material. **2. Circular economy / circular consumption (policy, sustainability, Hobson, much of the EU and Latvian policy talk).** "Circular" as opposed to "linear" — the loop, the closing of material flows, recycling, reuse, repair as policy goals. This register is *normative* and *systemic*: circulation is something the economy ought to do more of. Your draft mostly engages with this critically, especially via Hobson on consumption work and "social circularities" (which is itself a bridge term — Hobson uses *social circularities* to drag the policy concept back toward the relational labour register). **3. Practice-theoretical circulation of elements (Shove, Pantzar and Watson; Welch and Warde).** Here circulation is what *practice elements* do — meanings, materials, and competences travel between practices, get recombined, sometimes form new practices. *"Practices come into being and are transformed through the circulation and recombination of elements"* (#YFRLU6). This is technical Shovean vocabulary, and it's part of why your homology argument lands: in this register, "circulation" already refers to element-traffic, not object-traffic. **4. The unmarked, idiomatic circulation.** Just "things moving around." Used loosely. Nicolini cheerfully refers to "practice theories now in circulation" (#MPFAVR) — meaning, practice theories that are currently being talked about. Same word, completely different referent. The literature isn't always disciplined about which one it means. ## Where this leaves your draft Your usage is mostly **register 1 (anthropological)** with traces of **register 3 (practice-theoretical)** and a polite distance from **register 2 (circular economy)** — you cite it but you're not arguing within it. That's a defensible position, but it's currently implicit. A reader could reasonably ask which "circulation" you mean. Three options for handling this: **(a) The disciplined option:** add a short paragraph in the theory chapter — maybe in #MUKRGA "A note on terms" since you already have such a note — disambiguating. Something like: *"I use 'circulation' primarily in the anthropological sense developed by Bohlin and Appelgren (2015) — the socially and materially generative movement of objects between people — rather than in the policy sense of 'circular economy' or the strict Shovean sense of the recombination of practice elements. Where the practice-theoretical sense is intended, I specify 'circulation of practice elements.'"* **(b) The strategic option (probably better for you):** lean into the polysemy as a feature, since your homology argument *depends* on circulation meaning both things at once. Brīvbode is interesting precisely because object-circulation and practice-element-circulation are happening at the same site, in the same gesture. So instead of disambiguating away the overlap, you make it explicit: the word "circulation" lets you hold the two registers together, but you note that you are doing so deliberately, and you keep "circular economy" at arm's length. **(c) The minimal option:** add a footnote acknowledging the term is polysemous, citing Bohlin & Appelgren's own admission, and clarifying that you are not making a circular-economy argument. This is the laziest path and probably enough to inoculate you against pedantic readers. ## A small linguistic suggestion In the chapter title **"Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation"** (#9XAKTW), the word "circulation" is doing slogan-duty — it's intuitive and pleasant but unspecified. You don't have to change it; just be aware that the word is carrying a lot. In the chapter opener (#PL9BXR), or wherever you first introduce the term in chapter 4, one sentence locating which register you mean would do a lot of work. ## And the small joke worth allowing yourself The literature is "in circulation" about circulation. You can pretty much guarantee a reader at your defence will have read at least one of these four senses and not the others. Pre-empting that with a half-page of disambiguation is a small investment with a high payoff. And then you can stop being dizzy. ### 31. User i kind of wonder if the whole intro to that chapter 4, could/should be rewritten to not say that it's examining freecycling "as a practice", but to focus on the multiplicity of practices, and how the swapshop sits at the intersection? there is like a sprawlingness to the chapter that it's trying to acknowledge but i think this makes it more actually like coherent? ### 32. Assistant Yes — and I think this is exactly the right move. The current intro paragraphs (#PL9BXR, #EKYQ3W, #XYAHKP, #L252MY) actually fight the chapter they're introducing. The chapter's own *section titles* signal pluralism — "plural meanings of acquisition" (#W2WRDC), "holding together incompatible orientations" (#A3X9XX) — and the conclusion (#M3VCHH) explicitly says the place is held together by plurality, not by a single practice definition. The "freecycling as a practice" frame is doing the chapter a disservice; it's a hangover from Shove that the empirical material has already outgrown. Here's a rewrite to consider — four short paragraphs to replace #PL9BXR through #L252MY: --- Brīvbode does not host a single, neatly bounded practice. On any given day, the swapshop is the meeting place of a number of different doings, brought there by different participants for different reasons. People arrive having performed household sorting and divestment; they encounter and sometimes participate in others' secondhand acquisition; and they leave again having performed something that variously resembles gifting, gleaning, charity, sufficiency, resale, environmental commitment, or simply visiting a familiar place. This chapter takes that multiplicity seriously rather than collapsing it into a single named practice called "freecycling." Following the framing developed in chapter 2, I treat Brīvbode as a site in Schatzki's sense — a constitutive milieu where multiple practices and a particular material arrangement hold together. The work of this chapter is to trace which practices are gathered there, how they contribute their materials, meanings and competencies to the site, and how the site in turn reshapes them. Some are continuations of domestic routines; some emerge in the specific encounter with the swapshop; some pass through and leave again. The site is what holds them in temporary relation, not a single underlying practice they all instantiate. The chapter follows the trajectory of things and people through Brīvbode. I begin with the incoming flow — the household decisions of divestment that bring things to the swapshop in the first place — and turn to the site itself to consider how its material and social arrangement copes with the constant pressure of overflow. I then move outward through acquisition: the plural meanings under which people come to take things, the moral economy through which the site distinguishes itself from charity, the new attachments and detachments that the absence of price requires, and finally the question of what kind of sustainability practice — or non-practice — Brīvbode belongs to. Across these sections I sustain the view that Brīvbode is held together less by a single definition of what is happening at it than by a moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist. The chapter therefore does not arrive at a clean determination of "what kind of practice" freecycling is, because the site itself has not arrived at one. What it does arrive at is a clearer picture of the configuration of practices the site brings into productive friction. The labour that keeps that configuration from disintegrating — the work that has to happen for the friction to remain productive rather than collapse — is the subject of chapter 5. --- ## What this change implies elsewhere A few small downstream consequences if you take this route: - **Chapter title.** "Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation" (#9XAKTW) becomes inconsistent. Easiest fix: *"Brīvbode as a Site of Circulation"*. Same rhythm, same scope, doesn't fight the new intro. - **Section #QP7HMF "Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation"** is fine as-is — "competencies of circulation" reads now as competencies that the *site* requires across multiple practices, rather than as the competencies of one bounded practice. - **The conclusion (#A3X9XX, especially #M3VCHH and #MHM9Q5)** is already aligned with this framing — you don't need to change it. In fact, the new intro retroactively makes the conclusion read as the chapter's natural arrival point rather than as a partial retreat from the opening claim. - **Section openers** are worth a quick scan to see if any echo the singular-practice framing of the old intro. I haven't reread them all, but it's a small audit job. Want me to tag #PL9BXR, #EKYQ3W, #XYAHKP, and #L252MY as `needs_revision` so you have them flagged when you come back to it? ### 33. User could you read through that chapter, and maybe search through the 'spreadsheet' or the interviews or however that's loaded here, and talk to me about specific ways to see distinct practices that meet in this site? ### 34. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "9XAKTW" ], "expand": true } ``` #### Tool call: `list_documents` ```json {} ``` ### 35. Tool result: read THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation PARAGRAPH #PL9BXR This chapter examines freecycling as a practice constituted by a physical venue and the materials flowing through it, the meanings that recruit and retain participants, and the competencies that order the exchange. Throughout the chapter I move between analysis of freecycling as practice-entity and as performance, especially attending to moments of friction and tension where the two pull against each other. PARAGRAPH #EKYQ3W Following the trajectory of things moving through Brīvbode, I trace the incoming flow of things into Brīvbode, starting with the decisions of divestment in the households of participants. I look at how Brīvbode is positioned among possible routes of divestment, and turn to the site itself to see how its material elements sustain the practice of circulation, as well as how the competencies and norms at play let the swapshop cope with the constant pressure of overflow. PARAGRAPH #XYAHKP Turning towards the acquisition side, I show how the value and usefulness of Brīvbode is experienced through a plurality of meanings, and how participants negotiate between conceptions of charity and exchange. I also examine how the absence of price reshapes participants’ attachment to objects, and the competencies of letting go that the practice both requires and cultivates. Finally I consider the range of participant orientations towards freecycling as a practice of sustainability. PARAGRAPH #L252MY Across the chapter, I sustain the view that the character of Brīvbode as a non-monetary site of exchange is held together less by a single definition than by the moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist. SECTION #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home PARAGRAPH #5XUPCJ The material outcome of one practice present in Brīvbode (domestic divestment: things arrive) is a direct resource for another (sequential acquisition: things are taken), sustaining the circularity between different households and the freeshop. Instead of starting at the “shop”, freecycling in Brīvbode can be viewed as starting with the outward flow of things no longer needed or wanted in the household and the question of what to do with them. The practice of managing this flow (what Počinkova et al. (2023) call voluntary disposal) is what brings most givers to Brīvbode. The swapshop offers them an opportunity for circulating materials as well as a way of managing attachment and detachment from things. Brīvbode is one node in the available infrastructure of divestment, and is distinguished from others by what it means to route things through it. PARAGRAPH #CLU5VP Noting how meanings migrate across practices, Shove et al. (2012) mention how thrift, for example, is no longer expressed 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. PARAGRAPH #TYTN9E The ideal encouraged by the organisers in Brīvbode is for participants to both give and take, yet the two roles do not always recruit the same carriers or sustain participation through the same meanings. Giving in Brīvbode is typically more structured by the motives of givers rather than by the needs of the receivers. Giving contributes to a stock of the swapshop and is shaped by the givers’ assessments of their sense of responsibility toward still-usable objects (too good to throw away), hopes for things finding new trajectories with other carriers, and their capacity to manage the work of getting rid of things well. The practice is donor-driven, and things arriving reflect more the rhythms and pressures of household life, and coordination with receivers’ needs is only indirect. PARAGRAPH #WEBXCF 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. PARAGRAPH #AB93FC 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. PARAGRAPH #7Y7J2Z 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. PARAGRAPH #CWZ4L2 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." PARAGRAPH #V83RLN 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. Divesting well and finding a route that feels appropriate to the object's remaining value is itself a practice with normative dimensions: there are right and wrong ways to let things go, and Brīvbode offers one of the right ways. PARAGRAPH #PQV5PN 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. PARAGRAPH #7ZXWJU In absence of a specific receiver, while trying to negotiate the appropriate value and quality standards for the items circulated, givers construct a figure of a receiver, a meaning which shapes the practice 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. PARAGRAPH #YNY54V 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. PARAGRAPH #MS53CN 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. PARAGRAPH #796PVP 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. PARAGRAPH #HN8W7V 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. PARAGRAPH #5GWZER Yet unpredictability of supply works both ways – e.g. the same giver who took extra effort to send Brīvbode a parcel with stained old plates that raised volunteer questions about the balance of invested energy for handling it, divested a bag full of colourful folk-style knitted mittens another time – laid out on the table, those attracted many visitors’ attention with shared beauty. This uncertainty of supply is itself part of what sustains participant engagement with the practice through meanings of “serendipity” and magic moments of unexpected “good catch”. PARAGRAPH #4G43HR 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. PARAGRAPH #9CFEH4 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. SECTION #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow PARAGRAPH #2PU5ZY 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." PARAGRAPH #X8RDCG 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. PARAGRAPH #SUZYLN 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. PARAGRAPH #RQ8CCN 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. PARAGRAPH #LHLZ8Y 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 availability of affordable rental space, especially in high density urban areas. Tan and Yeoh (2024) note how, because of this reason, organisers of Singapore markets must bin or redistribute excess items after every event. They identify availability of rental and storage space as one of the main pre-requisites for functioning freecycling initiatives – thus it is important to note how regular operation in the same physical venue constitutes the practice of freecycling, as it becomes a stable and recurring weekly infrastructure for participants. This enables visitors to sustain a regular visiting rhythm through which, for many of them, freecycling becomes genuinely embedded in everyday life. PARAGRAPH #KMD7AJ 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, signifying that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. "The emptier the shelves, the more people find," she notes. A different aesthetic displaying abundance of things on offer and decorating with plushies appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements hold competing views about which meanings the practice of freecycling should enact. Material and meaning elements of the practice are not settled but are actively contested through performance. PARAGRAPH #CL5CS8 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. PARAGRAPH #WW8YUW 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. PARAGRAPH #2TPNCM 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." PARAGRAPH #3USBHB 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. PARAGRAPH #PNCAWA 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 practice had recruited carriers so effectively that the site’s closure did not interrupt the flow. PARAGRAPH #SFAYYS The things are made visible by being put in the shop. It makes the material overflow more visible – there is no “away” to throw your things. SECTION #QP7HMF Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation PARAGRAPH #TDQ4JL 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. PARAGRAPH #BCDC5C 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. PARAGRAPH #2U6CTU 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. PARAGRAPH #F9CK8T 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. PARAGRAPH #BZ6FJC 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. PARAGRAPH #Y7K4KZ 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. PARAGRAPH #7CR75E 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. PARAGRAPH #CUBS5Q "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. PARAGRAPH #MQPMT2 Competencies of Circulation PARAGRAPH #76T3WR The competencies that sustain freecycling 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. 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. PARAGRAPH #EXTCGS 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. PARAGRAPH #73DSQT On the divesting side, the practice expects items to arrive clean and in reasonable condition, requiring washing, stain-checking, and sometimes minor repair, though 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 itself negotiated through the practice. PARAGRAPH #J4CQAN “on material literacy, meaning the skills and knowledge about different materials, how durable they are and with what treatment they last longest. This includes knowledge about appropriate washing, storing (Figures 2 and 3) and other care techniques like using a lint shaver or an iron.” SECTION #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange PARAGRAPH #QU37KZ Practices have normative meanings – understandings upheld about what correct participation looks like, what the practice is for, and who belongs in it. In Brīvbode, normative work is done by organisers to uphold the meaning of the freecycling as an exchange as opposed to a charity. This framing is a normative aspiration – a claim about who belongs and on what terms, actively maintained against pressure from resellers and heavy-takers. The normative aspiration is held together by a moral vocabulary of equality and reciprocity – the norm that participants bring something or at least contribute in kind or offer their help at the shop is part of what defines active participation in the practice rather than use of a service. This positioning work is felt as particularly needed by organisers also because Brīvbode is located in the neighbourhood of Gaiziņš night shelter. PARAGRAPH #KBESND 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.”” PARAGRAPH #T8P86W 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. PARAGRAPH #UFJ4GC 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. PARAGRAPH #7FPBUS 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." PARAGRAPH #QKY57B 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. PARAGRAPH #ERMRTL 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. SECTION #7Z8WUY Letting Go: Attachment Without Price PARAGRAPH #GL6QPX 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. PARAGRAPH #Q9UXGA 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. PARAGRAPH #PYZ6UH 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. PARAGRAPH #34Z7TB 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." PARAGRAPH #VXG4LU 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. PARAGRAPH #5NWUSK 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. PARAGRAPH #KM4KFK (Sometimes the relation to the shop is a source for jokes: “We have special mega discounts, 100 % – only today and tomorrow!”) PARAGRAPH #F6TNUS The self-management work PARAGRAPH #7397K7 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. PARAGRAPH #PYSU33 (moral economies of access and restraint) PARAGRAPH #9XUDV9 "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. PARAGRAPH #QCXR6D 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.] PARAGRAPH #Z2Y4K8 "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. PARAGRAPH #AB5XLD "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. PARAGRAPH #LG8X4N "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. PARAGRAPH #WABKA8 Brīvbode as material infrastructure enabling the practice of letting go. The freeshop does not just receive things; it creates conditions that make divestment possible for people who otherwise could not do it. This is the role of material arrangement in sustaining practice. PARAGRAPH #35KR5F the practice of divestment requires competencies that include emotional regulation and the capacity to detach from objects. Māra is developing these competencies deliberately. SECTION #W2WRDC What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition PARAGRAPH #5L3QYB Taking things in Brīvbode is sustained by a variety of meanings that do not need to be shared or mutually coherent across practitioners. The heterogeneity of meanings allows the practice to recruit across a wide and socially diverse public. The following section examines the main meaning clusters and what each reveals about how the practice recruits and retains its carriers – what do people experience as useful and rewarding when they opt to take things in Brīvbode. PARAGRAPH #54GE84 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. PARAGRAPH #NMQ6KB 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. PARAGRAPH #N2JHPC 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." PARAGRAPH #D4H3PB 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. PARAGRAPH #VGRDGV 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. PARAGRAPH #RQ88U2 While alternative, these meanings simultaneously overlap with some of the meanings present in capitalist consumption – PARAGRAPH #86WW2X Alongside the meanings of novelty, originality and access is the meaning of class related stigma, and its presence significantly affects the practice’s recruitability. 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 freecycling as normalized exchange practice for people of all walks of life. While actively and regularly using Brīvbode and also praising the things she has managed to acquire as high quality and aesthetically pleasing, nevertheless, 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. PARAGRAPH #ZEVQDB 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.” PARAGRAPH #Z4WUR2 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. PARAGRAPH #MD2XMJ 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”. SECTION #GTJY22 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability? PARAGRAPH #T6FW9N 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 orientation is present in Brīvbode and practically expressed through organising photo shoots and parties, encouraging playfulness with clothing. PARAGRAPH #LUDRGT 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 meaning-work. The practice has stabilized to the point where the question of what it means has receded behind the doing. PARAGRAPH #M9983A 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) describe as quiet sustainability: practices that produce sustainable outcomes without requiring their practitioners to hold or articulate sustainability as a motivation. PARAGRAPH #CX2SM8 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. PARAGRAPH #78HBEQ 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. PARAGRAPH #P6X2DJ 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 contend that quiet sustainability is defined by 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. Cultures of sharing, repairing, gifting and bartering characterise quiet sustainability” (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. [..] PARAGRAPH #FLSHWG 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, however, what practitioners say about why they do what they do is only one element of practice and “doings” hold the centre. PARAGRAPH #SY28Z3 (Lifestyles of Enough) “Finally, the meanings attached to sufficiency-oriented consumption practices go way beyond altruistic motives like environmental concern. As a study by Kropfeld et al. (2018) showed, environmentally concerned consumers (with more altruistic motives) have a higher environmental impact than voluntary simplifiers (with more self-related motives). Personal or egocentric motives, therefore, can lead to sufficiency-oriented behavior, as the example for sharing services from this review showed. This is in line with Sandberg’s (2021) findings on sufficiency practices related to miscellaneous consumption, as she connects a reduction of consumption of various products (incl. clothing) to anti-consumption lifestyles such as voluntary simplicity or frugality. PARAGRAPH #JDEYZH Quiet sustainability – sustainable practices without added sustainability meaning. PARAGRAPH #Q9T2SN what matters in sustainability? e.g. people gather egg cartons because it is easy, but issues that are more impactful and require more resources are more difficult to enact. PARAGRAPH #8B2Y8N 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. PARAGRAPH #VFPYU2 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. PARAGRAPH #V445EY 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. PARAGRAPH #FV3V4W 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.] SECTION #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations PARAGRAPH #M3VCHH Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space. Givers come to resolve the moral weight of unwanted things, the site’s permanence and visibility offer a trusted route for it. Takers come for dignity, experimentation, craft materials, social contact or simple convenience. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogenous orientations together, as it is actively maintained against the pressure of resellers, heavy takers and people looking for charity, yet flexible enough to accommodate them when the alternative is overflow. PARAGRAPH #4V448P Sustainability can be an outcome without it being a requirement and a conscious orientation for practitioners. The practice recruits and retains carriers through meanings that also have little to do with environmental concern and yet the circulation it enables has sustainable dimensions that persist regardless of how participants frame their involvement. PARAGRAPH #MHM9Q5 This does not resolve the tension running through the chapter of Brīvbode functioning simultaneously as a moral circularity infrastructure embodying an alternative value regime of exchange and responsible material life – and as a low threshold overflow channel that absorbs the surplus generated by the consumption patterns it aspires to counter. This tension just reflects the observed dynamic of how sustainable practices are embedded in contemporary life. ### 36. 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Schatzki | 253 pp. | doi:10.4324/9780203977453 - #RCRP8Z The World of Goods: Towards an anthropology of consumption - 1996 | Baron Isherwood, Mary Douglas | 198 pp. - #BX2YWY Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically - 2007 | Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, Sari Wastell | 248 pp. - #8YF7LY Thrift and its Paradoxes: From Domestic to Political Economy - 2022 | Catherine Alexander, Daniel Sosna | 232 pp. | doi:10.3167/9781800734623 - #3N7TTE Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture - 2009 | Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk | 251 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781474215862 Book chapters (12) - #TNE9JN Habits and Their Creatures - 2012 | Elizabeth Shove | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 100-112 | 13 pp. - #EVCWDH Introduction. Storing and storying the serendipity of objects - 2013 | Patrick Laviolette | Things in Culture, Culture in Things | Approaches to Culture Theory | pp. 13-33 | 11 pp. - #PB2Z6X Introduction: commodities and the politics of value [cited] - 1986 | Arjun Appadurai | The Social Life of Things | Cambridge University Press | pp. 3-63 | 31 pp. | doi:10.1017/CBO9780511819582.003 - #WMSENQ Sustainable consumption as a systemic challenge: inter- and transdisciplinary research and research questions - 2015 | Philip J. Vergragt, Sylvia Lorek | Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption | Edward Elgar Publishing | pp. 19-31 | 14 pp. | doi:10.4337/9781783471270.00008 - #V4V7XC Sustainable Consumption, Behaviour Change Policies and Theories of Practice [cited] - 2012 | Andrew McMeekin, Dale Southerton, David Evans | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 113-129 | 17 pp. - #BZ63DX Sustainable practices: social theory and climate change - 2013 | Elizabeth Shove, Nicola Spurling | Sustainable Practices | Routledge | pp. 17-30 | 22 pp. | doi:10.4324/9780203071052-6 - #Y3CFPX The Assembling of Circular Consumption: A sociomaterial practice approach - 2023 | Christian Fuentes, Elina Närvänen, Nina Mesiranta | The Routledge Handbook of Catalysts for a Sustainable Circular Economy | Routledge | pp. 535-549 | 15 pp. | doi:10.4324/9781003267492-30 - #9DHD6K The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process - 1986 | Igor Kopytoff | The Social Life of Things | Cambridge University Press | pp. 64-92 | 15 pp. | doi:10.1017/CBO9780511819582.004 - #3SKV2A The cultural dimension of sustainable consumption practices: an exploration in theory and policy - 2013 | Gert Spaargaren | Innovations in Sustainable Consumption | Edward Elgar Publishing | 13 pp. | doi:10.4337/9781781001349.00022 - #72GVQ9 The Habits of Consumption [cited] - 2012 | Alan Warde, Dale Southerton | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 1-25 | 25 pp. - #KWZ2A4 Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption [cited] - 2015 | Alan Warde, Daniel Welch | Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption | Edward Elgar Publishing | pp. 84-100 | 17 pp. | doi:10.4337/9781783471270.00013 - #Q8AKGZ Towards a Better Accounting of the Roles of Body, Things and Habits in Consumption - 2012 | Harold Wilhite | The Habits of Consumption | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | pp. 87-99 | 13 pp. Doctoral theses (3) - #QRRZP2 Consumption and Practice: Unfolding Consumptive Moments and the Entanglement with Productive Aspects - 2013 | Benjamin Julien Hartmann | 157 pp. - #ZC3PHV Patchworks of Care: Ethics and Practice of Care in the Organic Food Movement in Latvia - 2020 | Agnese Bankovska | 234 pp. - #8EVNK8 The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings - 2025 | Réka Tölg | 138 pp. Reports (1) - #XBPXDL Inconspicuous consumption: the sociology of consumption and the environment - 1998 | Alan Warde, Elizabeth Shove | 17 pp. Spreadsheet (1) - #XGCWS4 Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet ### 37. Assistant Good — let me see what additional empirical practices appear in the coded material that may not have made it into the chapter yet, and then organise. #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "XGCWS4", "limit": 15, "query": "practice everyday routine household" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "XGCWS4", "limit": 10, "query": "craft repair sewing making" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "XGCWS4", "limit": 10, "query": "gift family give friend" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "XGCWS4", "limit": 10, "query": "socializing chatting time visit" } ``` ### 38. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 1193 | Disposal, flow of goods, intense circulation Matching coded excerpt #8YEXY4: Meklēju, ko vest uz Brīvbodi. Ļoti gribu no kaut kā atbrīvoties. Vai mājās var paturēt bojātas lietas? Ieplīsušas? Lasu, ka life cycle analysis for household items must include “energy use for storage” — jā, ieskaitot mentālo enerģiju… 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 496 | Fun, creativity, novelty, sustainability, guilt, shame, Scandinavian etc Matching coded excerpt #9V26MJ: Jūtu, ka nekontrolēju savu dzīves telpu. Vai mana vēlme “rūpēties par vidi” ir neirotiska? Meklēju, ko vest uz Brīvbodi. Ļoti gribu no kaut kā atbrīvoties. Vai mājās var paturēt bojātas lietas? Ieplīsušas? Lasu, ka life cycle analysis for household items must include “energy use for storage” — jā, ieskaitot mentālo enerģiju… ### 39. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 750 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Matching coded excerpt #MWM5A7: S2: Jā, sākumā es par Brīvbodi uzzināju caur Repair Cafe. Tātad sākumā Repair Cafe un Brīvbode notika atsevišķi. Repair Cafe bija Kaņepes Kultūras centrā. Tad uznāca Covid, uz kādu brīdi nekas nenotika, un tad pēc tam, pēc Covid, Repair Cafe ar Brīvbodi nolēma, ka būs vienā vietā. Kas ir ļoti loģisks lēmums, manuprāt. Jo, nu, arī reizēm Brīvbodē ir lietas, kuras vajag mazliet pielabot, vai reizēm Repair Cafe atnes lietas, kurām trūkst materiālu, tad aiziet uz Brīvbodi un paņemt. Nu, jā, nu, tā es tur esmu vismaz reizi mēnesī, reizēm biežāk. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 248 | Consumption practices Matching coded excerpt #JVUQGU: S2: Es lielākoties apvienoju, bet ir bijušas arī kaut kādas reizes, kad ārpus. Nu, kad, piemēram, es gribu kaut kādu ziedojumu aizvest, vai arī, ka man kaut ko pašai vajag atrast, nu, un tad, teiksim, es eju kaut kādu apli tur Brīvbode, Otrā elpa, Humana vai vēl kaut kas. Visbiežāk kopā ar Repair Cafe, jā. 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 536 | Fun, creativity, novelty, sustainability, guilt, shame, Scandinavian etc Matching coded excerpt #7X98KA: tu esi arī minējusi, ka laiku pa laikam jūs intervē, ka ir bijusi kaut kāda dalība tajos pētījumos arī kā par tādu aprites piemēru. Nu, cik tu pati to redzi tādā griezumā, tādā aspektā vai arī tas ir jau otršķirīgi... S2: Tas ir palicis laikam kaut kādā ziņā nedaudz otršķirīgi. Pārējais ir tik intensīvi, ka... Nē, tāpēc man patīk, pieņemsim, ka ir tāda Repair Cafe, mēs sadarbojamies. Ka tas tev ļauj bišķiņ pašķaidīt to ikdienas sociālo ar to zaļāko, to domāšanu. 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 802 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Matching coded excerpt #DCFACM: 5.05. Brīvbodes jauno telpu atklāšanas svētki. Ārā notiek augu maiņa un Repair Cafe, bet līdz turienei nemaz netiekam (esmu ar Jāzepu). Ieradāmies ap 14.30, bijām Brīvbodē ap 1,5 h. Sākums bija jau no 12, komandai jau no 10, bet mēs netikām agrāk ārā no mājas – Mīkaels ap 10 izgāja pabūt viens, ap 12 bija mājās, bet es vēl cepu kūciņu ziedojumiem utt. Mājās cepu cepumus – vegāniskus, ar kaņepēm un šokolādes gabaliņiem – un bezpiena kūku ar kokosriekstu pienu un mellenēm. Izmantoju tofu, ko vajadzēja izlietot termiņa dēļ. Priecājos, ka Jāzepam ļoti garšoja kūka un ka Gundega izteicās, ka beidzot ir kas tāds, ko viņa arī var ēst (jo ēd vegāniski). 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 965 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Matching coded excerpt #9SXFUC: S2: Nu, ar citiem apmeklētājiem tikai tik daudz, cik tāda draudzīga sasmaidīšanās, bet, kad es tur esmu repair cafe sakarā, tad ir viena mamma ar vienu dēlu, kas ir, man liekas, tur katru reizi. Un tas dēls ir tāds ļoti aktīvs, un viņš grib šūt, un tad vienreiz viņš gribēja šūt sev apmetni. Tad mēs izdomājām, kā mēs tur piešūsim lenti, un viņš pats ar viņu piešuva. Tas bija superīgi Jā, ir tādi... 00:47:36 - 00:49:36 S2: Tādi regulārie apmeklētāji, bet, nu, tā, ka man ar viņiem būtu tādas tiešām attiecības, tā es neteiktu, bet tā, ka mēs tur pazīstamies, otru atpazīstam viens otra seju un sasmaidamies, tādas ir, jā. 6. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 464 | Lietu stāsti – kas un kam noderējis, kā sagādājis prieku, kas atrasts Matching coded excerpt #78TEBH: S2: Nu, labi, 10 bija tāds random skaitlis, bet es atceros, es kaut kad aizgāju, un tas vēl bija iepriekšējā uzrāvienā, kad es strādāju skolā, es, nu, pirms 1. septembra aizgāju uz brīvbodi, man bija tāds, man vajag klasiskas bikses. Tad es atradu divas klasiskas bikses. Tad tās es vilku uz skolu. Tad es no turienes esmu ņēmusi, nu, jā, to akrila džemperi, ko es pieminēju, to gan es īstenībā velku nepietiekami bieži, man liekas, lai viņš tiešām attaisnotu savu eksistenci. Tad ir bijusi kaut kāda reize, kad es esmu Repair Cafe, un mēs esam ārā, ir kaut kāds aprīlis vai marts, un ir diezgan vēsi, un es vienkārši ieeju brīvbodē, un es paņemu kaut kādu vestīti, un to es īstenībā, kaut kā sagadījās, ka ir ļoti laba krāsa un ļoti labi piestāv citām lietām, kas man ir, un es viņu tiešām velku, es viņu tiešām bieži velku. 00:31:44 - 00:33:44 S2: Un tad interesanta lieta, kas, man liekas, ir forši, ka var izmēģināt kaut kādus stilus par brīvu. Es paņēmu jaciņu, kura pēc stila laikam saucās bomber jacket. Un es tādu pati nekad nebūtu pirkusi. Man ir kaut kāda aizture pret to, kas ir street style. Man liekas, ka tas ir tajā kategorijā, es tā par sevi nejūtos, man liekas, man nepiestāv, es viņu nevelku. Nu, labi, bet es tā kā uzvelku, man patīk rakstiņš, man patīk krāsa, un tagad tā man ir viena no visbiežāk valkātajām lietām. Es viņu arī velku uz darbu. Jo man vienkārši ir vienas bikses līdzīgā krāsā, nu, tā kā klasiskas bikses un tā bomber jaciņa. Un reāli pārsteidzoši. Bet visvairāk valkātie ir, jā, šie zābaki, kas man šodien arī ir. Bet vispār viņi jāizved pie kurpnieka, jo viņiem ir caurums parādījies zolē. Es mēģināju aizlīmēt, bet izrādās, ka zole nav lieta, ko var baigi aizlīmēt, jo viņa tāpatās, nu, ar berzi izdilst. Approximate matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 201 | Consumption practices Score: 0.379 Related coded excerpt #JZEB5D: Arī tad, kad man pēc tam tas nav vajadzīgs, un es ļoti daudz mēdzu viskaut ko izgatavot, sākot ar pītiem, sietiem, šūtiem tepiķiem, visādām izšūšanām. Un bieži vien, kad es redzu kādu lietu, es to redzu nevis vienkārši kā tikai gatavu apģērbu, bet, piemēram, arī kā materiālu, kā audumi, pērlītes, rāvējslēdzēji un tāda skumjā realitāte, ka tagad šobrīd ir lētāk nopirkt lietotu, lietotas džinsas, izgriezt ārā rāvējslēdzēju, nekā nopirkt jaunu rāvējslēdzēju. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #RXMNYT Agnese Z. Agnese Z., row 1064 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Score: 0.373 Related coded excerpt #9L22QA: S2: Un man liekas, ka jā, ja to var salabot, tad tas ir jālabo. S2: Apģērbus arī, nu, teiksim, ja bērnam ir kaut kāds tur... 00:37:41 - 00:39:41 S2: ...caurumiņš izplīsis kaut kur un pati tā pārējā visa lieta ir laba, tad es aizlāpu. S2: Nu, ja vien tas nav kaut kas pavisam šausmīgs. S2: Mhm. S2: Jā, nu, protams, pogas arī tiek šūtas klāt un tā tālāk. S2: Nu jā, un arī kaut kādas tehniskās lietas, nu tā kā... S2: Meiteņu tētis, viņš jau nu viss kaut ko remontē. S2: Nu tā kā tagad, tagad varbūt man nav sanācis viņam neko prasīt tādu, bet nu jā, viss kaut ko viņš, viņš māk saremontēt jebko, un līdz ar to tad tā kā arī tāda laba lieta, ka var tā izdarīt. 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 88 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Score: 0.369 Related coded excerpt #R5L3SK: S2: Tie ir retro audumi, padomju audumi. Piemēram, no vieniem es šobrīd šūšanas skolā šuju bikses, un viņš ir tāds riktīgi labs, tāds blīva vilna, viņas būs siltas, viņas būs smukas. Nu, bet tur ir vēl, nu, tur ir kādi, es nezinu, 10 dažādi audumi, bet vēl ir visādi apģērbi, kuriem man patīk materiāls, un es vienkārši no viena apģērba gribu uztaisīt citu apģērbu, bet tas jau neaizņem mazāk laika viņu pārtaisīt. Tas aizņem, iespējams, tikpat vai pat vairāk. Jā, tad tos es arī gribu sākt bīdīt dzīvē. S1: Un tu mini tā kā dāvanas citiem. Ko tu gatavo dāvanās? S2: Nu, piemēram, šobrīd es adu vienas zeķītes. Tad man ir doma... S1: Tās arī ir no kaut kādas dzijas, ja? S2: Jā. Tad man ir doma, ka visvienkāršākā dāvana, nu, piemēram, draudzenēm varētu būt tās auduma matu gumijas, skrančiji 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 1075 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Score: 0.364 Related coded excerpt #PNN83S: Nē, nu, tā aktīvi es pati laboju lietas kopš es sāku studēt. Tad, kad es gāju vidusskolā, es tā... Nē, man liekas, tur bija kaut kāda viena reize, kad es gāju vidusskolā. Man bija mīļa soma, uz kuras bija kaut kādi pleķīši. Un es tur pa virsu uzšuvu krāsainas pogas, un man likās, vau, es esmu tāds malacis. Nu, jā, bet vispār jau man, nu, es teiktu, ka tas ir ģimenē – man mamma vienmēr ir šuvusi, adījusi, darījusi visas lietas. Un kaut kāda tāda ar rokām darbošanās vienmēr ir bijusi, nu, tāda normāla. Un es vienkārši pati to sāku darīt. Nē, nu, es atceros, ka ir bijuši arī kaut kādi gadījumi tur devītajā klasē uzšuvu mājturības olimpiādei kleitu, ko ļoti labi sanāca, māsa pēc tam uzvilka uz augstskolas izlaidumu. Mamma tur palīdzēja, protams. Jā. Nu, kaut kādi tādi daži izrāvieni, bet tā regulāri, nu, tā... Tas, ka man tā ir kaut kāda veida meditācija, tas ir sācies pieaugušo vecumā, nu, pēc studijām, sākot strādāt. 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 202 | Consumption practices Score: 0.348 Related coded excerpt #T5GXHP: S2: Tur vispār aizgāja tāds baigais loks, jo kā es sāku taisīt, nu, izgatavot tos tepiķus? Tāpēc, ka man, staigājot pa humpalām, bija sakrājies tik daudz apģērbu, ka es sāku domāt, kā viņu izmantot, nemetot ārā vai neziedojot tālāk, bet ko es varu darīt vēl, lai tam piešķirtu to vērtību. Es tādā veidā sāku izgatavot tos tepiķus un apgāju to loku. 6. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #H7ZZY9 Austra Austra, row 1057 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Score: 0.345 Related coded excerpt #RJXCVT: S1: Tad vairāties tā kā nest par daudz, ja? S2: Nu, protams. Kaut kādus dažus apģērba gabalus tikai paņemu. Ā, nu, tad vēl pirms tam, ka es pieprotu arī to, teiksim, skatos kleitu, ja. Nu, kā kleitu es viņu nevikšu nekad tādu nevilkšu. Varbūt viņa man konkrēti arī nederēs. Es viņu nogriežu, paliek lieliski svārki. Pat ļoti skaisti svārki iznāk. S1: Tad jums ir arī tās prasmes mazliet to... S2: Jā, protams! S1: Esat mācījusies šūšanu vai tā kā pašmācības ceļā? S2: Man mamma ļoti labi šuva šuva un māsa. Tā kā tad es varu ļoti labi to izdarīt pati. Nu, tādus vienkāršus, ja. Nu, saprast, ko darīt ar to apģērba gabalu. 7. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 47 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Score: 0.338 Related coded excerpt #GVEZVU: S2: Tas ir... gan finansiālu apsvērumu dēļ, gan tāpēc, ka es visam redzu atkārtotu pielietojumu. Arī tad, kad man pēc tam tas nav vajadzīgs, un es ļoti daudz mēdzu viskaut ko izgatavot, sākot ar pītiem, sietiem, šūtiem tepiķiem, visādām izšūšanām. Un bieži vien, kad es redzu kādu lietu, es to redzu nevis vienkārši kā tikai gatavu apģērbu, bet, piemēram, arī kā materiālu, kā audumi, pērlītes, rāvējslēdzēji un tāda skumjā realitāte, ka tagad šobrīd ir lētāk nopirkt lietotu, lietotas džinsas, izgriezt ārā rāvējslēdzēju, nekā nopirkt jaunu rāvējslēdzēju. 8. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 439 | Lietu stāsti – kas un kam noderējis, kā sagādājis prieku, kas atrasts Score: 0.338 Related coded excerpt #EAUY5V: Es tomēr tiešām paskatīšos, jo man ļoti noveicās atrast vecu, sagrieztu odu tīklu, ko es izmantoju kā pamatni izšūšanai. Tā kā pat tāda lieta, kas kādam tiešām šķita atkritumi, man tomēr izrādījās noderīga. 9. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 822 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.327 Related coded excerpt #CDEYWQ: Gundega saka, ka vienubrīd Alise mēģinājusi iekārtot šūšanas stūrīti, bet tas īsti nav izdevies, jo cilvēki ņēmuši lietas (Gundega saka “zaguši”). 10. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #NCT8BM Ita Ita, row 722 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Score: 0.32 Related coded excerpt #8WCN48: S2: Ka apģērbs tiek akurāti valkāts un akurāti lietots. Tai paaudzei bija cita apģērba vērtība, jo to apģērbu nebija tik daudz. Varbūt tie, kas šuva, tiem bija savādāk, viņi šuva sev tos apģērbus, bet tā, teiksim, un sevišķi jau nelieliem cilvēkiem bija ļoti grūti iegādāties kaut ko. ### 40. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 113 | Apmeklētāju dažādība Matching coded excerpt #5EVSTV: Divas somu anarhistes. Dažas pazīstamas sejas — Gunta aizskrien, neuzrunāju viņu. Middle Eastern looking family. Vecāks vīrs meklē sieviešu blūzes, mērīdams ar striķīti. Approximate matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #PPNZNN Agate Agate, row 909 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.346 Related coded excerpt #D4P4YT: S2: Jā, jā. Man ir sanācis, jo man draudzenei viņai, nu, es parasti, ja esmu Brīvbodē, viņa man pasaka, paņem man arī kaut ko, un pieņemsim, viņai patīk plīša mantiņas, nu, Garfield. Un es atradu ļoti smuku plīša mantiņu, un tad, jā, es viņai atdevu, nu, Garfield. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #NCT8BM Ita Ita, row 927 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.322 Related coded excerpt #468Q49: Jā, es esmu dāvinājusi gan maniem radiniekiem. Bija ļoti jauka bērnu rotaļlieta, un tad tā rotaļlieta tika uzdāvināta. Un patiesībā bija priecīgs, mazais cilvēciņš bija priecīgs. Jo tās rotaļlietas, ja viņas ir labā stāvoklī, viņām arī nav pilnīgi nekādas vainas. Tā kā jā. Un laikam arī grāmatu. Jā, laikam arī vienu grāmatu, zinot cilvēku par tēmu, par ko interesējās. Tur bija par dārzkopību laikam grāmata. S1: Un jūs pieminējāt arī to Brīvbodes... S2: Vienam tika pieminēts, otram ne. S1: Arī tā mazliet stratēģiski. S2: Jā, jo ir cilvēki, kas varbūt arī, nu, to Brīvbodi, nu, viņi varbūt teiktu, "Ā, nu, jā, nu, sazin," tā teikt. 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 89 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Score: 0.318 Related coded excerpt #5AKG73: S2: Jā. Tad man ir doma, ka visvienkāršākā dāvana, nu, piemēram, draudzenēm varētu būt tās auduma matu gumijas, skrančiji, un tad es, nu, teiksim, tiem cilvēkiem, kas man ir pietiekami tuvi, lai mēs regulāri satiktos, es domāju viņiem vienkārši pāris mēnešus iepriekš pateikt, ka, re, kur, nāk tev dzimšanas diena, es gribu tevi apdāvināt, lūdzu, atnāc 00:23:48 - 00:25:48 S2: Atnāc ciemos, un izvēlēsimies piegrieztni, un izvēlēsimies audumu, un es gribu tev kaut ko uzšūt. S1: Vai tu tā jau esi darījusi vai tā ir iecere? S2: Tā ir pagaidām iecere. Pagaidām vēl nav neviena šāda gadījuma, bet gads ir tikko sācies. S1: Ā, tad tas ir tieši šogad. 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #WEF3A2 Jana Jana, row 606 | Fun, creativity, novelty, sustainability, guilt, shame, Scandinavian etc Score: 0.276 Related coded excerpt #4DE547: S1: Manam dēlam visvairāk ir tā, ka viņš negrib, lai es kaut ko atdotu Brīvbodē. Ka viņam tas ir kaut kāds bubulis, ka atdod Brīvbodē. Vai arī, nu, kad es viņam sagādāju kaut kādas drēbes, un tad viņš, nu, tā kā viņš pat nepamēra vai kaut kā, bet viņam nepatīk. Nē, atdod Brīvbodē. 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #WEF3A2 Jana Jana, row 1303 | Disposal, flow of goods, intense circulation Score: 0.276 Related coded excerpt #ENBGTC: S1: Manam dēlam visvairāk ir tā, ka viņš negrib, lai es kaut ko atdotu Brīvbodē. Ka viņam tas ir kaut kāds bubulis, ka atdod Brīvbodē. Vai arī, nu, kad es viņam sagādāju kaut kādas drēbes, un tad viņš, nu, tā kā viņš pat nepamēra vai kaut kā, bet viņam nepatīk. Nē, atdod Brīvbodē. 6. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 920 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.269 Related coded excerpt #X7NNSU: S1: Vai tu mēdz arī citiem cilvēkiem kaut ko sagādāt? S2: Es mēdzu, jā, jo es zinu, ka tas ir kaut kas noderīgs, bet man vienkārši nav daudz tādu cilvēku, kas varētu par to priecāties. S1: Kādā ziņā? S2: Nu, kā jau es minēju, man ģimene, viņiem lielāks prieks par jaunām dārgām lietām, dažādu iemeslu dēļ, kā jau es minēju. S2: Es arī savam draugam piemeklēju lietas, kas ir otrreizēji lietoti apģērbi. Tas arī varbūt ne vienmēr viņa izvēle, bet tā arī var atrast daudz skaistākas lietas, arī labākas lietas un labāku kvalitāti. Tā kaut kā. Ne tikai man. 7. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 963 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.267 Related coded excerpt #6579VJ: un tad es, nu, teiksim, tiem cilvēkiem, kas man ir pietiekami tuvi, lai mēs regulāri satiktos, es domāju viņiem vienkārši pāris mēnešus iepriekš pateikt, ka, re, kur, nāk tev dzimšanas diena, es gribu tevi apdāvināt, lūdzu, atnāc 00:23:48 - 00:25:48 S2: Atnāc ciemos, un izvēlēsimies piegrieztni, un izvēlēsimies audumu, un es gribu tev kaut ko uzšūt. S1: Vai tu tā jau esi darījusi vai tā ir iecere? S2: Tā ir pagaidām iecere. Pagaidām vēl nav neviena šāda gadījuma, bet gads ir tikko sācies. ### 41. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 260 | Consumption practices Matching coded excerpt #9G86AX: like I've had to get some suits in my life, and I've never felt particularly good about it. S2: Like if I have to go, if I need to get a suit, I don't have time to learn about suits. S2: I don't know how to do that. S2: And like, and like I can't, I don't want to spend like huge amounts of money when I don't even know, maybe I'm just buying something stupid that costs a lot of money, but then I don't care about it. S2: And it's like, his ideal would be something like, yeah, you have to just have a budget. S2: It's like getting a car, it's like getting anything. S2: And like you should take it somewhat seriously if you need to take it seriously, and like find some real person, like a tailor, who can do it. S2: But then there's all kinds of complicated things where it's like, yeah, you can find these like... 00:29:45 - 00:31:45 S2: ...not the most expensive tailors, and then you need to meet them three times to do like the three different fittings. S2: And they will like go, they travel around to the major cities with some kind of intervals. S2: So like if I first meet him in January, like I'm not going to be able to plan this ever in my life. S2: I won't be able to like procrastinate until the last day and then go to Suit Supply and like, okay, fine, I'm going to take this. S2: But I would really like to have a truly high-quality clothes and... S2: This is the only like really nice thing... S2: I've had a few clothes that I've loved, there's always some element where they've had a very distinct feeling of, "Oh my god, what is this?" S1: Mhm. S2: And some things I have really liked, like in the open-air market, I went there and there was like a woman who made clothes from linen. S2: And she was like, "Oh," somehow in a funny way like looking at me. S2: And I tried things and like, "Hey, this is really cool, it's amazing, it's made of linen, it has some nice buttons that are a bit too big because that's cool." S2: And like, yeah, this is really nice, but then it broke immediately in some places. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 1083 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Matching coded excerpt #D33N58: S2: But also like, getting... like I've had to get some suits in my life, and I've never felt particularly good about it. S2: Like if I have to go, if I need to get a suit, I don't have time to learn about suits. S2: I don't know how to do that. S2: And like, and like I can't, I don't want to spend like huge amounts of money when I don't even know, maybe I'm just buying something stupid that costs a lot of money, but then I don't care about it. S2: And it's like, his ideal would be something like, yeah, you have to just have a budget. S2: It's like getting a car, it's like getting anything. S2: And like you should take it somewhat seriously if you need to take it seriously, and like find some real person, like a tailor, who can do it. S2: But then there's all kinds of complicated things where it's like, yeah, you can find these like... 00:29:45 - 00:31:45 S2: ...not the most expensive tailors, and then you need to meet them three times to do like the three different fittings. S2: And they will like go, they travel around to the major cities with some kind of intervals. S2: So like if I first meet him in January, like I'm not going to be able to plan this ever in my life. S2: I won't be able to like procrastinate until the last day and then go to Suit Supply and like, okay, fine, I'm going to take this. S2: But I would really like to have a truly high-quality clothes and... S2: This is the only like really nice thing... S2: I've had a few clothes that I've loved, there's always some element where they've had a very distinct feeling of, "Oh my god, what is this?" S1: Mhm. S2: And some things I have really liked, like in the open-air market, I went there and there was like a woman who made clothes from linen. S2: And she was like, "Oh," somehow in a funny way like looking at me. S2: And I tried things and like, "Hey, this is really cool, it's amazing, it's made of linen, it has some nice buttons that are a bit too big because that's cool." S2: And like, yeah, this is really nice, but then it broke immediately in some places. Approximate matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #NCT8BM Ita Ita, row 924 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.373 Related coded excerpt #2U3YN6: S2: Sanāk aprunāties, jo kādreiz jau bija tā, tagad jau telpas ir plašākas un nav... Sanāca tā, ka laikam kādu brīdi, nu, lai paspētu uz darbu, ja ver vaļā 12.00, tad ir jābūt uz 12.00. Un lai nav jāstāv rindā ilgi pārāk, bet vienalga dažreiz sanāca stāvēt. Tā kā, nu, jau kādas trīs paziņas man ir droši. Mēs neesam draudzenes, bet mēs dalāmies informācijā. Es dalos informācijā ar kultūras pasākumiem, ko var apmeklēt un līdz ar to tur mēs Facebookā jau esam drusciņ, tā teikt, padalījušās informācijā. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #E8TGY2 Laura Laura, row 906 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.369 Related coded excerpt #29TARU: S2: Jā, ja sanāk, ja ir brīvs, tad es apsveru atnākt, tā teikt iziet bišķi no mājas bišķi, arī ar cilvēkiem te parunāties. 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 250 | Consumption practices Score: 0.343 Related coded excerpt #45ZJMP: S1: Jo tev ir arī varbūt vairāk tā laika šobrīd, ja, tad attiecīgi? S2: Jā, nu, ja es strādātu pilnas slodzes darbu, tad šis nebūtu variants. Jā, jā, jā. To noteikti nē. Jā, man tagad ir vairāk laika, un tagad man tūlīt būs arī vairāk prasmju, kas jau tiek tapinātas, un man liekas, ka tas būtu forši. Man ir arī ar meitenēm sarunāts, ka, nu, tā gan nav tā kā dāvana, bet, nu, vienvārdsakot, ar divām draudzenēm ir plāns, ka mēs satiksimies, viņas atnāks pie manis ciemos, un viņām ir kaut kādi apģērbi, ko viņas nelieto kaut kādu iemeslu dēļ, un tad mēs mēģināsim viņus kaut kā pāršūt vai izdaiļot, vai kaut kā tamlīdzīgi. Tā kā arī tas mums būs laika pavadīšanas un satikšanās veids un iemesls. 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 90 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Score: 0.343 Related coded excerpt #KL86QG: S1: Jo tev ir arī varbūt vairāk tā laika šobrīd, ja, tad attiecīgi? S2: Jā, nu, ja es strādātu pilnas slodzes darbu, tad šis nebūtu variants. Jā, jā, jā. To noteikti nē. Jā, man tagad ir vairāk laika, un tagad man tūlīt būs arī vairāk prasmju, kas jau tiek tapinātas, un man liekas, ka tas būtu forši. Man ir arī ar meitenēm sarunāts, ka, nu, tā gan nav tā kā dāvana, bet, nu, vienvārdsakot, ar divām draudzenēm ir plāns, ka mēs satiksimies, viņas atnāks pie manis ciemos, un viņām ir kaut kādi apģērbi, ko viņas nelieto kaut kādu iemeslu dēļ, un tad mēs mēģināsim viņus kaut kā pāršūt vai izdaiļot, vai kaut kā tamlīdzīgi. Tā kā arī tas mums būs laika pavadīšanas un satikšanās veids un iemesls. 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #6BXDF7 Linards Linards, row 543 | Fun, creativity, novelty, sustainability, guilt, shame, Scandinavian etc Score: 0.334 Related coded excerpt #XWPLFS: S2: Nu, tagad ir jau mums nostabilizējies tas darba ritms, pienākumi. Nevienam nav vairs nekādas ambīcijas celt gaisa pilis. S2: No sākuma tad, kad bija tās domas – sociālais tīkls, sociālais centrs tur. S1: Nezinu. S2: Bija kaut kā tāda stadija, ka tām tantēm tur rīkot pasākumus tur, lai viņas tur var tusēt, iepazīties, sapazīties. S2: Kaut kāda tā pirmā ilūzija bija, ka tas tā varētu labi strādāt. Tas jau tā strādā, bet tad tu saproti, ka tev sāk kāpt uz galvas. S2: Nu, jā, man patīk, kad ir tā konkrēti, ka viss ir tā kā zināms, smuki sadalīts. Ja ir tie cilvēki, kuriem kopā sanāk, nu tur kaut ko izdarīt. S2: Savs darba stils... Jā, es neesmu tāds reizēm ļoti iejūtīgs, empātisks. 6. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #WEF3A2 Jana Jana, row 1045 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Score: 0.326 Related coded excerpt #A4T9H8: Vai arī, piemēram, nu, tu vari atnākt uz to savu pusstundiņu, nu, tā kā atnāc, paskaties, kas tev vajadzīgs, un ej projām taču. Bet ir tādi, kuri atnāk uz tiem 15.00 un līdz 19.00 viņi arī tur ir. Viņi tādi tā kā ļoti neuzkrītoši, tu viņus tā kā principā neredzi, bet tu zini, ka viņi... Tad ir tā ļoti dīvaini – kopā atnācām, kopā aizgājām. 7. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #WEF3A2 Jana Jana, row 214 | Consumption practices Score: 0.326 Related coded excerpt #CHDP8L: Vai arī, piemēram, nu, tu vari atnākt uz to savu pusstundiņu, nu, tā kā atnāc, paskaties, kas tev vajadzīgs, un ej projām taču. Bet ir tādi, kuri atnāk uz tiem 15.00 un līdz 19.00 viņi arī tur ir. Viņi tādi tā kā ļoti neuzkrītoši, tu viņus tā kā principā neredzi, bet tu zini, ka viņi... Tad ir tā ļoti dīvaini – kopā atnācām, kopā aizgājām. 8. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 867 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.322 Related coded excerpt #FHX4VD: Viens ir, jā, tas, ka vienkārši tu redzi tos cilvēkus, un ir forši viņiem arī dot kaut kādu piederību. Ir kaut kādas lietas, ko mēs pat neiedomājamies, kas notiek. Pieņemsim, tas bija pirms Covid... Mums bija dāmas, kas nāca regulāri. Kaut kādas, nezinu, tur 10, 15, 20 sievietes, kas nāca visu laiku regulāri, viņas sapazinās savā starpā, mēs pat viņām taisījām to 8. marta pasākumu ar Viku Ekstu. Man likās, ka tas viss beidzās, jo pēc Covid viņas dažas tikai nāca vai pa vienai nāca, un vairs nebija tā čupošanās. Bet pēc tam es pēc kaut kāda laika vēl uzzināju – pirms Covid viņas sāka iet reizi nedēļā ekskursijās pa Rīgu, jo viena no tām sievietēm bija arī gide. Un izrādās, ka viņas aizvien iet katru nedēļu ekskursijās. S1: Joprojām tagad? S2: Jā. Ir pagājuši trīs četri gadi, un viņas joprojām. Pagājušajā reizē viņas teica, viņas bija kaut kādas piecas, septiņas vai cik tur, piecas laikam viņas bija, nu, tās čupiņas, katru reizi viņas ir vairāk, mazāk, vienas vai otras, un tad viņas katru nedēļu aizvien iet kaut kur vai uz koncertiem. Viņas saka, viņas tagad iet uz... 9. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #EHQDCZ interview_6_Valentīna 31.05.docx interview_6_Valentīna 31.05.docx, row 910 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.321 Related coded excerpt #4J3838: S2: No sākuma nesa cilvēki laikam visu to labāko no mājām. Un tur bija ēdieni, mēs ēdām. Un tēju dzērām, un vienkārši bija... S1: Ēdāt, tēju dzērāt, tā kā iekšā? S2: Te iekšā, jā. S1: Es pati tā kā neilgi esmu, tā uz brīdi es... S2: Tad es vēl tā uzbrīnījos, kad bija tās, kas tur zemenes bija, es tā izbrīnījos, jā. Agrāk jau bija tādas visādas kūciņas un konfektes, un es pati nesu kādreiz, ja man bija vārda diena, es nesu. Nu, nu, labi bija. Un tad varēja tur pasēdēt, parunāties, aprunāties ar cilvēkiem, vispār. Un tagad drusciņ kaut kādi, varbūt tas Covids vai kā, tur drusciņ palikuši tādi. Atsvešinājušies. 10. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 871 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.321 Related coded excerpt #VRT9KH: Viņam arī atnāk kaut kādas savas draudzenītes vai tamlīdzīgi, viņam atkal ir sava ballīte bišķiņ. Nu, tā kā katrs mēs tā moderējam, lai mums tas laiks tur ir foršs un patīkams, un... Un ārpus darba laika kaut kas arī notiek. Nu, tā kā katrs... Tiek dota diezgan liela brīvība izmantot to kā resursu kaut kādam arī savam labumam. ### 42. Assistant OK — I read through chapter 4 in full and pulled threads from the coded spreadsheet. The good news is that **the multiplicity is genuinely there in your material** — much more than the current "freecycling as a practice" framing of the chapter lets show. Some of the most interesting threads are actually under-told because the singular framing doesn't have a place for them. Here's what I see. ## The practices that meet at Brīvbode I'll group them by the direction they enter the site from, with empirical anchors. ### Practices that bring things INTO Brīvbode **1. Domestic divestment / wardrobe purging.** The most-developed in the current chapter (#5XUPCJ, #WEBXCF, #CWZ4L2). Things accumulate at home and have to leave. Tied to TV decluttering scripts (Gundega), small homes (#7Y7J2Z), seasonal rhythms. **2. Life-event clearance.** Moving, renovation, downsizing, death (#AB93FC). Aiga's thirty trips for relatives' belongings (chapter 5, #Y344XY) belong here. This is a distinct practice — it has its own rhythm (intense, finite), its own emotional load, and its own ethics. **3. Network divestment / divestment-on-behalf-of-others.** People routing other people's surplus through their own visits. Marija's neighbours, Māra's five neighbours, Anna's colleagues, Madara's energy-fearing aunt. Currently mostly in chapter 5 (#3BY9GH, #Y344XY) but crucially shapes what arrives at the site. **4. Online retail surplus routing.** The participant who was told by the retailer to *donate* her returned online purchase rather than send it back (#4G43HR). This is a quietly important practice — Brīvbode is being recruited into commercial fast-fashion logistics. ### Practices that take things OUT of Brīvbode **5. Wardrobe management / dressing / self-presentation.** Marija "dressing like a princess" (#54GE84), Anna's distinctiveness/glitter dress (#NMQ6KB), Elīna's bomber jacket experiment (#N2JHPC), the cross-dresser sourcing characters (#N2JHPC). Different participants, same general practice: assembling a wardrobe. **6. Sewing / textile making as serious craft.** Genuinely under-told in the chapter. Zane sews trousers from Soviet-era wool fabrics found at Brīvbode (#R5L3SK), plans bespoke sewn gifts for friends (#5AKG73), describes sewing as a kind of meditation (#PNN83S). Marta makes rugs and woven items, partly *because* her thrifting accumulated too many clothes — "I started making rugs and went around the loop" (#T5GXHP). Austra cuts down dresses she won't wear into skirts (#RJXCVT). Anna's sewing (#NMQ6KB), Madara's rugmaking (#D4H3PB) — same cluster. This is a substantial practice with its own competencies, materials, and meanings, drawing on Brīvbode as raw-material source. **7. Repair.** This is the biggest under-told story. Zane explicitly: *"Sometimes Brīvbode has things that need a little fixing, or sometimes Repair Cafe people bring things that need materials, and they go to Brīvbode and take some. Which is a very logical decision"* (#MWM5A7). Repair Cafe and Brīvbode are physically co-located precisely because one practice's surplus is another's material input. This deserves a paragraph of its own — it's the clearest example of how Brīvbode functions as a feeder for an adjacent practice rather than as a self-contained one. **8. Material extraction / scavenging.** The button- and zipper-cutters who damage garments to get parts (#VGRDGV). Madara's "mosquito net for embroidery" (#D4H3PB). Marta cutting zippers from used jeans because new zippers cost more than secondhand jeans (#GVEZVU). The wire-offcuts woman (#HN8W7V). This is distinct from sewing-as-craft because the relationship to the object is purely instrumental — the garment is just a delivery system for components. **9. Resale.** Suspected presence of flea-market resellers; Viesturs's "forest sanitarians" reframe (#ERMRTL). Distinctive because it explicitly violates the moral economy yet is pragmatically tolerated. **10. Costume sourcing.** The two young women looking for film costumes (#2U6CTU). Probably a smaller practice but a distinct one — Brīvbode as a costume warehouse. **11. Family clothing supply.** Marija "supplying everyone with clothes and shoes" (chapter 5, #PNGSGT). This is a practice of household care, not personal acquisition — the object is destined for someone else from the moment of being picked up. **12. Gifting / matched giving.** Agate finding a Garfield plushie for her specific friend (#D4P4YT), Ita gifting children's toys and gardening books to specific recipients (#468Q49), Zane planning bespoke sewn gifts where the recipient comes over to choose pattern and fabric (#5AKG73). The site provides material for *gifting*, which is a distinct practice from acquiring-for-self. ### Practices that bring people to the site for non-object reasons **13. Sociality / regular weekly visiting.** Probably the second-biggest under-told story. Alise narrates how "the ladies" who came regularly to Brīvbode formed a group, started doing weekly Riga walking tours together, and have continued for *three or four years* — the swapshop seeded a friendship circle that exceeded the swapshop (#FHX4VD). Valentīna remembers when participants brought food and tea and sat together (#4J3838). Ita developed regular acquaintances through queueing (#2U3YN6). Laura comes "to get out of the house and chat with people" (#29TARU). Linards's wry "old ladies' club" observation (#XWPLFS). This is genuinely a different practice — being-at-Brīvbode is the goal, the things are incidental. **14. Volunteer labour / shop-running.** Mostly chapter 5 territory but it's a practice that meets the others at the site (#KMD7AJ on aesthetic disagreements is part of this). ### Practices people are *cultivating* at the site as projects of self-change **15. Detachment work.** Māra explicitly using Brīvbode as infrastructure for developing her own capacity to let go (#LG8X4N, #WABKA8). Aiga's biographical-rupture solo trip after employment ended, working to release her hoarding tendency (#Z2Y4K8). **16. Sufficiency / making peace with what one has.** Madara's "I really try not to be that auntie with three bags" (#9XUDV9). Elīna's "there's simply no more space in my wardrobe" + the pleasure of wearing things out (#QCXR6D). This is a cultivated practice with its own discipline. **17. Restraint / regulation of acquisition impulse.** Marta replacing "free" with "exchange" in her mental vocabulary (#7397K7). Madara's cognitive labour around taking (#CUBS5Q). Distinct from sufficiency because it operates moment-by-moment in the shop. ### Orientational practices that participants align Brīvbode with **18. Articulated environmentalism.** Luīze's "thrift shops" generation, fast-fashion politics (#MD2XMJ, #CX2SM8). **19. Quiet sustainability / generational frugality.** Post-Soviet scarcity carried forward, sustainability without the word (#8B2Y8N, #VFPYU2). **20. Charity / almsgiving.** Aiga's imagined homeless recipient from Ķengarags (#7ZXWJU). The figure that organisers reject but participants keep producing. **21. Class self-management / dignity work.** Marija's "I will not let them see I've fallen so low" + reclaiming "I'm common" (#86WW2X). Grandmothers withholding origin from daughters (#ZEVQDB). **22. Spiritual / energy / purification.** The aunt who can't donate because objects carry previous owners' energy (#Z4WUR2); Viesturs's institutional reframe of Brīvbode as "purgatory for things." **23. Mediating between resistant family members.** Jana's son who refuses both letting her donate to Brīvbode *and* accepting things she got there (#4DE547). Madara's aunt routing through her. This is a domestic-management practice that emerges around the swapshop's stigma. ## How I'd organise this for the rewrite You don't need to enumerate all 23. The point is to show the site is dense with intersecting practices, and to organise the chapter so this density becomes legible rather than messy. A few suggestions: **Group them by direction of arrival.** Practices that *deliver* things to the site (1–4), practices that *take* things from the site (5–12), practices that *use* the site for non-object purposes (13–14), practices that participants are *cultivating* at the site (15–17), and orientational/meaning practices that align with the site (18–23). This gives the chapter an organising spine that doesn't pretend to be a single practice's elements. **Promote the under-told ones.** The Repair Cafe coupling, the sewing/craft cluster, and the sociality-spawning effect of regular visiting are the three most striking findings that the current "freecycling" framing under-uses. Each could be a short subsection or a strong paragraph. **Lean on Zane.** She is uniquely articulate about how multiple practices meet at the site — Repair Cafe, sewing, gifting, sufficiency, sociality, all in one interview. She's almost a one-person argument for the framing. **Use Marta as the "loop" case.** Marta makes rugs *because* her secondhand acquisition accumulated too much, and now sources material from Brīvbode for her rugs and gifts (#T5GXHP, #JZEB5D). That trajectory is the homology written in one biography. If you want, I can draft a revised version of one of the chapter sections — say, a new opening section on "the practices that meet at Brīvbode" that does the work of laying this out before the chapter dives into divestment — or work up the Repair Cafe paragraph that's missing. ### 43. User what are some undeniable examples of practices according to e.g. shove? so i can get a sense of how practices are typically seen ### 44. User what are some undeniable examples of practices according to e.g. shove? so i can get a sense of how practices are typically seen ### 45. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 10, "query": "driving showering laundry example practice" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 10, "query": "cooking Nordic walking example of practice" } ``` ### 46. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 83 Context: #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION #F8JCHW FIRST ENCOUNTERS: NETWORKS AND COMMUNITIES Matching excerpt #FPABDM: There are no laws about showering on a daily basis but the practice has become embedded through material and not only social networks. As a result, people are in a sense recruited to showering by the design of the bathroom and the products on sale, as well as by the expectations of friends and family (Burke, 1996). Much the same applies to driving. In cities planned around the car, it is often difficult to move around in other ways. In sum, and in brief, channels of recruitment change as the careers of individuals, practices and related infrastructures and institutions develop. First encounters are surely critical, but where participation is in any sense voluntary more is required if practices are to retain faithful cohorts of suitably committed carriers. 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 87 Context: #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION #7QBCW8 CAPTURE AND COMMITMENT: CAREERS AND CARRIERS Matching excerpt #YGPK7K: Again, showering is a good example. Over the last century the number of people who regularly take a shower has increased dramatically. When interviewed about what showering involves, respondents generally claim to be set in their ways: showering is something they do day-in, day-out and without thought or innovation (Hand et al., 2005). Unlike some of the sports considered above, this practice is not obviously transformed by enthusiastic lead users, nor is there a tradition that novices are tempted to overthrow. No one seems to be changing what it is to take a shower, but national and international data on the water used for personal hygiene demonstrate that the timing of the experience, the force of the flow and the valuing of freshness and invigoration are on the move (Walker, 2009). Daily showering, viewed as a totality, is being reconfigured by subtle but cumulative differences in the elements of which it is formed, including plumbing technologies and products, and in how these are integrated by its many carriers, all of whom take their routine to be the normal thing to do. In other words, practices like showering can and do emerge and evolve through multiple minor adjustments made in private but made possible by the circulation of new and different materials, meanings and forms of competence. 3. Source: The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (#6J5MKL), Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 187 Context: #MTDRS9 Part III #6FS2RF Practice and posthumanismSocial theory and a history of agency #26M2QV Objectal practice #BXQMJZ The relational undergirding of epistemic practice Matching excerpt #KLPUQ3: I now want to begin to describe this practice, starting with the observation of the dissociative dynamic that comes into play when practice ceases to be a procedural routine. As indicated before, the dissociation relevant here is that between subject and object. What do we mean by this dissociation? How does it come about, and why is it important? The separation between subjects with mental states and independent objects is common to all areas of everyday life. To take an example, a car and its driver are distinct entities in our perception and in much of our experience. Nonetheless, while I am driving, my car becomes what Heidegger calls ‘ready-to-hand’ and transparent (Heidegger 1962:98ff.): it has the tendency to disappear while I am using it. In other words, the car becomes an unproblematic means to an end rather than an independent thing to which I stand in relation. It becomes an instrument that has been absorbed into the practice of driving, just as I, the driver, have been absorbed into the practice of driving—I, too, become transparent. When I engage in this practice, I am oriented to the street, the traffic, the direction I have to take. I am not oriented to the car—unless it malfunctions and temporarily breaks down. Nor am I thinking of myself as separate from the immediate activity. 4. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 131 Context: #5YMLUS Acknowledgements #UCCDX9 Laundering: a System of Systems Matching excerpt #LK7RZP: It is no longer usual to sew children into their clothes for the winter, nor is it common practice to do all the laundry on just one day of the week. Despite the net drop in dirtiness and despite the popularity of regular showering and bathing, the last century has seen a shift of collective routine such that on average British washing machines are used 274 times a year. The figure is even higher for the USA where the average is 392 cycles per year. One result is that domestic laundry currently accounts for something like 21 per cent of per-capita residential indoor water use in the USA and a smaller but still significant 12 per cent in British homes. With the diffusion of the domestic washing machine at 'saturation' point in both countries (98 and 92 per cent respectively), the evidence is that people are washing and drying loads of clothes more frequently than ever before and in the process consuming copious quantities of energy and water. The central challenge for this chapter and the next is to explain both the engraining and the transformation of laundry-related routines. 5. Source: Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices (#ARE7AL), Eliisa Kylkilahti, Henna Syrjälä, Liisa Kääntä, Sara-Ellen Laitinen, p. 7 Context: #QLT6TK Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices #YUF7SG Findings #ZXFMV4 Delay the performance of the practice Matching excerpt #KHWFHR: We first address how the material can delay the performance of the practice. In these instances, the material influences the temporal realization of the performance of the practice, having thus mildest implications on the performance of the practice. The first analysis example is based on showering, which has quite largely been studied from a practice-theoretical perspective (e.g., Bäckman, 2023; Gram-Hanssen, Christensen, Madsen, and do Carmo, 2020; Hand et al., 2005; Shove, 2003a), because washing consumes abundant resources: energy and water. Material aspects related to cleanliness practices have evolved over time and can be disrupted by temporary events or specific socio-material settings, impacting water and energy consumption (Gram-Hanssen et al., 2020). Torriti (2017) argues that washing is a practice that is time-dependent, meaning it is carried out at specific times of the day or week. 6. Source: Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption (#KWZ2A4), Alan Warde, Daniel Welch, p. 4 Context: #STMANK Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption #6U6DVD 5.1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF PRACTICE #AT2TKQ 5.2 THE SOCIOLOGY OF SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTION Matching excerpt #9MTHHH: Theories of practice have an affinity with the analysis of sustainable consumption for several reasons. Firstly, one is that the inconspicuous consumption of energy and resources in the use of goods and services in the accomplishment of everyday routine tasks (for example, doing the laundry, showering or commuting) as opposed to simply their acquisition, has profound environmental impacts. Furthermore such use is not amenable to explanations based on models of consumer choice, and approaches to consumption based in cultural theory have little purchase, due to their concern with symbolic display, communication and the presentation of self (Shove and Warde 2002). Secondly, goods and services are primarily put to use for the accomplishment of social practices (for example, sharing a meal, playing sport or gardening), rather than for their consumption per se, drawing attention to the dynamics of social practices for explanatory resources for the escalating environmental impact of consumption (Warde 2005). Thirdly, theories of practice offer the sociology of sustainable consumption an understanding of social action that promised a way out of the cul-de-sac of the 'value-action' or 'attitude-behaviour' gap: the phenomenon of the discrepancy between reported pro-environmental values and obdurately unsustainable behaviour. 7. Source: Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions (#MCJT5Q), Léon Francis Hirt, Margit Keller, Marlyne Sahakian, p. 2 Context: #4YDMEG Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions #RBND7H 2. Comparing the multi-level perspective and social practice approaches #RBT3Z4 2.1. Overview of both approaches Matching excerpt #HNSVCW: A core aspect of this understanding of social practice is a shift in focus from individuals and systems to practices as patterns of activity. Building on these insights while recognizing the heterogeneity of existing definitions, Welch and Warde (2015, p. 85) have suggested a minimal definition of social practice as “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, p. 134 ).” Examples of social practices are driving, cooking, cycling, showering, and decision-making. While many studies have sought to better understand a single practice or multiple inter-locked practices, some have also focused on change over time, such as explaining the emergence of Nordic walking in Europe ( Shove and Pantzar, 2005 ) or the shift from bicycles to motorbikes in the streets of Hanoi ( Hansen, 2017 ). 8. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 123 Context: #RYNGP9 IS SMALL THE ONLY BEAUTIFUL? #NYECJK Three theory method packages through which to study large-scale phenomena from a practice-based perspective #ETGEY3 Studying large-scale phenomena by rhizomatically following connections between trans-situated practices #K3PR8P Studying scalography and playing with it Matching excerpt #2WGUKW: territory. Social scientists are perfectly entitled to create partial, thumbnail abstracted representations of large phenomena for practical use, as long as they do this in plain view and do not sever the link between representational practice and practice represented. In this sense, we can study large-scale phenomena by taking the regular performances of a large number of similar activities across time and space as the object of interest. We can attribute a collective name to a number of individual instances and treat the resulting epistemic object as quasi-entity: for example, the 'macro-practice' or 'practical regime' of showering, shopping in supermarkets, washing, teaching, cycling and trading in the market (all cases discussed in Shove et al. , 2012). Such representational and processual quasi-entities can then be used to construct narratives of growth, survival and disappearance at a large spatial and temporal scale. The critical reflexive step is to refrain from granting such quasi-entities direct causal power. Growth, competition and disappearance must also be explained by reference to specific events, local conditions and ordinary practices. This manoeuvre, which has been successfully adopted by a number of practice-oriented scholars (see, e.g. Warde, 2005; Shove et al. , 2012; Shove and Spurling, 2013), lends itself to studying the relative success of practices in terms of competition for practitioners (their time and attention) and other resources 'consumed' by the practice. We can thus explain why showering seems to have won the competition with bathing, at least in most Western countries, by focussing on how an incremental change of techniques, know-how and ways of understanding bodily cleanliness came together to create 'a space for showering to challenge the previously dominant way of doing bodily cleansing (that is bathing)' (Southerton, Warde and Hand, 2004: 42). By focussing on the particular connections between the 'infrastructural, technological, rhetorical, and moral positioning of showering vis-à-vis bathing' (Hand, Shove and Southerton, 2005: 15), the approach provides an alternative, practice-based explanation of the process of 'diffusion' and how local innovations turn into large-scale phenomena. It also leaves plenty of room for, and in fact invites us to take into account, individual calculation (costs), social mechanism (imitation and fashions) and affective as well as preconscious elements (for example, the subconscious interpellation of cleanliness associated with late modernity, see Leader, 2002). By the same token, the approach also allows us to reason in terms of alliances, mutual support between practices and their components and even competitive appropriation. 9. Source: The Logics of Frugality: Reproducing Tastes of Necessity among Affluent Climate Change Activists (#UTEUAD), Jean Léon Boucher, p. 5 Context: #2RZNYN The logics of frugality: Reproducing tastes of necessity among affluent climate change activists #XA9G86 4. Findings #EGT55B 4.8. A nostalgic frugality Matching excerpt #HVTQPV: A number of my respondents told narratives which had a nostalgic character ; and some of these narratives seemed more nostalgically charged than others. I found nostalgia present, for example, in the hanging of one's laundry or the wearing of tattered clothes reminiscent of one's mother. Carol, a 71 year old retired editor-writer, seemed to be indelibly marked by a nostalgic frugality. She explained how her grandparents struggled as immigrants; her dad died when she was seven and her mom "was a product of the Depression." Carol did have an economically constrained childhood, but her extended family's practice of frugality marked her with a deeply meaningful set of behaviors. For instance, Carol detailed resurrecting a memory and practice from her past which combined frugal, environmental/green, and nostalgic scripts: hanging her laundry.... 10. Source: Sustainable Consumption, Behaviour Change Policies and Theories of Practice (#V4V7XC), Andrew McMeekin, Dale Southerton, David Evans, p. 14 Context: #PPB3M7 Sustainable Consumption, Behaviour Change Policies and Theories of Practice #GMAVCP Emergent programmes of practice based interventions Matching excerpt #E25MAV: which practices evolve over time (and across space). The effectiveness of such an approach will be enhanced when it can be based on cumulative learning about the practice in question, the ways in which it has evolved historically in the past and the sorts of interventions that have previously been used to try to facilitate change. There are of course limits to this cumulative learning in that lessons may not readily transfer from one setting to another. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that these understandings would be instructive, say, for thinking about subsequent and contingent policy options that can be deployed in order to respond to the unfolding of both the practice and the programmatic intervention. Efforts to improve road safety over the last several decades are instructive as an example of an emergent and multifaceted programme of interventions which has clearly delivered significant progress in the UK. It would be impossible to attribute improvements to any single intervention or indeed to any one type of intervention. There have been informational campaigns, major safety related innovations by car manufacturers, investments in road infrastructure and technologies for 'scripting' safer driving, regulations and the policing of those regulations. To give a more specific example, it is clear that the wearing of seatbelts took considerable time to become normalised from their highly contested introduction and this involved the whole suite of interventions described above. As such, our conjecture is that it is the mix and persistent sequence of interventions that has made the habitual practice of driving safer. Efforts to do so have become increasingly institutionalised with dedicated governmental and non-governmental bodies assuming direct responsibility for improvement. There was never a master plan, set out in stone c. 1950, setting out the entire future programme. Rather, the last 60 years can be seen as an emergent programme full of twists and turns, with new initiatives deployed in the context of contemporaneous understandings of the safety problem and the practice of driving. Approximate matches 1. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 116 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #YWVNFD Routines – Made and Unmade #YQQGCF Introduction #SSDY2F Morning Routines Score: 0.493 Related excerpt #WC8NFX: One could, however, have chosen other examples. Let us take up one of them: the morning routine of putting on make-up. This is a practice with complex meanings that calls for a lot of learning before it can be turned into a mechanical routine. It is also a habit charged with different content, from the daily minutes in front of the mirror, to situations where this routine becomes a very conscious and well-planned ritual, as when you are preparing for a new exciting date or an important public appearance. 2. Source: Household Recycling and Consumption Work (#4LST57), Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann, p. 43 Context: #SG3XKH Consumers as Workers in Economies of Waste #MCE5DZ Introducing consumption work Score: 0.494 Related excerpt #6TEQ2U: In the second example of a washing machine, the range of work activities undertaken by the consumer to support consumption is again fairly self-evident. When buying a new machine, the consumer will need to research the range of possible models to choose between, the retail options and which outlet sells what, and then order online, by phone or in store, and arrange for delivery. Plumbing alterations may be required prior to installation, so any necessary arrangements have to be made for these, normally by acquiring the paid services of a plumber. On delivery, the machine has to be unpacked, then installed, either by the consumer herself or himself or by paying for this to be done. She or he will also need to study the instructions, become familiar with the machine's functions and learn how to use it, undertake periodic maintenance and, at the end of its life, arrange for its disposal and recycling. All these tasks are distinct from the actual act of consuming or using the machine to wash and cannot be simply subsumed as domestic labour. 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 87 Context: #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION #7QBCW8 CAPTURE AND COMMITMENT: CAREERS AND CARRIERS Score: 0.507 Related excerpt #YGPK7K: Again, showering is a good example. Over the last century the number of people who regularly take a shower has increased dramatically. When interviewed about what showering involves, respondents generally claim to be set in their ways: showering is something they do day-in, day-out and without thought or innovation (Hand et al., 2005). Unlike some of the sports considered above, this practice is not obviously transformed by enthusiastic lead users, nor is there a tradition that novices are tempted to overthrow. No one seems to be changing what it is to take a shower, but national and international data on the water used for personal hygiene demonstrate that the timing of the experience, the force of the flow and the valuing of freshness and invigoration are on the move (Walker, 2009). Daily showering, viewed as a totality, is being reconfigured by subtle but cumulative differences in the elements of which it is formed, including plumbing technologies and products, and in how these are integrated by its many carriers, all of whom take their routine to be the normal thing to do. In other words, practices like showering can and do emerge and evolve through multiple minor adjustments made in private but made possible by the circulation of new and different materials, meanings and forms of competence. 4. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 168 Context: #5YMLUS Acknowledgements #9PNC8T Laundry Habits: Integrating Practices #HN2B22 Scheduling and Order Score: 0.503 Related excerpt #K5Q4Q5: Laundering is a sequential enterprise in which washing comes before drying and drying before ironing. In analysing the making and breaking of habit I take note of one last aspect, that is the scheduling , as well as the meaning, purpose and experience of doing the wash. There are two dimensions to this: one relates to the management of the steps involved. The second concerns the positioning of laundry-related activity within the flow of everyday life. 5. Source: Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (#8J3FXD), Elizabeth Shove, p. 134 Context: #5YMLUS Acknowledgements #UCCDX9 Laundering: a System of Systems #EY58QW Laundering as Work Score: 0.494 Related excerpt #JQJ9S4: In addition, and again in contrast to bathing, laundering is a typically sequential operation consisting of a series of discrete activities. These might now include sorting clothes, filling a washing machine, adding detergent, drying and ironing. In other situations, necessary steps have included lighting fires, boiling water, soaking, hand wringing, rinsing, soaping, bleaching, blueing, starching and crimping. Exactly what 'doing the laundry' means depends, in a rather immediate way, upon the technologies involved and upon contemporary understandings of what it takes to produce a pile of appropriately cleaned clothing. I have more to say about this, but for now it is enough to recognize that innovation in any one part of the system (for instance, in textiles, detergents or washing and drying technology) will have repercussions for the whole. 6. Source: Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices (#ARE7AL), Eliisa Kylkilahti, Henna Syrjälä, Liisa Kääntä, Sara-Ellen Laitinen, p. 7 Context: #QLT6TK Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices #YUF7SG Findings #ZXFMV4 Delay the performance of the practice Score: 0.521 Related excerpt #KHWFHR: We first address how the material can delay the performance of the practice. In these instances, the material influences the temporal realization of the performance of the practice, having thus mildest implications on the performance of the practice. The first analysis example is based on showering, which has quite largely been studied from a practice-theoretical perspective (e.g., Bäckman, 2023; Gram-Hanssen, Christensen, Madsen, and do Carmo, 2020; Hand et al., 2005; Shove, 2003a), because washing consumes abundant resources: energy and water. Material aspects related to cleanliness practices have evolved over time and can be disrupted by temporary events or specific socio-material settings, impacting water and energy consumption (Gram-Hanssen et al., 2020). Torriti (2017) argues that washing is a practice that is time-dependent, meaning it is carried out at specific times of the day or week. 7. Source: Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices (#ARE7AL), Eliisa Kylkilahti, Henna Syrjälä, Liisa Kääntä, Sara-Ellen Laitinen, p. 7 Context: #QLT6TK Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices #YUF7SG Findings #ZXFMV4 Delay the performance of the practice Score: 0.498 Related excerpt #KS9GEJ: In the diary excerpt, a female participant who lives in a detached house in a suburb describes a problem her husband encountered with warm water from the shower. This showering practice involves several materials, including water, the shower and the heat pump: 8. Source: Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing (#EPZXEW), Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa, p. 6 Context: #LVDEMW 3. COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION AND PRACTICE THEORIES Score: 0.53 Related excerpt #DB7WVF: When driving, walking, or cooking, people (practitioners) dynamically combine the three elements that make up their practices (Shove et al., 2012). When serving dinner, for example, material objects and tools are needed, such as food, drink, crockery, tables, and chairs, in addition to the kitchen, energy, and water supply infrastructures. Some competences such as cooking and knowledge of etiquette to serve are basic; a differential, or specialized knowledge in turn, such as harmonization with wine, is a competence based on conventions and cultural expectations (Spurling et al., 2013). 9. Source: Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions (#MCJT5Q), Léon Francis Hirt, Margit Keller, Marlyne Sahakian, p. 2 Context: #4YDMEG Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions #RBND7H 2. Comparing the multi-level perspective and social practice approaches #RBT3Z4 2.1. Overview of both approaches Score: 0.495 Related excerpt #HNSVCW: A core aspect of this understanding of social practice is a shift in focus from individuals and systems to practices as patterns of activity. Building on these insights while recognizing the heterogeneity of existing definitions, Welch and Warde (2015, p. 85) have suggested a minimal definition of social practice as “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, p. 134 ).” Examples of social practices are driving, cooking, cycling, showering, and decision-making. While many studies have sought to better understand a single practice or multiple inter-locked practices, some have also focused on change over time, such as explaining the emergence of Nordic walking in Europe ( Shove and Pantzar, 2005 ) or the shift from bicycles to motorbikes in the streets of Hanoi ( Hansen, 2017 ). 10. Source: Habits and their creatures (#TNE9JN), Elizabeth Shove, p. 7 Context: #2WSGTX Habits and Their Creatures1 #ZBKFD6 Habit and relations between practices Score: 0.514 Related excerpt #V7W4S2: For a practice-as-entity, losing habit-demanding status does not spell instant demise, but it does imply a repositioning in the temporal ordering of daily life. Home laundering is a good example. Not so long ago it was normal to set aside the best part of a day and do all the week's washing on a Monday. Laundering remains an established practice, but the details of performance and timing have changed, as has the relation between washing clothes and other habit-demanding practices. In many households today, laundering involves a series of relatively brief episodes of attention – sorting, loading, drying, ironing – often spread across a number of days (Shove 2003). For some people, these moments remain thoroughly habitual, but for others the timing is much more erratic. In this case the elements of laundering have changed (automatic washing machines have become normal, newly demanding interpretations of freshness have taken hold) in ways that matter for how the practice is positioned in relation to a host of other also changing practices, and for the kinds of temporal injunction involved. ### 47. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 147 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #XFFY4G Fads, Fashions and ‘Real’ Innovations #VHGDPZ Novelties and Social Change #6662JK The Cultural Mediators in the Innovation Process Matching excerpt #XEPTAM: In many ways, this 'gap' between the original constituency, whether a group of enthusiastic amateurs, engineers or inventors, and the future wider group of buyers is what marketing and advertising departments try to fill in by offering ready-made models of life-styles and cultural practices that new products and services can fit into. For instance, in order to export Nordic walking sticks (Shove and Pantzar 2005), the company producing them has, very concretely, to export and make meaningful a totally new practice of walking with two sticks. When exported to other countries from Finland, the practice is radically transformed and effectively become quite another practice. 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 68 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning Matching excerpt #AKS9K3: Two aspects of this story are relevant for a discussion of meaning. First, this semiotic positioning of Nordic Walking was only possible because concepts of wellbeing and nature already existed in the popular imagination, each having recognizable qualities born of prior practice-based associations. Second, although efforts to frame Nordic Walking in this way have been relatively successful, defining and classifying an emergent practice is not something that any one actor can control. As things turned out, Nordic Walking was initially associated with health and nature, as the promoters hoped, and soon after with specific categories of age and gender. These new connections arose as a consequence of the fact that middle-aged women were the first to take up the practice. As more and different people became involved, the social significance of participation and the meaning of Nordic Walking changed. 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 69 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning Matching excerpt #VFW2VT: One possibility is that meanings are extended and eroded as a result of dynamic processes of association. Accordingly, when Nordic Walking is linked with health, the meaning of wellbeing extends to encompass this practice, along with many others. The extension of one set of meanings sometimes implies the contraction of others. For example, concepts of 'freshness', conventionally associated with qualities of air, have found their way into the realm of laundering and bathing. As this 'new' element entered the practice of washing, other previously dominant themes of cleanliness or hygiene have been overlain, transformed or displaced. This is relevant in that notions of freshness legitimize and in a sense demand more frequent showering and laundering than ever before (Shove, 2003; Hand et al., 2005). 4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 69 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning Matching excerpt #SGNCNN: Since any one practitioner has limited first-hand experience of how a practice is reproduced by others, it is nearly always the case that elements of meaning are quite literally mediated. In Finland, representations and pictures of Nordic Walking in the press and on TV proved crucial in making key associations, for example, depicting Nordic Walkers in natural rather than urban settings, and illustrating other relevant features like the age and clothing of those involved. Infrastructures of mass communication are now such that there is virtually no limit to the settings through which such images might circulate. The catch is that while the media has a vital role in disseminating ideas, pictures and texts, 5. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 67 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning Matching excerpt #DUUPD6: Although we are primarily interested in following the lives of elements, not of practices as such, a brief account of how Nordic Walking (a form of walking involving the use of two specially designed poles to increase the intensity of the exercise) emerged in Finland provides some insight into the ways in which meanings like those of infirmity and well-being 'travel' and evolve. For Nordic Walking to take hold on any scale, walking with 'sticks' had to be disassociated from meanings of frailty and somehow connected to concepts of vitality and wellbeing. This required a process of de- and re-classification: old connotations had to be shaken off and new connections made. In an effort to make this happen, manufacturers and others with an interest in establishing the practice sought to position it with reference to two established narratives, 6. Source: The (im)possibilities of circular consumption: Producing and performing circular clothing consumption in retail and household settings (#8EVNK8), Réka Tölg, p. 33 Context: #T6KQ92 Introduction #BDRQSR A practice theories approach to producing and performing circular consumption Matching excerpt #DNQDEN: Since the early 2000s, the practice turn in social sciences has influenced studies of everyday consumption (Shove, 2003; Shove and Pantzar, 2005; Warde, 2005, 2014). This has led to more attention being paid to how consumption unfolds while carrying out everyday chores, such as cooking, routines, like commuting, but also free-time activities, like Nordic walking. Parallel to this the practice turn has also influenced the study of markets (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006, 2007). Studies have set out to explain how markets are made to work, as well as how different actions on markets, such as a consumer choosing a product, are configured through market practices. While these two streams—one focusing on consumption in everyday life and the other addressing how consumption is shaped through markets—developed parallel to each other, their shared theoretical roots, influenced by the practice turn, and their respective sociological approaches to consumption and economics allowed for different cross-fertilisations (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2022; Evans and Mylan, 2019; Shove and Araujo, 2010). Furthermore, it is increasingly argued that the two can strengthen each other to study what shapes consumption (Evans, 2020; Fuentes and Samsioe, 2020; Stigzelius, 2017). 7. Source: Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions (#MCJT5Q), Léon Francis Hirt, Margit Keller, Marlyne Sahakian, p. 2 Context: #4YDMEG Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions #RBND7H 2. Comparing the multi-level perspective and social practice approaches #RBT3Z4 2.1. Overview of both approaches Matching excerpt #HNSVCW: A core aspect of this understanding of social practice is a shift in focus from individuals and systems to practices as patterns of activity. Building on these insights while recognizing the heterogeneity of existing definitions, Welch and Warde (2015, p. 85) have suggested a minimal definition of social practice as “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, p. 134 ).” Examples of social practices are driving, cooking, cycling, showering, and decision-making. While many studies have sought to better understand a single practice or multiple inter-locked practices, some have also focused on change over time, such as explaining the emergence of Nordic walking in Europe ( Shove and Pantzar, 2005 ) or the shift from bicycles to motorbikes in the streets of Hanoi ( Hansen, 2017 ). 8. Source: Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions (#MCJT5Q), Léon Francis Hirt, Margit Keller, Marlyne Sahakian, p. 10 Context: #4YDMEG Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions #HR3457 4. Bridging the MLP and SPA #YUUKLL 4.6. Types of practices 2: vulnerable proto-practices vs entrenched sticky practices Matching excerpt #E5PERH: Another avenue for classifying social practices would be to analytically delimit those that are emergent and vulnerable, i.e., "proto-practices" (Seeyang and Gilbert-Squires, 2019), and those that are most entrenched, obdurate or sticky. Whether a novel emerging social practice (e.g., Nordic walking, Shove and Pantzar 2005) constitutes a niche on its own or whether we can also observe proto-practices at the regime level (e.g., solar PV among cooperatives, public authorities, and energy utilities, Hirt et al., 2021) are additional empirical questions. Also, not all emergent practices may be favourable for sustainable transitions, as is the case of certain emergent "green economy" practices that may have significant social and environmental impacts over the long term. For example, Lane et al. (2018) argue that the rapid dissemination and uptake of household IT is fundamentally unsustainable in its current form, and they examine some of the issues of current research focusing primarily on green technology development. They call for more attention to be directed towards these unsustainable practices and envisage development of new niche-level material- and energy-efficient practices. 9. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 103 Context: #QGJ7DX 4. Findings and Discussion #ZAHQPV 4.1 Unfolding Consumption as Practice Moments #JAG24W 4.1.5 Consumption as consequence Matching excerpt #S9NY5M: In this perspective, it is the procedures prescribed in the practice templates of a practice that are consequential for consumption—the practice governs consumption. The consumption of guitar gear, water, fertilizer, images and symbols, and skill, judgement, and commitment can be seen as functions of electric guitar playing, gardening, participation in an online community, and discursive practice, respectively. This resonates with the idea that, for example, to perform Nordic Walking, Nordic walking gear is necessary—an idea that is shaped by both consumers (more in the sense of carriers of practice) and producers (more in the sense of firms and marketers) as shown by Shove and Pantzar (2005). 10. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 61 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #7FDH2N 2.3 Approaching Practice Moments #SKMUVA 2.3.1 Consumptive moments #LPVAVU Consumption and performativity Matching excerpt #ZCYA5P: The indication that consumption is not only an outcome of practice but also plays a vital role in the performance of practice speaks to a performative quality of consumption. As for practice performances, consumptive moments are prone to exert influence on the ‘doings’ (as Schatzki 2010 refers to practice performances). This can be illustrated with the range of studies demonstrating how consumption that takes place within practices is a necessary ingredient of doings—for example free-skiing (Woermann 2012), DIY (Watson and Shove 2008; Moiso, Arnould, and Gentry 2013), or Nordic Walking (Shove and Pantzar 2005)—and can enable and constrain the performances of practices. This suggests that moments of consumption have performative effects on practice performances. Approximate matches 1. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 123 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #YWVNFD Routines – Made and Unmade #YQQGCF Introduction #2YBXXF Collective Collapse Score: 0.429 Related excerpt #KEHCFJ: heating. Everyday routines like preparing a meal could become complicated tasks, calling for both innovation and patience. Can you make a small fire on the balcony? What would work as a water carrier? 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 67 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning Score: 0.537 Related excerpt #DUUPD6: Although we are primarily interested in following the lives of elements, not of practices as such, a brief account of how Nordic Walking (a form of walking involving the use of two specially designed poles to increase the intensity of the exercise) emerged in Finland provides some insight into the ways in which meanings like those of infirmity and well-being 'travel' and evolve. For Nordic Walking to take hold on any scale, walking with 'sticks' had to be disassociated from meanings of frailty and somehow connected to concepts of vitality and wellbeing. This required a process of de- and re-classification: old connotations had to be shaken off and new connections made. In an effort to make this happen, manufacturers and others with an interest in establishing the practice sought to position it with reference to two established narratives, 3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 69 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning Score: 0.488 Related excerpt #SGNCNN: Since any one practitioner has limited first-hand experience of how a practice is reproduced by others, it is nearly always the case that elements of meaning are quite literally mediated. In Finland, representations and pictures of Nordic Walking in the press and on TV proved crucial in making key associations, for example, depicting Nordic Walkers in natural rather than urban settings, and illustrating other relevant features like the age and clothing of those involved. Infrastructures of mass communication are now such that there is virtually no limit to the settings through which such images might circulate. The catch is that while the media has a vital role in disseminating ideas, pictures and texts, 4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 68 Context: #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning Score: 0.455 Related excerpt #AKS9K3: Two aspects of this story are relevant for a discussion of meaning. First, this semiotic positioning of Nordic Walking was only possible because concepts of wellbeing and nature already existed in the popular imagination, each having recognizable qualities born of prior practice-based associations. Second, although efforts to frame Nordic Walking in this way have been relatively successful, defining and classifying an emergent practice is not something that any one actor can control. As things turned out, Nordic Walking was initially associated with health and nature, as the promoters hoped, and soon after with specific categories of age and gender. These new connections arose as a consequence of the fact that middle-aged women were the first to take up the practice. As more and different people became involved, the social significance of participation and the meaning of Nordic Walking changed. 5. Source: Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing (#EPZXEW), Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa, p. 6 Context: #LVDEMW 3. COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION AND PRACTICE THEORIES Score: 0.438 Related excerpt #DB7WVF: When driving, walking, or cooking, people (practitioners) dynamically combine the three elements that make up their practices (Shove et al., 2012). When serving dinner, for example, material objects and tools are needed, such as food, drink, crockery, tables, and chairs, in addition to the kitchen, energy, and water supply infrastructures. Some competences such as cooking and knowledge of etiquette to serve are basic; a differential, or specialized knowledge in turn, such as harmonization with wine, is a competence based on conventions and cultural expectations (Spurling et al., 2013). 6. Source: Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions (#MCJT5Q), Léon Francis Hirt, Margit Keller, Marlyne Sahakian, p. 2 Context: #4YDMEG Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions #RBND7H 2. Comparing the multi-level perspective and social practice approaches #RBT3Z4 2.1. Overview of both approaches Score: 0.417 Related excerpt #HNSVCW: A core aspect of this understanding of social practice is a shift in focus from individuals and systems to practices as patterns of activity. Building on these insights while recognizing the heterogeneity of existing definitions, Welch and Warde (2015, p. 85) have suggested a minimal definition of social practice as “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, p. 134 ).” Examples of social practices are driving, cooking, cycling, showering, and decision-making. While many studies have sought to better understand a single practice or multiple inter-locked practices, some have also focused on change over time, such as explaining the emergence of Nordic walking in Europe ( Shove and Pantzar, 2005 ) or the shift from bicycles to motorbikes in the streets of Hanoi ( Hansen, 2017 ). 7. Source: Sustainable Consumption, Behaviour Change Policies and Theories of Practice (#V4V7XC), Andrew McMeekin, Dale Southerton, David Evans, p. 8 Context: #PPB3M7 Sustainable Consumption, Behaviour Change Policies and Theories of Practice #3UF3XR Re-interpreting 'behaviour change' policy initiatives through a practice-based perspective #YYWF5B Eating Score: 0.482 Related excerpt #D4J8CL: There are, however, some cases that pay attention to the inter-connections between the many aspects that relate to the performance of eating as a practice. An example is the 'New Nordic Diet' programme which is attempting to make Danish patterns of food consumption more sustainable by facilitating a shift away from the Mediterranean diet (and its reliance on imported foodstuffs) in favour of Nordic (so local and seasonal) foodstuffs. This initiative plans to make use of celebrity chefs, the establishment of Nordic restaurants and media exposure in order to shift collective understandings of what constitutes 'good Danish food'. Additionally there are plans to produce recipe books and fund cookery lessons, which can usefully be interpreted as an intervention to ensure that the requisite skills and competencies are available for these new Danish food practices to take hold. Interpreted through a 'practice-based' analytical lens, this initiative seeks to shift some of the elements that coordinate the practice as an entity. While only implied in the programme, it is hoped that the attempt to re-arrange Danish eating practices towards the Nordic diet will consequently provide the necessary impetus for the development of a fledgling infrastructure of locally provisioned foodstuffs that will be required for widespread appropriation of these new dietary practices. 8. Source: Object Relations in Accounts of Everyday Life (#VJ8G58), Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, Mikko Jalas, p. 6 Context: #SYB8LM Object Relations in Accounts of Everyday Life #QXFSJG Encountering the Object-World: The Weather, the Heating System, the Firewood Score: 0.419 Related excerpt #AUX3HP: It's cold inside. I place logs in the stove and a matchstick in the curly birchbark, porridge water in the pot, and morning coffee in the kettle. [...] The kitchen warms up, the porridge water boils. The day can begin. (SKS KRA, 2009: 96) 9. Source: Object Relations in Accounts of Everyday Life (#VJ8G58), Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, Mikko Jalas, p. 10 Context: #SYB8LM Object Relations in Accounts of Everyday Life #PWG3FB Evaluating the Material World: How Heating Should be Done Score: 0.41 Related excerpt #YFUYAF: I light up an old Siro-stove (model number 52) manufactured by Högfors. The stove gives a lovely cosy feeling. In winter time like this the fixed electric radiator (from 1972) takes care of the heating of the kitchen. I move to the dining room of our 110-year-old house, and make a fire out of logs in the original 'pönttöuuni' [a type of stove]. The height of our rooms is still 3.4 metres and the stoves too are 3.2. There's a lot to be heated in winters, even though we also partly use electricity . . . When the ignition seems to succeed, I move to the hall where I do the same tasks. (SKS KRA, 2009: 8) 10. Source: Patchworks of Care - ETHICS AND PRACTICE OF CARE IN THE ORGANIC FOOD MOVEMENT IN LATVIA (#ZC3PHV), Agnese Bankovska, p. 226 Context: #6L8925 Chapter 5 #CR2QAW References Score: 0.419 Related excerpt #SMAC6A: Gronow, Jukka, and Lotte Holm 2019 Everyday Eating in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden: A Comparative Study of Meal Patterns 1997-2012 . Bloomsbury Academic. ### 48. Assistant Good question — and the answer reveals something useful about why "freecycling as a practice" feels strained. The canonical examples in Shove and adjacent literature cluster around a fairly specific shape. ## The classic Shovean exemplars The list that gets cited and recited: - **Showering** (Shove 2003 and ever after — the founding example, #FPABDM, #YGPK7K) - **Laundering / doing the laundry** (Shove 2003, #LK7RZP, #JQJ9S4) - **Driving** (#FPABDM, #E25MAV) - **Cooking** (#HNSVCW, #DB7WVF) - **Cycling** (#HNSVCW) - **Eating / serving dinner** (#DB7WVF, #D4J8CL) - **Nordic walking** (Shove and Pantzar 2005 — the founding example for *emergence*, #DUUPD6, #AKS9K3) - **Gardening** (#9MTHHH) - **DIY** (Watson and Shove 2008, #ZCYA5P) - **Free-skiing** (Woermann 2012, #ZCYA5P) - **Electric guitar playing** (Magaudda 2011, #S9NY5M) - **Heating the home with a wood stove** (Shove, Rinkinen and Jalas, #AUX3HP) - **Putting on make-up** (#WC8NFX) - **Trading in the market, teaching, shopping in supermarkets** (#2WGUKW) ## The shape they share If you squint at the list, what makes something a "good" practice in this register is roughly: 1. **A clear bodily routine.** It has a recognisable performance shape — you can mime it. Showering, driving, swinging poles while walking. There's a single coherent set of doings. 2. **A small, definable set of materials.** Shower + water + soap + towel; car + road + petrol; poles + shoes + path. The material kit is bounded. 3. **A single (or small) cluster of meanings.** Cleanliness, freshness, well-being, mobility, fitness. You can name what the practice is *for*, even if the meanings shift over time. 4. **Definable competencies.** You can be more or less skilled at it. Driving has tests; cooking has techniques. 5. **A name in everyday speech.** "I'm going to take a shower." "I drive to work." "She's gone Nordic walking." Practitioners themselves recognise it as a thing. 6. **Repetition by the same person.** It's done routinely, often daily or weekly, by individuals over a sustained period. 7. **A practice career.** People can be recruited to it, become more committed, defect from it. These exemplars are also overwhelmingly **individual-bodily-domestic**: one person, in their own routine, mostly at home or in transit. They're also mostly *consumption-anchored* — one of practice theory's foundational moves was to redescribe what looked like consumer choices (showering more, driving instead of cycling) as practices instead. ## What this means for "freecycling" If you put "freecycling at Brīvbode" against this template, it fits roughly two and a half of the seven criteria: - ✓ It has a name (well, sort of — Latvian doesn't really have a settled word, and English "freecycling" is contested). - ✓ It has competencies (sorting, valuation, restraint). - ½ Materials? Yes, but the *whole point* is that the materials are constantly being detached from one practice and re-linked into another — it doesn't have a stable kit. - ✗ A clear bodily routine? Not really. Givers do one thing, takers do another, volunteers do a third, the regular weekly social visitors do a fourth. There is no single "freecycling gesture." - ✗ A single meaning cluster? The whole conclusion of chapter 4 (#M3VCHH) says no. - ✗ Repetition by the same person? Sometimes — for regulars. But many participants visit irregularly or only once. - ✗ Recognisable as one named practice in everyday speech? Latvian speakers reach for "humpalas," "otrreizēja lietošana," "Brīvbode," "bezmaksas," "apmaiņa" — there's no single word. So the framing strain you've been feeling has a real basis. **The Shovean exemplars are practices like showering. Brīvbode-going is not really like showering.** It's much more plural, much more split across roles, and the materials and meanings don't sit still. ## Where Brīvbode-going *is* shower-shaped To be fair, some sub-activities at Brīvbode do fit the showering template quite well, and you could analyse them as practices in the strict Shovean sense: - **Volunteering a shift at Brīvbode** — a recognisable bodily routine (open up, sort, restock, cope with overflow, close), repeated weekly, with definable competencies, a clear meaning cluster, and a practice career (people get recruited, develop, sometimes burn out). - **Sewing / textile making** — Zane, Marta, Anna, Austra. This is a classic Shovean practice in everything but the source of materials. Repair fits here too. - **Wardrobe management / dressing** — also fits the template, with Brīvbode as one supplying infrastructure among several. - **Decluttering / household sorting** — Gundega's TV-script version is genuinely Shovean (it even has named methods, celebrity carriers like Marie Kondo, recruitment infrastructure, and a media circulation of meanings). - **Sufficiency / "lifestyles of enough"** — Kropfeld (#SY28Z3) explicitly treats it as a practice, and Madara, Elīna and Rasa describe it as a sustained personal discipline. These are the practices that *meet* at Brīvbode. Each one has the shape of a recognisable practice. What Brīvbode is, by contrast, is the **site where they intersect** — which is exactly the framing we've been building. ## A small theoretical reassurance You're not being eccentric in finding "freecycling as a practice" awkward. Schatzki himself, in *The Nexus of Practices*, explicitly distinguishes between focal practices (showering, the canonical kind) and the **bundles, complexes, and constellations** they form (#3VHTH2, #SU4DRD). The whole second-generation move in practice theory has been toward acknowledging that empirically, you almost never encounter one practice in isolation — you encounter a nexus. Your case is just an unusually clear empirical instance of that nexus form. So if you wanted a one-liner: **canonical practices look like showering. Brīvbode is what happens when ten of them meet in a former bakery on the same afternoon.** ### 49. User now can you dig through our material and specifically look for that intersecting or intermingling or collision or 'circulation' between different practices, within or around or mediated by the swapshop? ### 50. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "XGCWS4", "limit": 10, "query": "repair cafe materials parts" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "XGCWS4", "limit": 10, "query": "because of brīvbode I started doing" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "XGCWS4", "limit": 10, "query": "stopped buying changed habits" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "XGCWS4", "limit": 10, "query": "flea market resell second hand shop" } ``` ### 51. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 750 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Matching coded excerpt #MWM5A7: S2: Jā, sākumā es par Brīvbodi uzzināju caur Repair Cafe. Tātad sākumā Repair Cafe un Brīvbode notika atsevišķi. Repair Cafe bija Kaņepes Kultūras centrā. Tad uznāca Covid, uz kādu brīdi nekas nenotika, un tad pēc tam, pēc Covid, Repair Cafe ar Brīvbodi nolēma, ka būs vienā vietā. Kas ir ļoti loģisks lēmums, manuprāt. Jo, nu, arī reizēm Brīvbodē ir lietas, kuras vajag mazliet pielabot, vai reizēm Repair Cafe atnes lietas, kurām trūkst materiālu, tad aiziet uz Brīvbodi un paņemt. Nu, jā, nu, tā es tur esmu vismaz reizi mēnesī, reizēm biežāk. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 248 | Consumption practices Matching coded excerpt #JVUQGU: S2: Es lielākoties apvienoju, bet ir bijušas arī kaut kādas reizes, kad ārpus. Nu, kad, piemēram, es gribu kaut kādu ziedojumu aizvest, vai arī, ka man kaut ko pašai vajag atrast, nu, un tad, teiksim, es eju kaut kādu apli tur Brīvbode, Otrā elpa, Humana vai vēl kaut kas. Visbiežāk kopā ar Repair Cafe, jā. 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 536 | Fun, creativity, novelty, sustainability, guilt, shame, Scandinavian etc Matching coded excerpt #7X98KA: tu esi arī minējusi, ka laiku pa laikam jūs intervē, ka ir bijusi kaut kāda dalība tajos pētījumos arī kā par tādu aprites piemēru. Nu, cik tu pati to redzi tādā griezumā, tādā aspektā vai arī tas ir jau otršķirīgi... S2: Tas ir palicis laikam kaut kādā ziņā nedaudz otršķirīgi. Pārējais ir tik intensīvi, ka... Nē, tāpēc man patīk, pieņemsim, ka ir tāda Repair Cafe, mēs sadarbojamies. Ka tas tev ļauj bišķiņ pašķaidīt to ikdienas sociālo ar to zaļāko, to domāšanu. 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 802 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Matching coded excerpt #DCFACM: 5.05. Brīvbodes jauno telpu atklāšanas svētki. Ārā notiek augu maiņa un Repair Cafe, bet līdz turienei nemaz netiekam (esmu ar Jāzepu). Ieradāmies ap 14.30, bijām Brīvbodē ap 1,5 h. Sākums bija jau no 12, komandai jau no 10, bet mēs netikām agrāk ārā no mājas – Mīkaels ap 10 izgāja pabūt viens, ap 12 bija mājās, bet es vēl cepu kūciņu ziedojumiem utt. Mājās cepu cepumus – vegāniskus, ar kaņepēm un šokolādes gabaliņiem – un bezpiena kūku ar kokosriekstu pienu un mellenēm. Izmantoju tofu, ko vajadzēja izlietot termiņa dēļ. Priecājos, ka Jāzepam ļoti garšoja kūka un ka Gundega izteicās, ka beidzot ir kas tāds, ko viņa arī var ēst (jo ēd vegāniski). 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 965 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Matching coded excerpt #9SXFUC: S2: Nu, ar citiem apmeklētājiem tikai tik daudz, cik tāda draudzīga sasmaidīšanās, bet, kad es tur esmu repair cafe sakarā, tad ir viena mamma ar vienu dēlu, kas ir, man liekas, tur katru reizi. Un tas dēls ir tāds ļoti aktīvs, un viņš grib šūt, un tad vienreiz viņš gribēja šūt sev apmetni. Tad mēs izdomājām, kā mēs tur piešūsim lenti, un viņš pats ar viņu piešuva. Tas bija superīgi Jā, ir tādi... 00:47:36 - 00:49:36 S2: Tādi regulārie apmeklētāji, bet, nu, tā, ka man ar viņiem būtu tādas tiešām attiecības, tā es neteiktu, bet tā, ka mēs tur pazīstamies, otru atpazīstam viens otra seju un sasmaidamies, tādas ir, jā. 6. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 464 | Lietu stāsti – kas un kam noderējis, kā sagādājis prieku, kas atrasts Matching coded excerpt #78TEBH: S2: Nu, labi, 10 bija tāds random skaitlis, bet es atceros, es kaut kad aizgāju, un tas vēl bija iepriekšējā uzrāvienā, kad es strādāju skolā, es, nu, pirms 1. septembra aizgāju uz brīvbodi, man bija tāds, man vajag klasiskas bikses. Tad es atradu divas klasiskas bikses. Tad tās es vilku uz skolu. Tad es no turienes esmu ņēmusi, nu, jā, to akrila džemperi, ko es pieminēju, to gan es īstenībā velku nepietiekami bieži, man liekas, lai viņš tiešām attaisnotu savu eksistenci. Tad ir bijusi kaut kāda reize, kad es esmu Repair Cafe, un mēs esam ārā, ir kaut kāds aprīlis vai marts, un ir diezgan vēsi, un es vienkārši ieeju brīvbodē, un es paņemu kaut kādu vestīti, un to es īstenībā, kaut kā sagadījās, ka ir ļoti laba krāsa un ļoti labi piestāv citām lietām, kas man ir, un es viņu tiešām velku, es viņu tiešām bieži velku. 00:31:44 - 00:33:44 S2: Un tad interesanta lieta, kas, man liekas, ir forši, ka var izmēģināt kaut kādus stilus par brīvu. Es paņēmu jaciņu, kura pēc stila laikam saucās bomber jacket. Un es tādu pati nekad nebūtu pirkusi. Man ir kaut kāda aizture pret to, kas ir street style. Man liekas, ka tas ir tajā kategorijā, es tā par sevi nejūtos, man liekas, man nepiestāv, es viņu nevelku. Nu, labi, bet es tā kā uzvelku, man patīk rakstiņš, man patīk krāsa, un tagad tā man ir viena no visbiežāk valkātajām lietām. Es viņu arī velku uz darbu. Jo man vienkārši ir vienas bikses līdzīgā krāsā, nu, tā kā klasiskas bikses un tā bomber jaciņa. Un reāli pārsteidzoši. Bet visvairāk valkātie ir, jā, šie zābaki, kas man šodien arī ir. Bet vispār viņi jāizved pie kurpnieka, jo viņiem ir caurums parādījies zolē. Es mēģināju aizlīmēt, bet izrādās, ka zole nav lieta, ko var baigi aizlīmēt, jo viņa tāpatās, nu, ar berzi izdilst. 7. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 1078 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Matching coded excerpt #AHNXYK: S2: Nu, materiāls pilnīgi noteikti ir būtisks. Vai man patīk materiāls, vai man patīk krāsa, vai man patīk, ka es redzu, kā viņš noveco, nu, jo Brīvbodē nav jaunu lietu, un tad jau var redzēt, kā viņas noveco. Un tad, ja man liekas, ka viņš jau ir sabumbuļojies, jau ir sliktā stāvoklī, nu, tad es viņu neņemšu. Bet, ja man, piemēram, tas materiāls patīk, un viņam pat nav obligāti jābūt, nu, tā kā dabiskam materiālam. Ir gadījies arī paņemt pilnīgi akrila džemperus... Pēc tam gan ir bijusi mazliet sajūta, vai man tiešām šo vajadzēja, jo, nu, viņā ir bišķiņ siltumnīciņas sajūta. Bet par to, vai man patīk, kā izskatās, vai man patīk, kā tas materiāls noveco. Tātad tie ir mani noteikumi. Nav jēgas ņemt tādu, kurš jau izskatās bēdīgi un izskatīsies vēl bēdīgāk pēc tam, kad es viņu sākšu valkāt. 8. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #RXMNYT Agnese Z. Agnese Z., row 72 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Matching coded excerpt #29JEQK: S2: Jā, skatos parasti, nu, drēbes tādas, kas mums derētu vai nu pēc krāsām, lai nav kaut kas, kas pilnīgi, pilnīgi, bet pats galvenais ir materiāls, jo es tā kā sintētiskus materiālus negribu īsti meitām dot, arī sev nē. 9. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #RXMNYT Agnese Z. Agnese Z., row 735 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Matching coded excerpt #NAT85A: S2: Jā, skatos parasti, nu, drēbes tādas, kas mums derētu vai nu pēc krāsām, lai nav kaut kas, kas pilnīgi, pilnīgi, bet pats galvenais ir materiāls, jo es tā kā sintētiskus materiālus negribu īsti meitām dot, arī sev nē. 10. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #RXMNYT Agnese Z. Agnese Z., row 1066 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Matching coded excerpt #E8SAKY: S2: Jā, es arī mēdzu kādreiz kaut ko pāršūt. S2: Nu, tagad man ir mazāk laika tam visam, bet jā, piemēram, dīvāna pārvalks arī ir pāršūts no lielāka pārvalka, un tad tur palika pāri materiāls un vēl spilvenu apšuvu. S2: Nu tā kā kaut kādas lietas man tā kā patīk viņām dot iespēju, un tā kā jā. Approximate matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 750 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Score: 0.364 Related coded excerpt #MWM5A7: S2: Jā, sākumā es par Brīvbodi uzzināju caur Repair Cafe. Tātad sākumā Repair Cafe un Brīvbode notika atsevišķi. Repair Cafe bija Kaņepes Kultūras centrā. Tad uznāca Covid, uz kādu brīdi nekas nenotika, un tad pēc tam, pēc Covid, Repair Cafe ar Brīvbodi nolēma, ka būs vienā vietā. Kas ir ļoti loģisks lēmums, manuprāt. Jo, nu, arī reizēm Brīvbodē ir lietas, kuras vajag mazliet pielabot, vai reizēm Repair Cafe atnes lietas, kurām trūkst materiālu, tad aiziet uz Brīvbodi un paņemt. Nu, jā, nu, tā es tur esmu vismaz reizi mēnesī, reizēm biežāk. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #2N5MN6 Laura L. Laura L., row 410 | Morālā ekonomika Score: 0.354 Related coded excerpt #M8YTVH: S2: Nu jā, man liekas, tās lietu labošanas, tas jau tas pats jau ir arī kaut kādām tām elektroprecēm, tur, jo man tieši arī bija, nu, saruna... S2: Nu jā, par veļas mašīnu labošanu, un ka tur tā kā laikam ļoti bieži, ka tās rezerves daļas ir, nu, praktiski jaunas veļas mašīnas vērtībā. S2: Un tas, man liekas, nu jā, ir tā crazy, jo nu tajā pašā laikā, es nezinu, mest ārā veļas mašīnu, tur atkal tik daudz resursu ir izmantots, lai viņu uztaisītu, man liekas, nu arī ir nu liekas kaut kā tik nepareizi. S1: Hm. S2: Kaut kā, jā. S2: Nu tā. S2: Nu jā, it sevišķi nu tā kā tur tām elektroniskajām lietām, kur ir kaut kādi tie super retie metāli iekšā, vai... S2: Es nezinu, arī atkal kaut kas, kur tur kaut kādā valstī tur, nezinu, paverdzin' cilvēkus tā resursa iegūšanas dēļ, un tad tev vienkārši tāds "ai, nu labi, trīs gadi pagājuši, kaut kas tur saplīsis, metīšu ārā". S2: Un tas tā kā, man liekas, ļoti interesanti, jo, nu jā, man arī tā kā veļas mašīna, ledusskapis nāca kopā ar dzīvokli, un tās tādas, nu, pavecas lietas, bet... S2: Nu, viņas darbojas, viss fain. S2: Un tad tieši kaut kad arī es, nu, runāju ar, nu, draudzeni un viņas boyfriendu, ka viņi tieši bija meklējuši tā kā vecu veļas mašīnu, jo viņas mūsdienās tur plīst daudz vairāk nekā agrāk. ### 52. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 93 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Matching coded excerpt #45JZSZ: S1: I appreciate that you care about this stuff and pay attention and try to find ways to organize and find new things and find a way to deal with things that we don't want. S1: And what you were talking about, that you feel that it's your duty to be the one who does that. S1: And there my feeling is that like, because you care so strongly, I mean, I don't know how to say it without it sounding rude or something, but like, that in some way, and I mean like, I don't mean to say you're doing anything wrong or whatever, I'm just like trying to... 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 422 | Morālā ekonomika Matching coded excerpt #FYT227: S2: Like, I will tend to think, "Okay, maybe we can just literally take like anything and put it in the trash and maybe that's not even so bad." S2: But then somehow by saying that I have like violated a very strong moral norm that I don't understand to begin with. S2: Is it because it's wasteful? S2: Is it because it's harmful? S2: Maybe there is a way to... yeah. S2: Obviously it is wasteful and I can, I mean, I understand that. S2: No, but... 00:07:56 - 00:09:56 S2: No, but yeah, like I'm also very interested in like the issue of plastic waste because that's also a thing where my whole life I feel like I have been made to like automatically agree that plastic waste must be inherently very bad. S2: And for me it's like, but I don't understand why and that makes me feel like a bit confused. 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 95 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Matching coded excerpt #5HKT3V: for me, like taking something seriously is like a dangerous thing because I can either not take it seriously or I can take it extremely seriously. S2: And if I take it extremely seriously, then it's a huge problem. S2: Like with furniture, it's a bit of a problem. S2: Like I can't buy anything and whenever I see like... I always have to... okay, it would be better if I didn't care or I just learned to care in a different way. 00:25:47 - 00:27:47 S2: ...and be more adaptive in a way, but there's some kind of like risk of care. 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 260 | Consumption practices Matching coded excerpt #9G86AX: like I've had to get some suits in my life, and I've never felt particularly good about it. S2: Like if I have to go, if I need to get a suit, I don't have time to learn about suits. S2: I don't know how to do that. S2: And like, and like I can't, I don't want to spend like huge amounts of money when I don't even know, maybe I'm just buying something stupid that costs a lot of money, but then I don't care about it. S2: And it's like, his ideal would be something like, yeah, you have to just have a budget. S2: It's like getting a car, it's like getting anything. S2: And like you should take it somewhat seriously if you need to take it seriously, and like find some real person, like a tailor, who can do it. S2: But then there's all kinds of complicated things where it's like, yeah, you can find these like... 00:29:45 - 00:31:45 S2: ...not the most expensive tailors, and then you need to meet them three times to do like the three different fittings. S2: And they will like go, they travel around to the major cities with some kind of intervals. S2: So like if I first meet him in January, like I'm not going to be able to plan this ever in my life. S2: I won't be able to like procrastinate until the last day and then go to Suit Supply and like, okay, fine, I'm going to take this. S2: But I would really like to have a truly high-quality clothes and... S2: This is the only like really nice thing... S2: I've had a few clothes that I've loved, there's always some element where they've had a very distinct feeling of, "Oh my god, what is this?" S1: Mhm. S2: And some things I have really liked, like in the open-air market, I went there and there was like a woman who made clothes from linen. S2: And she was like, "Oh," somehow in a funny way like looking at me. S2: And I tried things and like, "Hey, this is really cool, it's amazing, it's made of linen, it has some nice buttons that are a bit too big because that's cool." S2: And like, yeah, this is really nice, but then it broke immediately in some places. 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 1083 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Matching coded excerpt #D33N58: S2: But also like, getting... like I've had to get some suits in my life, and I've never felt particularly good about it. S2: Like if I have to go, if I need to get a suit, I don't have time to learn about suits. S2: I don't know how to do that. S2: And like, and like I can't, I don't want to spend like huge amounts of money when I don't even know, maybe I'm just buying something stupid that costs a lot of money, but then I don't care about it. S2: And it's like, his ideal would be something like, yeah, you have to just have a budget. S2: It's like getting a car, it's like getting anything. S2: And like you should take it somewhat seriously if you need to take it seriously, and like find some real person, like a tailor, who can do it. S2: But then there's all kinds of complicated things where it's like, yeah, you can find these like... 00:29:45 - 00:31:45 S2: ...not the most expensive tailors, and then you need to meet them three times to do like the three different fittings. S2: And they will like go, they travel around to the major cities with some kind of intervals. S2: So like if I first meet him in January, like I'm not going to be able to plan this ever in my life. S2: I won't be able to like procrastinate until the last day and then go to Suit Supply and like, okay, fine, I'm going to take this. S2: But I would really like to have a truly high-quality clothes and... S2: This is the only like really nice thing... S2: I've had a few clothes that I've loved, there's always some element where they've had a very distinct feeling of, "Oh my god, what is this?" S1: Mhm. S2: And some things I have really liked, like in the open-air market, I went there and there was like a woman who made clothes from linen. S2: And she was like, "Oh," somehow in a funny way like looking at me. S2: And I tried things and like, "Hey, this is really cool, it's amazing, it's made of linen, it has some nice buttons that are a bit too big because that's cool." S2: And like, yeah, this is really nice, but then it broke immediately in some places. 6. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 639 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Matching coded excerpt #7UK7EP: Brīvbode šķiet mazliet kā ūķītis. Daudz vecu lietu, kam šķietami zudusi vērtība. Lietas, kurām ir pārprodukcija. 7. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 638 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Matching coded excerpt #MCXH24: Brīvbode šķiet mazliet kā ūķītis. Daudz vecu lietu, kam šķietami zudusi vērtība. Lietas, kurām ir pārprodukcija 8. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 1086 | Notions of value, ownership Matching coded excerpt #VTFJ27: Brīvbode šķiet mazliet kā ūķītis. Daudz vecu lietu, kam šķietami zudusi vērtība. Lietas, kurām ir pārprodukcija. 9. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #2N5MN6 Laura L. Laura L., row 748 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Matching coded excerpt #9RLKYW: S2: Man liekas, ka arī, manuprāt, nebūtu arī slikti, ja Brīvbode bišķiņ, nu, tā kā kūrētu vairāk tās lietas. 10. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #2N5MN6 Laura L. Laura L., row 1073 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Matching coded excerpt #WG64EW: S2: Man liekas, ka arī, manuprāt, nebūtu arī slikti, ja Brīvbode bišķiņ, nu, tā kā kūrētu vairāk tās lietas. Approximate matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 808 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.463 Related coded excerpt #VG8U84: Baiba saka, ka uz Brīvbodi atnākusi, kad viņai nomiris vīrs — atnākusi, jutusi labu atmosfēru, forša komanda, Ira viņai jautājusi, vai negribot nākt palīgā. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 757 | Social relations – networks, relations in Brīvbode, exchange relations Score: 0.462 Related coded excerpt #SWZX3T: Es arī uz Brīvbodi nesu lietas, no kurām vienkārši vēlos tikt vaļā, bet esmu arī atradusi šo to jaunu un noderīgu. Tā ir arī mana motivācija pašai nest lietas, ko citādi varētu arī pārdot. – T.i. ir sajūta, ka maiņa notiek un ir līdzvērtīga 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #3WCYQC Līga Līga, row 1377 | Disposal, flow of goods, intense circulation Score: 0.457 Related coded excerpt #QR2DFU: S2: Nē, nekrājot, nē, nē, nē, nē, nē. Tad es darīju tā, vēl pirms tieši es uz Brīvbodi nesu, vēl es aiznesu, man liekas, kaut kādus astoņus vai sešus maisus ar drēbēm uz... Pie Daugavpils ielas ir tā ar baznīcu saistīta, nu, pie tām māsām. Tur es aiznesu. S2: Tā kā, nu, es visur kur. Tad es vēl uz Iļģuciemu braucu. Kāpēc. Es varētu tikpat labi iedot... Nu, tas ir mans... Tas jau vairs nav. S1: No Purvciema uz Iļģuciemu? Bet tas ir interesanti, es domāju, nu, tā kā, jo es visādas tās tieksmes. S2: Kāpēc es tā darīju? Es dažādoju ar domu: nekas, tur pietiek, tagad nesam uz turieni. 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YJLXV7 Sandra Sandra, row 1247 | Disposal, flow of goods, intense circulation Score: 0.451 Related coded excerpt #MM4HN3: S2: Vienkārši es, es biju priecīga, ka ir mantas šitā dabūnamas. Tad es arī padomāju, ka tā ir laba iespēja, kā no savām mantām tikt vaļā, ko žēl ārā mest un kas ir labas. Tad es sāku nest, un tad es sāku nākt regulāri. 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #NCT8BM Ita Ita, row 591 | Fun, creativity, novelty, sustainability, guilt, shame, Scandinavian etc Score: 0.45 Related coded excerpt #HR2EKP: Un Brīvbode zināmā mērā, tad, kad mēs par viņu uzzinājām, tas bija no raidījuma "Zaļgalvis". Pavisam nejauši. Un ideja man ļoti, ļoti iepatikās. Un tad mēs nolēmām, ka jāsāk atrast to vietu, kur tad tas ir. Sākumā Viskaļu ielā. 6. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YJLXV7 Sandra Sandra, row 179 | Consumption practices Score: 0.449 Related coded excerpt #W39QA6: S2: Vienkārši es, es biju priecīga, ka ir mantas šitā dabūnamas. Tad es arī padomāju, ka tā ir laba iespēja, kā no savām mantām tikt vaļā, ko žēl ārā mest un kas ir labas. Tad es sāku nest, un tad es sāku nākt regulāri. 7. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #A6N4NK Zane R. Zane R., row 750 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Score: 0.449 Related coded excerpt #MWM5A7: S2: Jā, sākumā es par Brīvbodi uzzināju caur Repair Cafe. Tātad sākumā Repair Cafe un Brīvbode notika atsevišķi. Repair Cafe bija Kaņepes Kultūras centrā. Tad uznāca Covid, uz kādu brīdi nekas nenotika, un tad pēc tam, pēc Covid, Repair Cafe ar Brīvbodi nolēma, ka būs vienā vietā. Kas ir ļoti loģisks lēmums, manuprāt. Jo, nu, arī reizēm Brīvbodē ir lietas, kuras vajag mazliet pielabot, vai reizēm Repair Cafe atnes lietas, kurām trūkst materiālu, tad aiziet uz Brīvbodi un paņemt. Nu, jā, nu, tā es tur esmu vismaz reizi mēnesī, reizēm biežāk. 8. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #3WCYQC Līga Līga, row 424 | Morālā ekonomika Score: 0.442 Related coded excerpt #UNUSRE: Atļauties brīvāk planēt un tāpēc arī man sanāk šobrīd vairāk veltīt laiku un aiziet papildus uz Brīvbodi diezgan daudz lietas, tikai tāpēc, ka viens periods bija, kad es palīdzēju radiniekiem pārcelties un nu, protams, godīgi sakot, būsim reāli, vieglāk ir izmest ārā. Kāpēc? Tāpēc, ka nav jānes un tā tālāk, un tā tālāk, nu, tas laiks, resursi un tā tālāk. Dažkārt tiešām gribas izmest ārā, bet, nu, man tā iekšējā sajūta neļauj to darīt vienkārši. Jā, un tāpēc arī es daru, tā, kā es daru. 9. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #E8TGY2 Laura Laura, row 149 | Apmeklētāju dažādība Score: 0.439 Related coded excerpt #46GAA9: S2: Nē, es dzīvoju Sarkandaugavā. Uzzināju es par viņu, pirmām kārtām, nejauši no cilvēka. Nu, arī sēžot parkā, pilnīgi nepazīstams cilvēks kaut kā atnāca, apsēdās ar manīm, nu kaut kā aizrunājāmies, un tad viņš man par šito teica. Pēc tam viņa bija ciet, jo tajā laikā es tos laikus nekad nevarēju uzspēt, pa dienu tad laiks. Un tad kaut kā nejauši vienkārši gāju, šeit biju— es trāpījos, viņa kādreiz bija vaļā, un tā bija. Tas bija rudens laikam. Un tad bija rinda. 10. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #YASYZN 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx 00 Piezīmes no Brīvbodes.docx, row 979 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Score: 0.432 Related coded excerpt #7P565U: Ēdu pusdienas uz dīvāna, Ira man piebiksta un saka, lai tomēr pārvācos uz dibentelpu. Vēlāk pārskatu jakas — Ira man piesaka, lai aiztaisu rāvējslēdzējus un pogas, t.i. mani pamāca. ### 53. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 260 | Consumption practices Matching coded excerpt #9G86AX: like I've had to get some suits in my life, and I've never felt particularly good about it. S2: Like if I have to go, if I need to get a suit, I don't have time to learn about suits. S2: I don't know how to do that. S2: And like, and like I can't, I don't want to spend like huge amounts of money when I don't even know, maybe I'm just buying something stupid that costs a lot of money, but then I don't care about it. S2: And it's like, his ideal would be something like, yeah, you have to just have a budget. S2: It's like getting a car, it's like getting anything. S2: And like you should take it somewhat seriously if you need to take it seriously, and like find some real person, like a tailor, who can do it. S2: But then there's all kinds of complicated things where it's like, yeah, you can find these like... 00:29:45 - 00:31:45 S2: ...not the most expensive tailors, and then you need to meet them three times to do like the three different fittings. S2: And they will like go, they travel around to the major cities with some kind of intervals. S2: So like if I first meet him in January, like I'm not going to be able to plan this ever in my life. S2: I won't be able to like procrastinate until the last day and then go to Suit Supply and like, okay, fine, I'm going to take this. S2: But I would really like to have a truly high-quality clothes and... S2: This is the only like really nice thing... S2: I've had a few clothes that I've loved, there's always some element where they've had a very distinct feeling of, "Oh my god, what is this?" S1: Mhm. S2: And some things I have really liked, like in the open-air market, I went there and there was like a woman who made clothes from linen. S2: And she was like, "Oh," somehow in a funny way like looking at me. S2: And I tried things and like, "Hey, this is really cool, it's amazing, it's made of linen, it has some nice buttons that are a bit too big because that's cool." S2: And like, yeah, this is really nice, but then it broke immediately in some places. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #DHZWSK Mikael Mikael, row 1083 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Matching coded excerpt #D33N58: S2: But also like, getting... like I've had to get some suits in my life, and I've never felt particularly good about it. S2: Like if I have to go, if I need to get a suit, I don't have time to learn about suits. S2: I don't know how to do that. S2: And like, and like I can't, I don't want to spend like huge amounts of money when I don't even know, maybe I'm just buying something stupid that costs a lot of money, but then I don't care about it. S2: And it's like, his ideal would be something like, yeah, you have to just have a budget. S2: It's like getting a car, it's like getting anything. S2: And like you should take it somewhat seriously if you need to take it seriously, and like find some real person, like a tailor, who can do it. S2: But then there's all kinds of complicated things where it's like, yeah, you can find these like... 00:29:45 - 00:31:45 S2: ...not the most expensive tailors, and then you need to meet them three times to do like the three different fittings. S2: And they will like go, they travel around to the major cities with some kind of intervals. S2: So like if I first meet him in January, like I'm not going to be able to plan this ever in my life. S2: I won't be able to like procrastinate until the last day and then go to Suit Supply and like, okay, fine, I'm going to take this. S2: But I would really like to have a truly high-quality clothes and... S2: This is the only like really nice thing... S2: I've had a few clothes that I've loved, there's always some element where they've had a very distinct feeling of, "Oh my god, what is this?" S1: Mhm. S2: And some things I have really liked, like in the open-air market, I went there and there was like a woman who made clothes from linen. S2: And she was like, "Oh," somehow in a funny way like looking at me. S2: And I tried things and like, "Hey, this is really cool, it's amazing, it's made of linen, it has some nice buttons that are a bit too big because that's cool." S2: And like, yeah, this is really nice, but then it broke immediately in some places. Approximate matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 399 | Morālā ekonomika Score: 0.384 Related coded excerpt #9CHKNU: Kā tev šķiet, no kurienes nāk tā, ja tu saki pēdējā laikā, ka tu centies rūpīgāk to darīt un esi laikam pievērsusies tai izvērtēšanai dziļāk, kas ir mainījies? S2: Es nezinu, varbūt es vienkāršu pieaugu. Pārstāju grābt visu, ko ieraudzīju. Kaut kā laika gaitā laikam sapratu, ka patiesībā vajag tik maz, lai būtu priecīgs un tā. Būtībā var iztikt ar tiem diviem džinsiem un diviem topiņiem un tā. Ko tad vairāk vajag, un dažreiz ir tā bišķi neērti, ka tik daudz tās drēbes. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 590 | Fun, creativity, novelty, sustainability, guilt, shame, Scandinavian etc Score: 0.384 Related coded excerpt #AFFDYH: Kā tev šķiet, no kurienes nāk tā, ja tu saki pēdējā laikā, ka tu centies rūpīgāk to darīt un esi laikam pievērsusies tai izvērtēšanai dziļāk, kas ir mainījies? S2: Es nezinu, varbūt es vienkāršu pieaugu. Pārstāju grābt visu, ko ieraudzīju. Kaut kā laika gaitā laikam sapratu, ka patiesībā vajag tik maz, lai būtu priecīgs un tā. Būtībā var iztikt ar tiem diviem džinsiem un diviem topiņiem un tā. Ko tad vairāk vajag, un dažreiz ir tā bišķi neērti, ka tik daudz tās drēbes. 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 582 | Fun, creativity, novelty, sustainability, guilt, shame, Scandinavian etc Score: 0.368 Related coded excerpt #3VRNS8: S2: Aptuveni jau 10 gadus pārsvarā iepērkos tikai otrreiz, cik vien tas ir iespēju robežās iespējams, protams, neskaitot higiēnas lietas un tādas lietas, bet maksimāli cenšos tiešām atkārtoti izmantot lietas, humpalas. Un es nezinu, kā es vispār nebiju lietas kursā par tādu Brīvbodi. Man ir tāda jauna pasaulīte, un es esmu tādā sajūsmā, bet es laikam izplūstu pārāk. 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 200 | Consumption practices Score: 0.368 Related coded excerpt #FWEUBH: S2: Aptuveni jau 10 gadus pārsvarā iepērkos tikai otrreiz, cik vien tas ir iespēju robežās iespējams, protams, neskaitot higiēnas lietas un tādas lietas, bet maksimāli cenšos tiešām atkārtoti izmantot lietas, humpalas. Un es nezinu, kā es vispār nebiju lietas kursā par tādu Brīvbodi. Man ir tāda jauna pasaulīte, un es esmu tādā sajūsmā, bet es laikam izplūstu pārāk. 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #3WCYQC Līga Līga, row 263 | Consumption practices Score: 0.362 Related coded excerpt #ELQ5AA: S1: Vai arī tas, kā tu izvēlies patērēt lietas, jā, vēl kaut kā? S2: Patērēt lietas vienmēr esmu patērējusi, nu, es esmu it kā vāc, man liekas, es esmu nopirkusi un vācējusi, tāpēc, ka S2: ir bijis maz. S2: Man ir bijis maz naudas, nu, kopumā S2: studiju laikā man ir bijis maz. S1: Jā. S2: Un patiesībā es ļoti labi atceros, ka es pirms pārcelšos dzīvot jau, nu, gāju dzīvot viena, es jau laiku, kaut kādu pusgadu krāju, nu, nevis krāju, bet es pirku kaut kādas lietas, lai es varētu pārcelties, vienkārši padzīvot, es jau laiku iepriekš nopirku, lai es varētu uzsākt to dzīvi. S1: Jā. S2: Un es ļoti labi atceros, ka es pirku, kājas tur gāja, un tad S2: man nebija laikam tik traki, bet es nezinu, kāpēc, man kaut kādā, nu, tajā laikā bija maksimāli pa vienu centīmu ### 54. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 166 | Consumption practices Matching coded excerpt #E7YGTX: Mēs arī, mēs ik pa laikam vienkārši aizbraucam uz Dobeli. Jo tur ir ļoti fantastisks divstāvīgs "second hand" "market" tāds veikals. Tur nav drēbes, bet tur ir viskaut kādi trauki, elektroiekārtas, mēbeles. Mēs vienkārši aizbraucam tā kā uz muzeju. Citi iet uz muzejiem, mēs aizejam tur, "O, vau, šitas, o, šitais, paskaties, tas kaut kāds vecais IKEA tur modelis, vai kaut kas ir vēl šitāds." Un tad mēs ejam un skatāmies, un tad mums ir tāda izklaide. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 363 | Morālā ekonomika Matching coded excerpt #A8UBUZ: Bet, nu, es tā kā mēģinu skatīties, lai vispār tas iemesls, kāpēc uz Brīvbodi [nāk strādāt], nav tikai: "O, tur ir laba manta, šitais ir tik vērtīgs," vai tamlīdzīgi. Nē, ka tas nav. Dažreiz kaut kas ir vērtīgs, es nezinu, mēs tur kā Brīvbode pēc tam tālāk pārdodam. Nu, Brīvbodei ir kaut kādas vajadzības un tu saproti, ka iedod noziedo ģitāru, kur tu saproti, ka viņai ir kaut kāda "second hand market" tā kā cena kaut kādi 200 eiro, tad es saku, "Šis mums nosedz divus mēnešus komunālajiem." Tā kā neatdosim viņu vienkārši kādam, kas aizies Čiekurkalna tirgū viņu nopārdot. 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 364 | Morālā ekonomika Matching coded excerpt #L7H4YM: Dažreiz kaut kas ir vērtīgs, es nezinu, mēs tur kā Brīvbode pēc tam tālāk pārdodam. Nu, Brīvbodei ir kaut kādas vajadzības un tu saproti, ka iedod noziedo ģitāru, kur tu saproti, ka viņai ir kaut kāda "second hand market" tā kā cena kaut kādi 200 eiro, tad es saku, "Šis mums nosedz divus mēnešus komunālajiem." Tā kā neatdosim viņu vienkārši kādam, kas aizies Čiekurkalna tirgū viņu nopārdot. Ka šito mēs paši, tad... Un tad visi par to zina, ka tā naudiņa aizies tur. S2: Tas, protams, ir tā shady, to mēs nedrīkstētu darīt. Jo mēs esam biedrība, un tad tas viss ir jāiet kaut kā... Tāpēc arī, pieņemsim, biedrība "Tavi draugi" tagad uztaisīja arī veikalu, lai to visu var darīt legāli. Jo, cik es zinu, viņi pirms tam arī to darīja. Bet, nu, tā kā, jā, ka viņi saprata, ka, ja tev noziedo tur veco porcelāna servīzi Rīgas, kuras vērtība ir 300 eiro, tu viņu nedosi vienkārši ukrainim, no kā dzert, tā kā viņi saprot, ka tur tie 300 eiro ir daudz vērtīgāki, tu vari nopirkt, cik daudz tur pamperus vai tamlīdzīgi. Nu, tādā ziņā, ka tās lietas ir dažas tādas, ka tev ir tas ētiskās dabas jautājums, un cik tas ir forši, ja kāds ir to vienkārši ziedojis tev atdošanai tālāk, un tad tu viņu izmanto tā kā... 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 328 | Paralēles vai atšķirības no veikala? Matching coded excerpt #ZNF4NR: Dažreiz kaut kas ir vērtīgs, es nezinu, mēs tur kā Brīvbode pēc tam tālāk pārdodam. Nu, Brīvbodei ir kaut kādas vajadzības un tu saproti, ka iedod noziedo ģitāru, kur tu saproti, ka viņai ir kaut kāda "second hand market" tā kā cena kaut kādi 200 eiro, tad es saku, "Šis mums nosedz divus mēnešus komunālajiem." Tā kā neatdosim viņu vienkārši kādam, kas aizies Čiekurkalna tirgū viņu nopārdot. Ka šito mēs paši, tad... Un tad visi par to zina, ka tā naudiņa aizies tur. S2: Tas, protams, ir tā shady, to mēs nedrīkstētu darīt. Jo mēs esam biedrība, un tad tas viss ir jāiet kaut kā... Tāpēc arī, pieņemsim, biedrība "Tavi draugi" tagad uztaisīja arī veikalu, lai to visu var darīt legāli. Jo, cik es zinu, viņi pirms tam arī to darīja. Bet, nu, tā kā, jā, ka viņi saprata, ka, ja tev noziedo tur veco porcelāna servīzi Rīgas, kuras vērtība ir 300 eiro, tu viņu nedosi vienkārši ukrainim, no kā dzert, tā kā viņi saprot, ka tur tie 300 eiro ir daudz vērtīgāki, tu vari nopirkt, cik daudz tur pamperus vai tamlīdzīgi. Nu, tādā ziņā, ka tās lietas ir dažas tādas, ka tev ir tas ētiskās dabas jautājums, un cik tas ir forši, ja kāds ir to vienkārši ziedojis tev atdošanai tālāk, un tad tu viņu izmanto tā kā... 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #EHQDCZ interview_6_Valentīna 31.05.docx interview_6_Valentīna 31.05.docx, row 197 | Consumption practices Matching coded excerpt #YUFBDX: S2: Jā, jā. Visur, ne tikai second hand. Piemēram, man Pepco patīk veikals un tur es vispār arī... kastrolīšus tur nopērku un tā. Vēl kāds. Nu, pārtikas labi, to es saprotu. 6. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #6BXDF7 Linards Linards, row 695 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Matching coded excerpt #Z3GTVW: Man ir bijusi pieredze ar jaunām lietām, ka viņas ātri saplīst un beidzas. Brīvbodē pārsvarā nonāk lietas, kas ir... Un arī second hand'ā, kas ir izturīgas un laika pārbaudījumu izturējušas. 7. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 528 | Fun, creativity, novelty, sustainability, guilt, shame, Scandinavian etc Matching coded excerpt #DKY5EQ: Jo Krišjānim arī patīk iepirkt viskaut kādus instrumentus un viskaut ko. Mēs pat no velo brauciena Zviedrijā vedām mājās kaut kādas knaibles un āmurus. Vienkārši velo braucienā... Tu tā kā skaitī katru gramu, un tad vienkārši no tālākā Zviedrijas stūra mēs vienkārši vedam atpakaļ kaut kādus instrumentus no kaut kāda viņu tā "second hand" lielveikala, kur mēs bijām. 8. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #3WCYQC Līga Līga, row 261 | Consumption practices Matching coded excerpt #ACLDCG: S2: Tātad, skatoties, kādas. Nu, labi, nu, piemēram, nu, veikals, jā, jebkurā gadījumā veikals, vai arī apģērbu es varu gan veikalā pirkt vai kāds man atdod. S1: Tā mēdz būt? S2: Jā, jā, jā, mēdz būt, piemēram, šī kleita man ir atdota. Vai arī, piemēram, ir arī tie second hand. Mēdz būt arī kaut kas tāds, bet tas retāk varbūt. 9. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #6BXDF7 Linards Linards, row 431 | Lietu stāsti – kas un kam noderējis, kā sagādājis prieku, kas atrasts Matching coded excerpt #CP7TCH: Vienīgi ar Brīvbodes kurpēm vairākkārt ir bijis tā, ka viņas... Tu sāc staigāt, un viņas sadalās. Pēc nedēļas vai pēc divām. Nu, ļoti bieži tā līme jau ir izžuvusi un, vai, nonākot mitrumā... Jā, ar apaviem mēdz būt. Ir kaut kādi divi zābaki, kas turas, bet ir bijuši vairākkārt gadījumi, kad smalkās it kā kurpes, izejot, nākot atpakaļ, jau ir šļap, šļap, šļap. Bet tā ir arī ar second hand pirktām, jā. 10. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #6BXDF7 Linards Linards, row 696 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Matching coded excerpt #L43FH9: Vienīgi ar Brīvbodes kurpēm vairākkārt ir bijis tā, ka viņas... Tu sāc staigāt, un viņas sadalās. Pēc nedēļas vai pēc divām. Nu, ļoti bieži tā līme jau ir izžuvusi un, vai, nonākot mitrumā... Jā, ar apaviem mēdz būt. Ir kaut kādi divi zābaki, kas turas, bet ir bijuši vairākkārt gadījumi, kad smalkās it kā kurpes, izejot, nākot atpakaļ, jau ir šļap, šļap, šļap. Bet tā ir arī ar second hand pirktām, jā. Tas ir vienkārši kaut kādas tehnoloģijas īpatnības, iespējams. Līmētās kurpes, kas ir ilgi stāvējušas, ir vienkārši pārsniegušas jau kādu līmes derīguma un garantijas termiņu. Approximate matches 1. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #PPNZNN Agate Agate, row 41 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Score: 0.437 Related coded excerpt #Q384F6: S1: Bet kādos vēl, tu saki thrift shops, uz kādiem vēl tu ej? S2: Es nezinu, kā īsti, bet man pie mājām ir tāds Asja? S1: Es nezinu, bet, arī vienkārši tāds humpalu veikaliņš tā kā? S2: Jā, jā. Ķengaragā arī ir, nu, tie ir tādi mazi, viņi nav tā plaši zināmi, tāpēc es zinu, ka tur mani vienaudži arī neiet. Es vienreiz uzzināju par šo, nu, mazo veikaliņu, viņš ir Ķengaragā. Es nezinu, kā izskaidrot, tur tādas bodītes ir ļoti daudz. Es, man liekas, uzzināju no... Es gāju uz koncertu Depo, un cilvēki par to vietu stāstīja, ka tur ļoti lēti var dabūt kaut kādas kameras. S1: Kameras? S2: Jā, kameras. S1: Foto kameras? S2: Jā, man vienkārši teica Japānas kaut kādas mini kameriņas, es nezinu, par ko bija runa. Un, pieņemsim, arī uz, man liekas, uz Bērnu pasauli. Tur ir tāds tā kā thrift shop. It kā viss pa eiro, bet tagad cenas ir bišķi augstākas, tur tagad pa 2 eiro viss. S1: Ā, un tās ir lietotas lietas, ja? S2: Jā. Nē, nu, ir tā, kad es, pieņemsim, vēl Imantā, kā tā bāze saucās? Es nezinu. Nu, Imantā arī ir šis thrift shop, tā kā Sebtex, man liekas, Sebteks, jā. Nu, un tur ir mazlietotas un arī jaunas preces. Līdz ar to viņiem varbūt tā cena bišķi atšķiras no parastajiem thrift shops, bet es uzskatu, tur var atrast reālas pērles. Jo tur ir tā kā audumi, nu, audumu arī var atrast, ne tikai drēbes. Un man patīk šūt. 2. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #PPNZNN Agate Agate, row 703 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Score: 0.436 Related coded excerpt #4W93D4: S1: Bet kādos vēl, tu saki thrift shops, uz kādiem vēl tu ej? S2: Es nezinu, kā īsti, bet man pie mājām ir tāds Asja? S1: Es nezinu, bet, arī vienkārši tāds humpalu veikaliņš tā kā? S2: Jā, jā. Ķengaragā arī ir, nu, tie ir tādi mazi, viņi nav tā plaši zināmi, tāpēc es zinu, ka tur mani vienaudži arī neiet. Es vienreiz uzzināju par šo, nu, mazo veikaliņu, viņš ir Ķengaragā. Es nezinu, kā izskaidrot, tur tādas bodītes ir ļoti daudz. Es, man liekas, uzzināju no... Es gāju uz koncertu Depo, un cilvēki par to vietu stāstīja, ka tur ļoti lēti var dabūt kaut kādas kameras. S1: Kameras? S2: Jā, kameras. S1: Foto kameras? S2: Jā, man vienkārši teica Japānas kaut kādas mini kameriņas, es nezinu, par ko bija runa. Un, pieņemsim, arī uz, man liekas, uz Bērnu pasauli. Tur ir tāds tā kā thrift shop. It kā viss pa eiro, bet tagad cenas ir bišķi augstākas, tur tagad pa 2 eiro viss. S1: Ā, un tās ir lietotas lietas, ja? S2: Jā. Nē, nu, ir tā, kad es, pieņemsim, vēl Imantā, kā tā bāze saucās? Es nezinu. Nu, Imantā arī ir šis thrift shop, tā kā Sebtex, man liekas, Sebteks, jā. Nu, un tur ir mazlietotas un arī jaunas preces. Līdz ar to viņiem varbūt tā cena bišķi atšķiras no parastajiem thrift shops, bet es uzskatu, tur var atrast reālas pērles. Jo tur ir tā kā audumi, nu, audumu arī var atrast, ne tikai drēbes. Un man patīk šūt. 3. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #PPNZNN Agate Agate, row 190 | Consumption practices Score: 0.436 Related coded excerpt #F7MYHD: S1: Bet kādos vēl, tu saki thrift shops, uz kādiem vēl tu ej? S2: Es nezinu, kā īsti, bet man pie mājām ir tāds Asja? S1: Es nezinu, bet, arī vienkārši tāds humpalu veikaliņš tā kā? S2: Jā, jā. Ķengaragā arī ir, nu, tie ir tādi mazi, viņi nav tā plaši zināmi, tāpēc es zinu, ka tur mani vienaudži arī neiet. Es vienreiz uzzināju par šo, nu, mazo veikaliņu, viņš ir Ķengaragā. Es nezinu, kā izskaidrot, tur tādas bodītes ir ļoti daudz. Es, man liekas, uzzināju no... Es gāju uz koncertu Depo, un cilvēki par to vietu stāstīja, ka tur ļoti lēti var dabūt kaut kādas kameras. S1: Kameras? S2: Jā, kameras. S1: Foto kameras? S2: Jā, man vienkārši teica Japānas kaut kādas mini kameriņas, es nezinu, par ko bija runa. Un, pieņemsim, arī uz, man liekas, uz Bērnu pasauli. Tur ir tāds tā kā thrift shop. It kā viss pa eiro, bet tagad cenas ir bišķi augstākas, tur tagad pa 2 eiro viss. S1: Ā, un tās ir lietotas lietas, ja? S2: Jā. Nē, nu, ir tā, kad es, pieņemsim, vēl Imantā, kā tā bāze saucās? Es nezinu. Nu, Imantā arī ir šis thrift shop, tā kā Sebtex, man liekas, Sebteks, jā. Nu, un tur ir mazlietotas un arī jaunas preces. Līdz ar to viņiem varbūt tā cena bišķi atšķiras no parastajiem thrift shops, bet es uzskatu, tur var atrast reālas pērles. Jo tur ir tā kā audumi, nu, audumu arī var atrast, ne tikai drēbes. Un man patīk šūt. 4. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #PPNZNN Agate Agate, row 1035 | Rules, successful practice, skills, know-how, techniques Score: 0.436 Related coded excerpt #ZTEGKX: S1: Bet kādos vēl, tu saki thrift shops, uz kādiem vēl tu ej? S2: Es nezinu, kā īsti, bet man pie mājām ir tāds Asja? S1: Es nezinu, bet, arī vienkārši tāds humpalu veikaliņš tā kā? S2: Jā, jā. Ķengaragā arī ir, nu, tie ir tādi mazi, viņi nav tā plaši zināmi, tāpēc es zinu, ka tur mani vienaudži arī neiet. Es vienreiz uzzināju par šo, nu, mazo veikaliņu, viņš ir Ķengaragā. Es nezinu, kā izskaidrot, tur tādas bodītes ir ļoti daudz. Es, man liekas, uzzināju no... Es gāju uz koncertu Depo, un cilvēki par to vietu stāstīja, ka tur ļoti lēti var dabūt kaut kādas kameras. S1: Kameras? S2: Jā, kameras. S1: Foto kameras? S2: Jā, man vienkārši teica Japānas kaut kādas mini kameriņas, es nezinu, par ko bija runa. Un, pieņemsim, arī uz, man liekas, uz Bērnu pasauli. Tur ir tāds tā kā thrift shop. It kā viss pa eiro, bet tagad cenas ir bišķi augstākas, tur tagad pa 2 eiro viss. S1: Ā, un tās ir lietotas lietas, ja? S2: Jā. Nē, nu, ir tā, kad es, pieņemsim, vēl Imantā, kā tā bāze saucās? Es nezinu. Nu, Imantā arī ir šis thrift shop, tā kā Sebtex, man liekas, Sebteks, jā. Nu, un tur ir mazlietotas un arī jaunas preces. Līdz ar to viņiem varbūt tā cena bišķi atšķiras no parastajiem thrift shops, bet es uzskatu, tur var atrast reālas pērles. Jo tur ir tā kā audumi, nu, audumu arī var atrast, ne tikai drēbes. Un man patīk šūt. 5. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 166 | Consumption practices Score: 0.432 Related coded excerpt #E7YGTX: Mēs arī, mēs ik pa laikam vienkārši aizbraucam uz Dobeli. Jo tur ir ļoti fantastisks divstāvīgs "second hand" "market" tāds veikals. Tur nav drēbes, bet tur ir viskaut kādi trauki, elektroiekārtas, mēbeles. Mēs vienkārši aizbraucam tā kā uz muzeju. Citi iet uz muzejiem, mēs aizejam tur, "O, vau, šitas, o, šitais, paskaties, tas kaut kāds vecais IKEA tur modelis, vai kaut kas ir vēl šitāds." Un tad mēs ejam un skatāmies, un tad mums ir tāda izklaide. 6. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 395 | Morālā ekonomika Score: 0.423 Related coded excerpt #TGTSEX: S2: Nu es sāku dzirdēt visādus nostāstus par to, kā tās lietas tiek pārpārdotas un kāds ļoti centīgi lasa ārā visu labo, jauko un arī pati esmu novērojusi tā teikt socmedijos ir tie reselleri, kas salasa labās lietas un tad pēc tam pārdod tālāk kā jaunas vai mazlietotas par lielām naudām un... S1: Tā kā Facebookā vai kur tā kā vairāk? S2: Jā, arī, arī TikTokā. 7. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #BCTCEA Marta Marta, row 46 | Consumption work, volunteer work, work of disposal and acquisition Score: 0.422 Related coded excerpt #VLFGWD: S2: Nu es sāku dzirdēt visādus nostāstus par to, kā tās lietas tiek pārpārdotas un kāds ļoti centīgi lasa ārā visu labo, jauko un arī pati esmu novērojusi tā teikt socmedijos ir tie reselleri, kas salasa labās lietas un tad pēc tam pārdod tālāk kā jaunas vai mazlietotas par lielām naudām un... S1: Tā kā Facebookā vai kur tā kā vairāk? S2: Jā, arī, arī TikTokā. 8. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #3WCYQC Līga Līga, row 261 | Consumption practices Score: 0.405 Related coded excerpt #ACLDCG: S2: Tātad, skatoties, kādas. Nu, labi, nu, piemēram, nu, veikals, jā, jebkurā gadījumā veikals, vai arī apģērbu es varu gan veikalā pirkt vai kāds man atdod. S1: Tā mēdz būt? S2: Jā, jā, jā, mēdz būt, piemēram, šī kleita man ir atdota. Vai arī, piemēram, ir arī tie second hand. Mēdz būt arī kaut kas tāds, bet tas retāk varbūt. 9. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 686 | Types of goods, infrastructure, bodies, technologies, objects Score: 0.403 Related coded excerpt #U9KVGX: Atsevišķā kontekstā, jo man patika, ka viens tāds, skatījos, viens britu uzņēmums laikam, viņi nodarbojas ar tām secondhand lietām, ko nevienam īsti vairs nevajag, kas ir palikušas bezmaz vai tā kā pāri. Viņi vienkārši kūrēja tādas, tā kā tematiskās, tādus blokus un tamlīdzīgi. Un viņi spēja atrast īpašnieku jaunu bezmaz vai katrai lietai. Viņi mācēja to tik labi pasniegt, vai nu pēc kaut kādas filmas stilistikas, vai pēc pasākuma, vai pēc kaut kādas personības, vai valsts, vai tamlīdzīgi. Viņiem tā mājaslapa arī bija par dažādām tēmām. Un principā visas tās lietas var ielikt kaut kādā kontekstā, un viņas paliek foršas un iekārojamas. Un tas priekš manis arī ir tas, kādā funkcijā šo te drausmīgo adīto vesti, kā tu varētu iemīlēt, un tad tu viņu ieliec kopā tur kaut ko konkrētu, tu saproti, ā, jā, šitā, tas tā kā aiziet. Un tas ir man tas izaicinājums arī, jo katrai lietai var būt īpašnieks, viņš tikai kaut kādā pareizā kontekstā ir jāparāda tev. Vai dažreiz vienkārši jāāsamaina lietas vietām, un tas man ir tas interesantais, jo tā kā daudzas lietas nevar izņemt, ja es redzu viņās kaut kādu potenciālu, kas kādam varētu patikt, un tad man ir tāds izaicinājums iekšējais, kā, kur viņš man ir jānoliek, ar ko kopā jāsaliek vai uz kuru festivālu jāaizved, lai tas aizietu. 10. Source: Ieva coded excerpt spreadsheet (#XGCWS4) Context: #SYQ2HN Alise Alise, row 364 | Morālā ekonomika Score: 0.398 Related coded excerpt #L7H4YM: Dažreiz kaut kas ir vērtīgs, es nezinu, mēs tur kā Brīvbode pēc tam tālāk pārdodam. Nu, Brīvbodei ir kaut kādas vajadzības un tu saproti, ka iedod noziedo ģitāru, kur tu saproti, ka viņai ir kaut kāda "second hand market" tā kā cena kaut kādi 200 eiro, tad es saku, "Šis mums nosedz divus mēnešus komunālajiem." Tā kā neatdosim viņu vienkārši kādam, kas aizies Čiekurkalna tirgū viņu nopārdot. Ka šito mēs paši, tad... Un tad visi par to zina, ka tā naudiņa aizies tur. S2: Tas, protams, ir tā shady, to mēs nedrīkstētu darīt. Jo mēs esam biedrība, un tad tas viss ir jāiet kaut kā... Tāpēc arī, pieņemsim, biedrība "Tavi draugi" tagad uztaisīja arī veikalu, lai to visu var darīt legāli. Jo, cik es zinu, viņi pirms tam arī to darīja. Bet, nu, tā kā, jā, ka viņi saprata, ka, ja tev noziedo tur veco porcelāna servīzi Rīgas, kuras vērtība ir 300 eiro, tu viņu nedosi vienkārši ukrainim, no kā dzert, tā kā viņi saprot, ka tur tie 300 eiro ir daudz vērtīgāki, tu vari nopirkt, cik daudz tur pamperus vai tamlīdzīgi. Nu, tādā ziņā, ka tās lietas ir dažas tādas, ka tev ir tas ētiskās dabas jautājums, un cik tas ir forši, ja kāds ir to vienkārši ziedojis tev atdošanai tālāk, un tad tu viņu izmanto tā kā... ### 55. Assistant This is very rich. Let me organise what I found into specific *moments of intersection* — the kind you can point to in writing and say "here, two practices meeting." Some are big architectural intersections, some are tiny gestures. I've grouped them by *type of intersection*. ## A. Spatial co-location: practices share the room **Brīvbode + Repair Cafe in one venue.** Zane is the clearest articulator (#MWM5A7): *"It's a very logical decision. Sometimes Brīvbode has things that need a little fixing, and sometimes Repair Cafe has things that need materials, so they go to Brīvbode and pick some up."* The two practices feed each other through the wall. This is a textbook practice-bundle that became a practice-complex through co-location. **Brīvbode + plant swap + opening parties.** Your fieldnote on the new venue's launch (#DCFACM): outside there's a plant exchange and Repair Cafe simultaneously, while you're inside Brīvbode having baked vegan cookies and a coconut-milk-and-blueberry cake at home that morning, partly because tofu was about to expire. *The same Saturday afternoon contains: home baking, ingredient salvage, plant exchange, repair, donation, sociality.* It's a small carnival of intersecting practices. **The unsuccessful sewing corner.** Gundega tells how Alise once tried to set up a sewing station in Brīvbode, but it failed because people kept taking the equipment ("zaguši" — stealing) (#CDEYWQ). A practice was attempted at the site but didn't take root — the site's own logic of free circulation was incompatible with the bounded-tools logic of a sewing space. That's a productive *failed* intersection worth analysing. ## B. Material flow between practices **Marta's loop.** Probably the single best case in the whole corpus. *"I started making rugs because, walking around second-hand shops, I'd accumulated so many clothes I started thinking how to use them — not to throw away or donate further, but what could I do to give them value. So I started making rugs and went around the loop"* (#T5GXHP). One practice (secondhand acquisition) generated a surplus that birthed a second practice (rugmaking), which then sources its materials from a third practice context (Brīvbode) and produces gifts feeding into a fourth (gifting) (#GVEZVU, #JZEB5D, #X7NNSU). The same biography contains four practices linked by Brīvbode. **Zane's Soviet wool trousers.** *"Those are retro fabrics, Soviet fabrics. From one of them I'm currently sewing trousers in sewing school"* (#R5L3SK). A garment from Brīvbode → unmade for fabric → remade as trousers at sewing school → worn. Brīvbode is one node in a multi-step craft trajectory that crosses domestic, educational, and circulation sites. **Madara's mosquito net.** *"I had the very good fortune to find an old, cut-up mosquito net, which I use as a base for embroidery"* (#EAUY5V). Something that *looked* like waste to others entered embroidery practice as material. The practice of *embroidery* is the lens that recategorises waste-as-material. **Marta cutting zippers from jeans.** *"It's now cheaper to buy used jeans, cut out the zipper, than to buy a new zipper"* (#GVEZVU). Sewing-as-craft meets retail pricing meets material extraction at the seam of a pair of jeans. The market for new haberdashery has made dismantling secondhand clothes economically rational, which then shapes what these participants do at the site. **Online retailer routing returns to Brīvbode.** Chapter 4's #4G43HR: a participant told by the online retailer to *donate* her returned, ill-fitting purchase rather than send it back. Fast-fashion logistics meets volunteer labour: corporate disposal practice grafted onto the swapshop. **The wire offcuts.** Already in chapter 4 (#HN8W7V): a man's wireworking craft generates surplus → his wife routes it through her divestment practice → reaches Brīvbode → never visibly taken → volunteers don't tell her. *"An imagined right-owner who may not exist."* The practice the materials were *intended* to meet (children's craft) didn't actually exist at the site. ## C. Competence transfer between practices **Ira teaching you (Ieva) to close zippers.** A small but lovely fieldnote (#7P565U): you eat lunch on the couch, Ira nudges you to move to the back room, and later when you're going through jackets she instructs you to close the zippers and buttons. *Sorting competency is being transmitted on the spot.* This is competence circulation in real time, in a body, in a doorway. **Kristīne teaching her daughters at Brīvbode.** Already in chapter 5 (#VCEUP7): she uses visits as moral education — *"It's also an opportunity to talk about things."* She is teaching three things at once: material literacy (what's worth donating), divestment ethics, and the embodied disposition of care. Three competencies from three different practices being transmitted together because the site holds them together. **Zane learning to sort women's clothing through Repair Cafe.** Zane learned about Brīvbode *through* Repair Cafe (#MWM5A7). Her sewing competency, her repair competency, and her swapshop competency developed in entanglement, not separately. **Viesturs learning to sort women's clothing as a man.** Already in chapter 4 (#BCDC5C): *"Where do I put it. Trying to systematize women's clothing — it's like a tree with many branches."* His existing competencies from other domains don't help; he has to develop a new one through site-specific practice. This is what it looks like when a person's existing practice habitus doesn't fit the site they've entered. ## D. Meaning collisions **The shift from "free" to "exchange" in Madara's head.** Already cited (#CUBS5Q). She is *actively repairing* her own meaning structure to fit the site: replacing the meaning structure of consumption-as-acquisition with one of exchange. This is meaning-element migration enacted as a personal cognitive discipline. **Alise's "shady" guitar resale.** A donor donates a guitar worth €200 secondhand; rather than letting it walk, the volunteers sell it themselves to cover two months of utilities (#A8UBUZ, #L7H4YM, #ZNF4NR). The non-monetary exchange practice collides with the volunteer-organisation-financial-survival practice. Alise calls it "shady" and notes that "biedrība Tavi draugi" set up an actual shop precisely to legalise this kind of cross-practice transaction. *The moral economy and the operational sustainability practice pull apart at exactly this seam.* **Aiga's imagined homeless recipient vs. the volunteer's quality threshold.** Chapter 4 #7ZXWJU + #YNY54V. Aiga's *charity-orientation* meaning (someone in genuine need would use this) meets the volunteers' *moral-exchange* meaning (we are not a charity). The same object means different things in the two practices, and the encounter at the donation table is where the meanings collide. **Viesturs's "purgatory for things."** Chapter 4 #Z4WUR2. The *spiritual/energetic* meaning of secondhand (objects carry previous owners' aura) meets the *institutional* meaning Brīvbode wants to project. Viesturs's joke metabolises the collision: he keeps the spiritual frame but reroutes it through Brīvbode-as-purifier. A meaning-element gets rewired across two practices. **Marija's "I will not let them see I've fallen so low" / "I'm common, I'll go and get what I need."** Chapter 4 #86WW2X. *Class-respectability* practice (managing how one is seen) meets *thrift/access* practice. The collision happens inside one person and produces both denial and reclamation in the same conversation. **Jana's son refusing to let her donate his clothes — and refusing things she finds for him.** #4DE547. The *family material care* practice meets the *anti-Brīvbode-stigma* practice in the same boy. The mother is caught between two practice frames he holds simultaneously. ## E. Site-mediated personal practice projects **Māra using Brīvbode as detachment infrastructure.** Already in chapter 4 (#LG8X4N): *"The question of attachment is in process. Brīvbode helps this process develop."* She is recruiting the swapshop into a *personal sufficiency practice* she is cultivating. The site is appropriated as a tool for a practice she's developing at home. **Aiga's post-employment biographical rupture.** #Z2Y4K8: a month-long solo trip after employment ended catalysed her shift away from hoarding. Now she routes things through Brīvbode partly because *"I want it to not be hard to pick up a bag and leave"* (#AB5XLD) — an explicitly *war-anxiety-driven* divestment. The geopolitical practice of preparing-to-flee meets the everyday practice of household divestment, mediated by the swapshop. **Baiba arriving after her husband died.** Fieldnote #VG8U84: she came to Brīvbode after her husband's death, found a good atmosphere, was asked by Ira if she'd like to volunteer. *Bereavement practice → site visiting → recruitment to volunteering.* A life-event moves a person from one practice into another, and Brīvbode is the hinge. ## F. Routing and circuit-making across practices **Zane's loop: Brīvbode + Otrā Elpa + Humana + Repair Cafe.** *"I usually combine them. When I want to take a donation somewhere or find something, I do a circuit — Brīvbode, Otrā Elpa, Humana or somewhere else. Most often together with Repair Cafe"* (#JVUQGU). Brīvbode is one node on a regular practice-circuit that loops through several institutional sites in one outing. The practice is *the circuit*, not any single stop. **Līga's distributed donation routing.** *"Before I started bringing to Brīvbode, I'd taken some eight or six bags of clothes to the place by the Daugavpils Street church, those nuns. I'd drive to Iļģuciems too. Why? I'd diversify, thinking 'enough there now, let's bring it here.'"* (#QR2DFU) Her divestment practice has its own internal routing logic spread across charity infrastructures of the city; Brīvbode joined that network rather than replacing it. **Brīvbode + Dobele "second-hand museum" trips.** Alise: *"We sometimes just drive to Dobele. There's a fantastic two-storey second-hand market shop. Not clothes, but dishes, electronics, furniture. We just drive there like to a museum"* (#E7YGTX). Tourism practice + secondhand acquisition practice + leisure-day practice — Brīvbode-going extended into a recreational genre of object-encountering. ## G. The site reshapes practices it touches **Linards's shoes that disintegrate.** *"With Brīvbode shoes it's been the case several times that you start walking and they disintegrate. After a week or two. Often the glue has dried out… But this also happens with secondhand-bought shoes, yeah"* (#CP7TCH). The material practice of *shoe-wearing* meets the site's *unscreened older inventory* — and Linards has had to develop a new tolerance for short-lived footwear, a new judgement, and a new attribution of cause (glue, age, technology). The practice of wearing-shoes adapts. **Rasa welding a stove from upcycled parts.** Chapter 5 #BTZ4RL. The shop needed a new stove → DIY metalwork practice → bartered against her partner's motorboat sanding labour. Three practices intersecting in one stove: shop-running, home-fabrication, and reciprocal favour-exchange. **Mikael's suit problem.** #9G86AX, #D33N58: an outsider perspective on what it means *not* to have practices for clothing acquisition that work. He encounters tailors and linen-clothes-makers and shoemakers as people whose *integrated* practices he cannot articulate with — he can't procrastinate-then-Suit-Supply. Useful as a contrastive case: when someone *doesn't* have a practice repertoire that fits, the absence is visible. ## How to use this in writing A few suggestions for what to do with this: 1. **Lead a section with one strong intersection case and let it carry the conceptual weight.** Marta's rug loop is the best candidate — it's a single biography that contains four intersecting practices and an explicit *"and so I went around the loop"*. That's almost too good not to use. 2. **Build a short typology of intersection types.** What I've listed above could collapse into something like: *spatial co-location, material flow, competence transfer, meaning collision, biographical recruitment, circuit-making.* Six modes through which the site brings practices into productive contact. This would give chapter 4 the analytical spine it currently lacks. 3. **The Repair Cafe coupling deserves its own paragraph.** Right now it's not in the chapter at all. It's the cleanest empirical case of "two practices share materials, share a building, and one is the other's input/output." 4. **The Alise guitar resale story is the perfect "moral economy under cross-practice strain" case.** Currently absent. Would strengthen #PZH45P enormously by showing the moral-economy framing buckling not just under resellers' pressure but under the org's own financial survival practice. 5. **Bring fieldnote scenes (the cake, Ira's zipper instruction, the unsuccessful sewing corner, opening day) into the body of the chapter.** They're some of the most evocative passages in the corpus and they all show practice intersection in action. If you want, I can draft a single new section — maybe "Practices Meeting at the Site" or similar — that uses three or four of these cases to do the conceptual work of showing the multiplicity, before the chapter dives into divestment. ### 56. User that'd be a great inspiration! ### 57. Assistant Here's a draft section. It's intended to slot in early in chapter 4 — probably right after the new chapter intro we drafted — and to do the conceptual work of showing the multiplicity through specific cases before the chapter walks through divestment, the site, acquisition, and so on. I've kept it to four cases plus a short framing and closing paragraph. Each case is built on a real interview or fieldnote excerpt, with block ids you can cite. Edit as needed; some of the verbatim phrasing should be checked against your transcripts. --- ## Practices Meeting at the Site Before turning to the trajectory of things and people through Brīvbode, I want to slow down on the question of which practices, exactly, are gathering there. The chapter that follows is organised around the flow of objects — incoming, sorting, acquisition, letting go — but that flow itself is sustained by the meeting of practices that are ordinarily kept apart, and which become observable here only because the swapshop holds them together for a moment. Four short cases, drawn from interviews and fieldwork, give a sense of how this meeting actually works in practice. ### Marta's loop Marta has been thrifting for around ten years and is, on her own account, *"in such delight"* about Brīvbode that she fears she is *"flowing over"* in the interview (#FWEUBH). What is striking is not that she comes to Brīvbode but that her rugmaking practice originated in her secondhand acquisition: *"I started making rugs because, walking around second-hand shops, I'd accumulated so many clothes that I started thinking how to use them — not to throw them out, not to donate them onward, but what I could do to give them value. So I started making rugs and went around the loop"* (#T5GXHP). The acquisition practice produced a material surplus that birthed a craft practice, which now sources its inputs from the same circulation infrastructure that originally created the surplus. She also extracts components: *"It's now cheaper to buy used jeans and cut out the zipper than to buy a new zipper"* (#GVEZVU). And she gives some of what she makes as gifts to a partner and friends who would otherwise prefer new things (#X7NNSU). One biography contains four practices — secondhand acquisition, rugmaking, material extraction, and gifting — linked through Brīvbode and other circulation sites. Her own phrase, *going around the loop,* is more accurate than any I could supply: a participant has noticed the homology, even if she has not theorised it. ### Zane's circuit Zane's account makes visible how Brīvbode functions as one node in a wider circuit of practices that participants assemble themselves. She first encountered the swapshop through Repair Cafe, and the two have since moved into the same building — *"a very logical decision, I think. Sometimes Brīvbode has things that need a little fixing, and sometimes Repair Cafe brings things that need materials, so they go to Brīvbode and pick some up"* (#MWM5A7). For Zane the institutional adjacency reflects a personal adjacency of practices: when she goes out, she usually combines, doing a circuit through Brīvbode, Otrā Elpa, Humana, *"or somewhere else, most often together with Repair Cafe"* (#JVUQGU). She is also enrolled in a sewing school, where she is currently making a pair of trousers from Soviet-era wool fabric she found at Brīvbode (#R5L3SK), and is planning to give friends bespoke sewn gifts — invite them over, choose patterns and fabric together, sew them at her machine (#5AKG73). Her sewing competency, her repair competency, and her swapshop competency have grown together rather than separately, and the practices feed into each other through the materials they share. She is also clear that the configuration depends on something else: she now has the time to do this because she is not working full-time (#45ZJMP). A practice circuit is being held together by, among other things, a particular relationship to working hours. ### The guitar that became utilities A different kind of intersection appears when Brīvbode's own moral economy is strained by the practical work of keeping the organisation afloat. Alise describes a recurring decision: when a particularly valuable item is donated — she gives the example of a guitar worth around two hundred euros on the secondhand market — the volunteers sometimes sell it themselves to cover the swapshop's expenses rather than letting it walk off the floor and likely end up resold at the Čiekurkalns flea market. *"This will cover two months of utilities,"* she says they say. *"This is, of course, a bit shady, we shouldn't really do this — we are a registered association, everything has to go through the books. That's why Tavi Draugi opened an actual shop, to be able to do this legally"* (#A8UBUZ, #L7H4YM, #ZNF4NR). The non-monetary exchange practice that Brīvbode formally upholds collides here with the fundraising and bill-paying practice that any organisation has to perform in order to continue existing. The two practices share the same room, the same volunteers, and sometimes the same object, but operate by incompatible rules; what holds them together is a quiet pragmatism and the shared knowledge that the alternative — letting a good guitar drift through the door — would feel worse. ### A stove for a motorboat A small fragment from chapter 5 belongs here too. When Brīvbode needed a new stove, Rasa and her partner welded one themselves, using upcycled gas canisters, springs from an old sofa, and a drain fitting; in exchange for her partner's labour, Rasa promised him a week of help with the final sanding phase of his DIY motorboat project (#BTZ4RL). The shop-running practice is here being sustained by a metalwork practice, which is in turn being remunerated by a boatbuilding practice, all through the medium of an unmonetised reciprocal favour. None of these practices reduce to any of the others, and none of them are particularly *about* freecycling. But all three intersect at Brīvbode, and the swapshop's ongoing operation depends on their meeting. ### What this multiplicity does These cases are not exhaustive — others appear throughout the chapter — but they sketch the kind of intersection the site supports. Practices meet at Brīvbode in several ways: through *spatial co-location* (Repair Cafe and Brīvbode under one roof), through *material flow* (Marta's rugs, Zane's trousers), through *competence transfer* (the sorting skills Ira teaches a new volunteer at the doorway, the moral education Kristīne conducts with her daughters by the donation table), through *meaning collision* (the resold guitar, the imagined homeless recipient meeting a volunteer's quality threshold), and through *biographical recruitment* (Baiba arriving after her husband's death and being invited to volunteer, #VG8U84). The chapter that follows will trace these intersections in more detail as it walks through divestment, the site itself, acquisition, and the questions of attachment and sustainability that arise on either side. What the cases above are meant to establish, in advance, is that the analytical work of the chapter is not the description of a single bounded practice called freecycling but the description of how a particular site holds heterogeneous practices in a working relation to one another. --- A few thoughts on the draft: - It's around 1100 words. You can cut the stove case if it duplicates chapter 5 too much, or move it to a footnote and let chapter 5 carry the weight there. I included it because it makes the *"none of these are about freecycling, all of them sustain it"* point in one paragraph. - The five-mode typology in the closing paragraph (co-location, material flow, competence transfer, meaning collision, biographical recruitment) is a smaller version of the six I listed in my previous turn — I dropped *circuit-making* because Zane's case already does that work. You can expand or contract this list freely. - Marta's *"going around the loop"* phrase is doing a lot of work — I'd verify the exact Latvian (#T5GXHP has *"apgāju to loku"*) and consider giving it as a section title or callback later in the thesis. - The section sets up the chapter to do nexus analysis rather than single-practice analysis without requiring you to abandon any of the existing material — the divestment, site, acquisition and so on sections all still work, they just now read as descriptions of how *one* of the intersecting practices flows through Brīvbode rather than as parts of a single thing. If any of the cases feels off or you want a different fourth case (instead of the stove — say, the Repair Cafe + plant swap opening day fieldnote, or Aiga's thirty trips, or Madara's "from free to exchange"), it's a quick swap. ### 58. User the loop yeah i mean that's circulation, and it's the hobson paper too ### 59. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 10, "query": "closing the loop circular economy Hobson" } ``` ### 60. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Matching paragraph #C8L8YQ: Hobson, K. (2020) ‘“Small stories of closing loops”: social circularity and the everyday circular economy’, Climatic Change, 163(1), pp. 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02480-z 2. Source: Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing (#AVNZLE), Christian Fuentes, Réka Tölg, p. 1 Context: #S6NTVJ Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing #QR437R Introduction Matching excerpt #ZDP99W: In recent years, the circular economy has attracted considerable scholarly and societal attention (Merli et al, 2018; Hobson, 2020). Circularity advocates – such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2013) – and policy documents – such as the European Commission (2020) – argue for the transition to a more circular and therefore also a more materially efficient economy (Ortega Alvarado et al, 2021). The circular economy programme sets out to break with the take-make-dispose linear economy, instead establishing a circular system in which materials are kept in circulation through ‘closed’ production and consumption loops (Hobson, 2016; Mylan et al, 2016). While much of the circular economy research focuses on production and recycling processes, typically geared towards the electronics, metal and waste management industries (Ghisellini et al, 2016; Merli et al, 2018), the role of consumers in making the circular economy possible is beginning to be acknowledged (Hobson et al, 2021). 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #BA7Z5L LIST OF SOURCES Matching paragraph #EK4EWA: Hobson, K. (2020) ‘“Small stories of closing loops”: social circularity and the everyday circular economy’, Climatic Change, 163(1), pp. 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02480-z 4. Source: Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review (#PSBVW7), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 0 Context: #HHKK3Q Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review #RRR7Y9 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #5QVW6D: A circular economy (CE) aims at decoupling value creation from waste generation and resource use [1] by radically transforming production and consumption systems [2]. Most of the literature on the circular economy seems to focus on the production side, exploring circular business models [3], strategies to develop circular value propositions [4], and the benefits of such models [5]. Less attention seems to have been paid to how consumption and consumers would affect or be affected by the circular economy [2]. As suggested by Hobson et al. [6] the circular economy might translate into significant changes in people’s everyday lives, but there seems to be little understanding of such alterations in the scientific literature, and the policies promoting the circular economy [7]. Among such changes are the 5. Source: Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review (#PSBVW7), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 6 Context: #HHKK3Q Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review #73CQ2D 4. Results #3VQSYA 4.1. General Characteristics Matching excerpt #Y9DTY6: Most of the studies reviewed focussed on specific solutions such as the sharing economy and collaborative consumption (40%), PSS (24%), and remanufactured products (25%). Research addressing consumption in the context of the circular economy is scarce (10%). Although research focussing on consumers and specific solutions that contribute to closing material loops started in the mid-1990s, it has been on the rise ever since. At first, regarding consumption, researchers seem to have only worked with PSS, but remanufacturing and the sharing economy started to catch their attention after 2010. Studies investigating consumption in the specific context of the circular economy appeared for the first time in 2015. 6. Source: Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review (#PSBVW7), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 2 Context: #HHKK3Q Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review #ZNHCPN 2. Background #48MHB9 2.1. Circular Economy and Circular Solutions Matching excerpt #CUCH48: Following Kirchherr et al., in a circular economy, materials and products should be reused, recycled, and recovered instead of discarded, if not reduced. Companies aiming at becoming circular should offer solutions based on such activities. In order to decide what solutions could be considered circular, we turned to the literature on circular business models. In 2014, Accenture [13] suggested five types of circular business models: circular supplies, resource recovery, product life extension, sharing platforms, and product as service. Later, Bocken et al. [14] suggested the access performance model, extending product value, classic long life, encouraging sufficiency, extending resource value, and industrial symbiosis as circular business model strategies. In a more systematic fashion, Lewandowski [4] presented over 25 different business models corresponding to the ReSOLVE (regenerate, share, optimise, loop, virtualise, and exchange) framework by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation [15]. Despite these efforts, clear definitions of circular business models and circular value propositions are still lacking 7. Source: Material culture and the circular economy (#R69WZQ), Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, p. 0 Context: #J8TDC3 Material culture and the circular economy #CNF67G 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #NKRBD6: Interpretations of the circular economy and its wide-reaching political mandate have an impact on the roles of resources and objects in the “consumer” society. As illustrated above, the discourse surrounding the circular economy has largely centered on the lives of objects, with a focus on repair, sharing, and re-use, with the general aim being the efficient handling of matter through systems of provision. This has implications for how the consumer’s role is understood. For example, Hobson et al. (2021) write about efforts to engage households in the circular economy, and to enhance their capacity to use, manage and preserve objects. 8. Source: Reuse practices and household consumption work (#V9QTJP), David M. Evans, Peter Jackson, Rorie Beswick-Parsons, p. 2 Context: #YDJM7S Prácticas de reutilización y trabajo de consumo doméstico #UTZZ6F Introduction Matching excerpt #6U9397: With a growing emphasis on the 'Circular Economy' in debates on consumption, sustainability and everyday life, systems of reuse are increasingly attracting attention (for example (EMF, 2019), (Greenpeace, 2020)) in transforming 'production-consumption systems towards enhanced material circularity' (Greene et al., 2024, p. 1). For example, the UK Plastics Pact emphasizes the need for a series of technical and design-based solutions in 'eliminating problematic plastics' and 'creating a circular economy for plastics' (WRAP, n.d.). At the same time, there is a strong emphasis on 'hard hitting campaigns' that encourage citizens to 'recycle more of the right things' (WRAP, n.d.) and a widespread sense that consumers must 'do their bit' by, for example, switching from single-use plastics to reusable packaging. 1 Within social science work, the role of 'consumer-users' and the labour involved in achieving a more sustainable circular economy has been identified as a critical, but often overlooked, component of citizen participation (Greene et al., 2024; Hobson, 2020; Hobson et al., 2021). Hobson's work suggests that any successful transition towards a circular economy requires a shift beyond prevailing individualistic perspectives on consumer behaviour that have dominated policy approaches against the backdrop of technocratic changes (cf. Shove, 2010). This paper contributes to these debates, focusing on the dynamics of existing household consumption practices to better understand how these might enable or inhibit the development of systems of reuse. 9. Source: New spaces, ordinary practices: Circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning (#XATD2A), Helen Holmes, p. 2 Context: #AHCZ2X New spaces, ordinary practices: Circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning #4F5EEN 2. Situating provisioning #38LM6C 2.2. Circular economy and sharing economy Matching excerpt #3CMBV5: To date, the majority of work on CE has focused on large-scale manufacturing and industrial processes, and their adoption of closed loop, cradle-to-cradle processes to maximise efficiency (Abu-Ghunmi et al., 2016; Lieder and Rashid, 2016). Circular economy is defined by WRAP (2017) as a model which keeps resources in use for as long as possible, avoiding make-use-dispose linear models. However, recent political interest in the concept has propelled a shift, not only in its popularity, but also its reach. The European's Commission now has a 'Circular Economy Package' designed to help 'European businesses and consumers to make the transition to a stronger and more circular economy where resources are used in a more sustainable way' (European Commission, 2015). Likewise, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation is solely focused on promoting economic circularity that is 'restorative and regenerative by design' including business, government and academia (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2012). This wide-ranging endorsement of CE, alongside its political broadening to include consumers, has led a few academics to begin to question the scope and potential spatiality of the concept. As Hobson (2016: 99) argues, close attention needs to be paid 'to spaces where disparate forms of CE may emerge and/or be fostered in forms and ways that current analyses of the CE omits'. 10. Source: New spaces, ordinary practices: Circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning (#XATD2A), Helen Holmes, p. 2 Context: #AHCZ2X New spaces, ordinary practices: Circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning #4F5EEN 2. Situating provisioning #38LM6C 2.2. Circular economy and sharing economy Matching excerpt #56AZCA: In a previous study with others (Mylan et al., 2016), I argue for recognition of the domestic as a site of CE; where practices that constitute domestic life, including food sharing, repurposing and recycling, already involve the circularity of materials. Similarly, Hobson (2016: 96) alludes to the importance of the household, and the materials which flow in and out, in expanding CE's realm. In addition, and as already noted, connections are being made between CE and SE. Lacy and Rutqvist (2015) describe the sharing platform, and the likes of Uber and Lyft Inc, as CE business models. Whilst not expressively stating the varying forms of economy at work, research by Niinimäki and Hassi (2011) likewise draws upon the links between PSS schemes involving fashion items, and more sustainable, circular modes of consumption. Thus, it is evident that the division between SE/CE is blurred and the two are often interwoven. Hobson (2016) also makes these connections to PSS and the interweaving of CE/SE, referencing models such as Zipcar. However, Hobson (2016) pushes at this further, referring to social enterprises and 'generative spaces' (p.98) of everyday activism, such as repair cafes, as spaces of the CE. Hobson's work bridges the lacunae between the sharing and circular economies, opening up the possibilities that diverse economic spaces offer to issues of circularity, sustainability and activism. As Hobson states (2016: 99), there is potential for 'rich engagement, through both further conceptual and empirical exploration'. This article empirically fleshes out what such spaces look like and how they engage in practices of circulating and sharing. Approximate matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.712 Related paragraph #C8L8YQ: Hobson, K. (2020) ‘“Small stories of closing loops”: social circularity and the everyday circular economy’, Climatic Change, 163(1), pp. 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02480-z 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.621 Related paragraph #TJVD8Y: Hobson, K., Holmes, H., Welch, D., Wheeler, K. and Wieser, H. (2021) ‘Consumption work in the circular economy: a research agenda’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 321, 128969. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128969 3. Source: Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing (#AVNZLE), Christian Fuentes, Réka Tölg, p. 1 Context: #S6NTVJ Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing #QR437R Introduction Score: 0.639 Related excerpt #ZDP99W: In recent years, the circular economy has attracted considerable scholarly and societal attention (Merli et al, 2018; Hobson, 2020). Circularity advocates – such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2013) – and policy documents – such as the European Commission (2020) – argue for the transition to a more circular and therefore also a more materially efficient economy (Ortega Alvarado et al, 2021). The circular economy programme sets out to break with the take-make-dispose linear economy, instead establishing a circular system in which materials are kept in circulation through ‘closed’ production and consumption loops (Hobson, 2016; Mylan et al, 2016). While much of the circular economy research focuses on production and recycling processes, typically geared towards the electronics, metal and waste management industries (Ghisellini et al, 2016; Merli et al, 2018), the role of consumers in making the circular economy possible is beginning to be acknowledged (Hobson et al, 2021). 4. Source: Freecycling Markets as Sustainable Materialist Movements? Closing Reuse Circularity Loops in Singapore (#FHZZ6U), Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Qian Hui Tan, p. 1 Context: #FRLSVA 1. INTRODUCTION Score: 0.637 Related excerpt #P4K8SC: The transition towards a 'circular economy' has gained traction in the wake of a climate emergency and environmental crisis. As opposed to a linear take-make-dispose model, a circular economic paradigm has been touted as the solution to resource depletion and waste production by turning waste (i.e. outputs) into resources (i.e. inputs) for another production cycle. Such a transformation closes the circularity loop, which is realised via a range of R-behaviours (also called R-hierarchies or R-imperatives). Reike et al.'s (2018) hierarchy of circular R-behaviours, also called resource value retention options (ROs) include refuse (R0), reduce (R1), resell/reuse (R2), repair (R3), refurbish (R4), remanufacture (R5), repurpose (R6), recycle (material, R7), recover (energy R8) and re-mine (R9). They have divided their ten ROs into short, medium and long loops. Short loops (R0–R3) exist in proximity to the consumer. Medium loops (R4–R6) involve business networks for upgrading (e.g. refurbishing) a product that is indirectly linked to the consumer. Long loops (R7–R9) entail waste processing activities that are far removed from the consumer, with things being broken down and losing their original utility. 5. Source: Freecycling Markets as Sustainable Materialist Movements? Closing Reuse Circularity Loops in Singapore (#FHZZ6U), Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Qian Hui Tan, p. 5 Context: #9RHV7M 5. FREE(CYCLING) MARKETS: INTERVENTIONS IN MATERIAL(IST) CIRCULARITIES Score: 0.622 Related excerpt #X986VY: Our two case studies are instructive in fleshing out the intersections between sustainable materialism and circular activisms from below by illustrating (a) how material circularity loops can be shortened 'with a minimum of entropy' (Reike et al. 2018: 254) and (b) how short loops cannot be understood in isolation from longer ones. 6. Source: Freecycling Markets as Sustainable Materialist Movements? Closing Reuse Circularity Loops in Singapore (#FHZZ6U), Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Qian Hui Tan, p. 1 Context: #FRLSVA 1. INTRODUCTION Score: 0.618 Related excerpt #J46PZ3: Scholars working in the field of circular economies have identified the predominance of top-down, often technocratic and market-based approaches at the expense of ground-up collaborative grassroots initiatives (Hobson 2020; Böhm et al. 2023). We seek to redress this over-emphasis on state-driven circular policies in public and academic discourses by attending to two case studies at the emerging frontiers of Singapore's circular waste management. These case studies pertain to two physical community-based freecycling markets that facilitate the closing and shortening of circularity loops via reuse. Freecycling refers to the practice of giving and receiving something for free (i.e. without cost, Lou 2019). These freecycling markets serve as important counterpoints to the city state's implementation of household recycling, which closes long circularity loops. Compared to long recycling loops, short reuse loops are preferable because they are better at conserving materials and energy by retaining an object's form, function and value (Reike et al. 2018). 7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #BA7Z5L LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.712 Related paragraph #EK4EWA: Hobson, K. (2020) ‘“Small stories of closing loops”: social circularity and the everyday circular economy’, Climatic Change, 163(1), pp. 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02480-z 8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #BA7Z5L LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.621 Related paragraph #DNUZ6F: Hobson, K., Holmes, H., Welch, D., Wheeler, K. and Wieser, H. (2021) ‘Consumption work in the circular economy: a research agenda’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 321, 128969. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128969 9. Source: The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy (#UMYA27), Kersty Hobson, p. 0 Context: #6DJ9DS The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy Score: 0.629 Related excerpt #3FTT7T: To cite this article: Kersty Hobson (2021) The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy, Environmental Politics , 30:1-2, 161-179, DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2020.1816052 10. Source: The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy (#UMYA27), Kersty Hobson, p. 7 Context: #WE2KWR The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #VACME2 The Circular Economy: from disparate sub-disciplines to holistic framework? Score: 0.618 Related excerpt #PE59R9: That, of course, is a very stark statement but one that has been made before in relation to the fundamentals of economy-environment systems (Jackson 2009). In terms of CE, there is some support for such claims if we consider the inherent dynamics of the 'economy' part of the CE, which to date has received a lot less attention than the 'circular' parts. As Zink and Geyer (2017) argue, there is 'no a priori reason to assume a closed loop is superior' (Zink and Geyer 2017, p. 594). Despite the fact that such loops dominate mainstream representations of the CE (see Figure 1), these authors argue that the central issue is whether 'secondary production actually prevents primary production' (Zink and Geyer 2017, p. 594). That is, does the recycling of goods so that they can be used again (secondary production) replace and prevent raw materials (primary production) from entering resources streams? To date – and as mentioned above – such moves are failing to happen, and instead, down- or up-cycling is adding to, or creating new, market opportunities. ### 61. Assistant Yes — and that connection is genuinely lovely, because the phrase doesn't just *resemble* circular-economy talk, it lands on the same metaphor from a completely different direction. Hobson's 2020 paper is literally titled *"Small stories of closing loops": social circularity and the everyday circular economy* (#C8L8YQ). Tan and Yeoh, whose Singapore freecycling paper you already cite, organise their entire argument around *short, medium and long circularity loops*, with freecycling as the paradigmatic *short loop* (#P4K8SC, #X986VY, #J46PZ3). The Hobson move — and Tan and Yeoh's after her — is to insist that the policy/industrial image of the closed loop is incomplete unless it is grounded in the small, vernacular, household-scale loops that ordinary people actually trace. Marta gives you one, in her own voice, in Latvian: *"apgāju to loku."* She *went around the loop*. She is not citing Hobson. She is independently producing the figure that the literature is reaching for. A few things worth doing with this: **Use it as the hinge between vernacular and theory.** The standard Hobson move is to argue *against* the abstract-systemic image of the circular economy by pointing to the small social circularities that actually do the work. Marta is the empirical illustration of that argument from the inside: a participant who has noticed her own loop and named it. You can quote her once and let her stand as a small ethnographic vindication of Hobson's claim — without overworking the connection. **It also gives you a precise way to handle the polysemy of "circulation"** that was making you dizzy a few turns back. Marta's loop is *circulation in three registers at once*: the anthropological (an object biography that returns), the practice-theoretical (elements detached from one practice and re-linked into another), and the circular-economy-policy (a small short loop that closes outside formal infrastructure). The fact that one Latvian phrase carries all three is, in a small way, the answer to your earlier worry about which "circulation" you mean. You mean the place where these three registers meet — and Marta is sitting in it. **Don't overdo it.** The temptation is to build a whole theoretical scaffold on this. Resist. One footnote or one sentence — *"As Hobson (2020) argues, the circular economy is sustained less by policy-scale closed loops than by small social circularities; Marta's phrase is one such loop, named by the person tracing it"* — does more work than three paragraphs would. **One small extension you could play with.** Tan and Yeoh's *short loops* (R0–R3 in Reike et al.'s hierarchy: refuse, reduce, reuse, repair) are *short* in the sense of staying close to the consumer. Marta's loop is short in another sense too: it loops *back through the same site*. She brings clothes from secondhand shops home, accumulates surplus, makes rugs, sources further fabric from Brīvbode for the rugs, gives the rugs as gifts. The loop is not just consumer-proximate — it is *site-recursive*. Brīvbode is on the loop more than once. That's an empirically distinct thing from what Hobson and Tan & Yeoh describe, and it might be a small contribution your case can make to that literature. ### 62. User how about #8ZKAT7? ### 63. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "8ZKAT7" } ``` ### 64. Tool result: get_document DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Title: Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy Outline: - 1 #ECVDXM Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy - 1.1 #BWE4XA Abstract - 1.2 #7JJN4G Keywords - 1.3 #YYPBP6 1 Introduction - 1.3.1 #DJ6AEM Corresponding author: - 1.4 #S7EQE3 II What is the circular economy and how do we get there? - 1.5 #R4GEYE III Governing the circular economy: The case of WEEE and the modernist myth - 1.6 #75DDTN IV Distributing politics and markets in the CE - 1.7 #MWMXE8 V Being a circular economy citizen: Pathways to radical product service systems? - 1.8 #ACNZ3L VI Concluding comments - 1.9 #RNUQ2A Funding and Acknowledgements - 1.10 #QKAYNE References - 1.11 #T8RC4F Author biography ### 65. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "BWE4XA", "YYPBP6", "MWMXE8", "ACNZ3L" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 66. Tool result: read DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy SECTION #BWE4XA Abstract EXCERPT #AKL7LC p. 0 Heightened concerns about long-term sustainability have of late enlivened debates around the circular economy (CE). Defined as a series of restorative and regenerative industrial systems, parallel socio-cultural transformations have arguably received less consideration to date. In response, this paper examines the contributions human geographical scholarship can make to CE debates, focusing on ‘generative spaces’ of diverse CE practices. Concepts infrequently discussed within human geography such as product service systems and ‘prosumption’ are explored, to argue that productive potential exists in bringing these ideas into conversation with ongoing human geographical research into practices, materialities, emergent political spaces and ‘everyday activism’. DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy SECTION #YYPBP6 1 Introduction EXCERPT #JYA93C p. 0 The need to go ‘beyond incremental efficiency gains to deliver transformative change’ (Preston, 2012: 1) is a long-standing entreaty within socio-environmental sustainability debates. However, what sort of change, transforming in what direction, and by what means remain undoubtedly highly contested questions. One framework that has of late received increasing political, research and civil society attention is that of the circular economy (CE) – the focus of this paper. EXCERPT #XRHFEU p. 0 The CE has been defined as: EXCERPT #QL2VAQ p. 0 an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. It replaces the end-of-life concept with restoration, shifts towards the use of renewable energy, eliminates the use of toxic chemicals, which impair reuse EXCERPT #9NU2JN p. 0 and return to the biosphere, and aims for the elimination of waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems and business models. (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2013b: 2; see also Aldersgate Group, 2012; Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2013a, 2014; Lee et al., 2012) EXCERPT #Y3CQAJ p. 0 As such, moving towards a CE necessitates substantial transformations in design, production, consumption, use, waste and reuse practices. Overall, the goal is to keep valuable materials in circulation through a series of systemic SECTION #DJ6AEM Corresponding author: EXCERPT #4PDLPU p. 0 Kersty Hobson, School of Geography and the Environment, Dyson Perrins Building, South Parks Road, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK. EXCERPT #A6DWSM p. 0 Email: kersty.hobson@ouce.ox.ac.uk EXCERPT #TDE8FL p. 1 EXCERPT #J7WMYD p. 1 EXCERPT #FBN5U5 p. 1 feedback loops between life-cycle stages, powered through resource-efficient industrial processes. EXCERPT #KBL8VY p. 1 Calls for a significant shift towards a more CE through approaches such as closed loop manufacturing have existed for decades, emanating mostly from the field of Industrial Ecology (e.g. Lyle, 1994). While initially such calls were founded upon hypothetical systems of production and reuse, advances in technological, design and retrieval processes are rendering the theory of CE a more realistic proposition. This agenda has recently gained further impetus through political concern about issues such as 'resource security', believed to be creating price volatility and thus threatening long-term economic sustainability (e.g. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2012). As such, solutions that fundamentally reconfigure current production-consumption patterns have made their way into high-level political agendas of late. For one, the European Commission has stated that resource efficiency and a move towards the CE is one of its seven 'Europe 2020' flagship initiatives, as 'the EU has no choice but to go for the transition to a resource-efficient and ultimately regenerative circular economy' (European Commission, 2011: 1). This transition is argued by the European Commission as a promising pathway to regional prosperity, enabling the 'reindustrialisation of the European economy on the basis of resource-efficient growth that will last' (European Commission, 2011: 1). EXCERPT #D98KVL p. 1 As well as such high hopes at the European level, the UK Government's 'Resource Security Action Plan' (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2012) includes interventions that aim to foster the CE. Beyond formal policy circles, an array of non-governmental organizations is gathering around the possibilities of the CE. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, for example, was founded with the sole purpose of promoting the CE and has been gaining notable political and business traction recently, such EXCERPT #MUW9UM p. 1 as being placed front and centre at the 2014 World Economic Forum (see Confinio and Holtum, 2014). EXCERPT #EQ56XU p. 1 Given all of the above, the impetus for this paper is that it is arguably apposite and timely to interrogate the implications of the CE. Extant academic, policy and business-led analyses frame transformations towards the CE as predominantly issues of innovation, technical systems, fiscal and business incentives, and reformulated business models. While these interventions are not dismissed here, this paper is prompted by the observation that, within prevailing CE debates, little has been said about the socio-political implications and possibilities for shifting current production-consumption-use-waste practices. In addition, scant consideration has been given to other 'transformative' pathways and practices, currently elided by a focus on industrial systems and sustained economic growth. As such, crucial questions require greater consideration, such as the forms and processes of governance that would facilitate an effective and equitable CE. In addition, what are the implications of a CE for quotidian spaces and practices, as the patterns and rhythms of everyday socio-materiality are potentially reconfigured? Is the CE yet another iteration of capitalist crisis, reproduction and survival (Harvey, 2010, 2006), or does it productively merge disparate discourses and actors to garner much-needed action around the manifold issues of global sustainability? And what forms of research/intervention might critical social scientists such as human geographers contribute to explore the above questions, informed by which streams of conceptual and empirical debate? EXCERPT #PD7DJG p. 1 This paper aims to examine some of these questions, arguing that human geographers are well placed to make critical contributions to debates about the CE, given the fundamental disciplinary understanding that 'Production is... entangled with biophysical, social, political and cultural processes' (Sheppard, 2011: EXCERPT #WXYE3U p. 2 EXCERPT #A8XNAJ p. 2 EXCERPT #88RBG4 p. 2 324; see also Berndt and Boeckler, 2011). In making this argument, this paper adopts a generative stance (e.g. Head and Gibson, 2012). That is, it aims to locate and foster emergent research spaces, with an eye to the 'virtual presences' (Dittmer, 2014: 388) of contingent futures that remain underexplored within prevailing CE frameworks and advocates. As the concept of the CE touches on so many processes, peoples and places, no one paper can offer a complete dissection of its contents and implications. Therefore this paper focuses predominantly on questions of socio-material practices as a key area where human geographical debate has arguably much to contribute. Specifically, it aims to bring work around materiality, emergence, and everyday activism into conversation with concepts less often discussed in human geography – such as product service systems and 'prosumption' – to map out fertile areas of debate and research. In doing so, the paper begins with an elaboration of the concept of the CE, discussing existing research that intersects human geography with industrial ecology. It then discusses some of the governmental implications of the CE, drawing on an example of electronic waste. The final section examines the possibilities for citizen engagement and reconfigured material practices around the CE, suggesting possible sites and topics for future research. DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy SECTION #MWMXE8 V Being a circular economy citizen: Pathways to radical product service systems? EXCERPT #TRN47D p. 8 What then is the perceived role of the citizen within the CE, in both mainstream renditions of the concept and alternate visions? Under a linear, non-circular economy, the role of the citizen is for the most part arguably elided with that of the consumer. Here, the individual is willing and able to make well-informed and rational purchase choices, as well as undertaking the correct waste disposal behaviour, all in the name of the environment (Lane and Watson, 2012). This includes buying more ‘sustainable’, ‘green’ or ‘ethical’ goods and recycling as much waste as possible from these (and other) goods. Such a framing of everyday sustainability has been roundly critiqued for its individualized and overly-rationalized rendition of what are fundamentally collective practices and challenges (e.g. Barnett et al., 2005; Burgess et al., 2003; Cohen et al., 2010; Dowling, 2010; Princen et al., 2002; Watson, 2012). Indeed, seemingly mundane behaviours, such as carbon offsetting and recycling, are argued as governmental devices that at once depoliticize the discourses of environmentalism while engendering forms of environmental citizenship in keeping with the aims of weak ecological modernization (e.g. Hobson, 2006, 2013; Marres, 2011; McDonald et al., 2009). EXCERPT #R68RGU p. 8 For the most part, mainstream advocates of the CE do not envisage new roles or recalibrated modes of engagement for the consumer, but EXCERPT #ML6SVB p. 8 rather rehearse the above norms of the linear economy. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation for one claims that the CE ‘largely replaces the concept of the consumer with that of a user’ (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2013a: 7), and creates ‘a new contract between businesses and their customers’ (p. 7). The main barrier to such a shift is argued as one of ‘consumer acceptance’ (e.g. Aldersgate Group, 2012) of altered systems of production and consumption, made palatable through consumer education and engagement (e.g. Lee et al., 2012). EXCERPT #PABS54 p. 8 This movement from ‘consumer’ to ‘user’ pertains to the business models forwarded by CE advocates. For example, goods that are now purchased and owned, such as carpets, washing machines or garden tools, are instead leased. This allows (in theory) consumers to access goods when needed, and businesses to recycle, repair and reuse goods through maintaining control of ownership. Within current CE debates, such business models are uncontroversial, and successful examples exist, such as carpet leasing company Interface. However, within CE debates little consideration has been given to what exactly is at stake vis-à-vis the acceptance or rejection of these modes of consuming by citizens. For example, how and to what ends do such business models shift or clash with perceptions of consumption, consumerism and private property? How might becoming a ‘user’ alter the spatial-temporal patterns of how households and other collectives locate, exchange and return goods? If goods now not only have ‘after lives’ (Crang et al., 2013) but also ‘on going’ and multiple lives, how do the current ways that households deal with unwanted goods – that include gifting, swapping, selling on, recycling, and storage (Bulkeley and Gregson, 2009; Crang et al., 2013; Gregson and Crang, 2010; Lane, 2011; Moore, 2012) – become enlivened, enrolled and/or reconfigured in the CE? EXCERPT #BGXDTS p. 8 The concepts of the Product Service System (PSS) and ‘servitization’ provide useful means to think through some of the above questions. EXCERPT #HDZLQX p. 9 EXCERPT #ZWCEMT p. 9 EXCERPT #QYXLEK p. 9 These frameworks and attendant literatures may be unfamiliar territory to many social scientists, with debates around these concepts appearing for the most part in industry, management and operations publications such as Journal of Cleaner Production (e.g. see Beuren et al., 2013; Lightfoot et al., 2013). However, there is an emergent literature within the social sciences that speaks to ideas of PSS through connecting work on theories of practice with debates about socio-technical transformations. That is, rather than seeing individual behaviours as the necessary unit of social change, work on practices emphasizes how patterns of action (e.g. showering) are co-constituted by histories, technologies, norms and preferences around issues of cleanliness. As such, making practices more sustainable requires questioning how and why current needs are met, and thinking creatively about other ways to meet needs such as mobility, warmth, cooling and cleanliness (e.g. Davies et al., 2014; Givoni and Banister, 2013; Watson, 2012): in short, reworking the ways products and services are calibrated to meet human needs. EXCERPT #6VESV4 p. 9 Tukker (2004, 2013) has mapped out the range of possible PSSs along a continuum. At one end, there are business models that remain for the most part product orientated with a few extra services included, such as leasing, renting and sharing components of a practice. One example is the much-lauded rise of car-sharing schemes, which provide rented, short-term (i.e. one hour and upwards) access to a communal car, thus aiming to alter entrenched travel habits (see Kent and Dowling, 2013). However, car sharing arguably does little to challenge the centrality of the car as the predominant mode of mobility and has been captured as a model for business expansion by large corporations, such as Avis' recent purchase of Zipcar. At the other end of the PSS spectrum are 'result-oriented' services where the client and provider agree in principle upon the result required with no predetermined product involved. Such indeterminacy and openness to the ways and means of EXCERPT #U2Z5VC p. 9 meeting needs is considered the more 'radical' end of the PSS spectrum. That is, an approach with potential to challenge current patterns of resource intensity and overuse, but also the most difficult to envisage, enact and create. Perhaps, then, there are ways in which human geographers can be part of envisioning and exploring the possibilities of radical PSSs, starting not so much from planning them on paper as an exercise in abstraction but rather paying attention to the emergent properties of current and nascent socio-material assemblages that speak to the inherent openness of radical PSSs. EXCERPT #BJXAVM p. 9 To explain, in this journal Dittmer (2014) argues for consideration of the capacities rather than just the properties of geopolitical assemblages, understood as 'emergent wholes defined by their properties, tendencies, and capacities' (p. 392). Here, while features and structures matter in terms of outcomes, so does how properties interact with other assemblages, creating a range of contingent futures that may not yet be realized in material form but still can exert a 'virtual presence'. Arguably, traces of such virtual presences can be located in current practices reshaping the ambit and forms of engagement with everyday consumer goods and services, potentially opening up spaces for forms of radical PSS to emerge. In this context, the role of human geographical research could be to look closer for the 'possibility spaces' (Dittmer, 2014: 392) amidst these practices, with an eye on the 'vitality' of the materialities at play (Gregson and Crang, 2010). EXCERPT #PGTBSW p. 9 But what practices are being referenced here? There have of late been claims about an apparent demise of prevailing consumption patterns and norms, wherein the sovereign consumer is being usurped by the rise of the 'prosumer' (e.g. Ritzer et al., 2012). This term – an amalgamation of producer and consumer – does in part hark back to a past when most humans produced and consumed food, clothes, etc., for themselves and their communities (Ritzer et al., 2012). In its current iteration however, the idea EXCERPT #LMSUGU p. 10 EXCERPT #RHDY3V p. 10 EXCERPT #3T4PQE p. 10 of the prosumer encapsulates a wider range of processes only tenable under the conditions of (post)modernity. These range from productive practices (e.g. ideas, designs) being taken up and co-created by external agents such as for-profit companies with the aim of producing and capturing value: to more 'hands on' and localised practices of do-it-yourself, crafts, and other examples of so-called 'post-consumerism' (Belk, 2014; Botsman and Rogers, 2011; Cohen, 2013). In relation to the former, it is feasible to argue that processes that aim to co-create value between citizens and organizations are another example of capitalist exploitation and co-option in the face of shrinking margins (Rifkin, 2014). However, there are other examples of joint value-creation that may – and, indeed, on paper seek to – go beyond the creation of a new good or service, to potentially create the emergent assemblages that Dittmer (2014) writes of. EXCERPT #DU8H6L p. 10 For example, the social enterprise Fairphone ( http://www.fairphone.com ) is a Netherlands-based organization whose core business is the creation of a smartphone made with conflict-free minerals, with a design that allows recovery, repair and recycling in line with CE principles. The Fairphone website states that their key principle is that of 'responsible design' which considers the life cycle of the phone and 'gives you complete control over how to use and configure it. Our adopted manifesto is "If you can't open it, you don't own it"' (see http://www.fairphone.com/2013/05/17/three-years-in-the-making-road-to-a-fairer-phone ). For the Fairphone user, this 'complete control' requires learning how to 'use and configure' the Fairphone, which takes place virtually via website information and online discussion forums. A quick glance at the content of these online forums highlights the challenges of learning to configure a smartphone and negotiate the responsibilities and challenges of electronic devices that have functional and material flexibility built into them. But it also highlights the capacities and EXCERPT #3RQ52R p. 10 willingness of citizens to engage with the technical specifications of coding and configuring, potentially fostering an emergent 'Fairphone movement' that the social enterprise speaks of on its website. This movement is based not just on the technical components of the smartphone but also on 'creating the fairer economy'. Such an economy is one where exploitative extractive practices are eliminated through conflict-free resources, with capital generated through crowd-sourced financing. For Fairphone this generation of capital entailed several thousand individuals purchasing the phone before it could go into production – a move that they state aimed to displace the politics and power of 'old capital', engaging online communities of interest and shared ethics (e.g. see Gibson-Graham, 2006). EXCERPT #CKFDRW p. 10 This is not to hero-worship Fairphone or to assume that all that appears on their website mirrors what happens in practice. But then that is partially the point. That is, the above example raises questions about what emerges from assemblages such as Fairphone, as they seek to co-create a PSS that takes on board CE thinking whilst bringing in agendas of fairness, participation and socio-material engagement of citizens. Indeed, how do investors/users/participants – and, indeed, people who are all three at once – become enrolled into and/or create new 'possibility spaces' through engagement with the contingent functionality of the Fairphone, which requires being more than a standard phone user? And how do these emergent properties speak to other generative spaces, such as Repair Cafés (see http://repaircafe.org ), that form in-person, temporary collectives around repairing everyday goods? And finally, what forms of 'everyday activism' emerge, wherein individuals and groups 'self-manage and develop workable and replicable models for a better life' (Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010: 476; see also Chatterton, 2010; Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006)? While research into forms of everyday activism has not foregrounded the EXCERPT #3BXB2J p. 11 EXCERPT #AE6Z7J p. 11 EXCERPT #EGHW9M p. 11 socio-material engagements of emergent political practices, it does focus attention on 'the social and spatial settings where matters of importance get politicized' (Hakli and Kallio, 2014: 189). Such an approach to locating and fostering spaces of activism stands in contrast to those that predetermine what can be and is labelled as political around the issues of sustainable production and consumption (cf. Hultmann and Corveleco, 2012). Instead, it requires paying close attention to spaces where disparate forms of the CE may emerge and/or be fostered in forms and ways that current analyses of the CE omits or at least obscures from view. DOCUMENT #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy SECTION #ACNZ3L VI Concluding comments EXCERPT #NB8CR8 p. 11 This paper has aimed to bring recent and growing debates around ideas of the CE into conversation with some facets of human geographical research. The aim is to outline how research into a CE requires much broader analytical lenses than are currently deployed, given the profound 'transformative change' advocates speak of. The purpose here was to provisionally locate generative spaces and practices that embody a CE which goes beyond re-jigged industrial systems and business models. Rather, the case is made that any consideration of the CE must encompass forms of 'everyday activism' that foreground the 'vital materialism' (Gregson et al., 2010: 853) necessary to rethink, re-envision, recreate, reuse and 'move on' the goods and services that currently meet everyday needs. In other disciplines, researchers and practitioners talk of addressing unsustainable production and consumption through frameworks such as product service systems. This (perhaps rather dry) phrase is not found a great deal in human geographical work, but it does intersect with – and arguably has much to contribute to – research that explores practices embedded within, and enacted through, multi-scale socio-technical systems (Davies et al., 2014; Watson, 2012). EXCERPT #4G9UV6 p. 11 Advocates of the CE appear to consider the role of citizens as being the acceptance (or not) of practices that have been formulated on their behalf by designers, engineers, economists and policy-makers. One key aim of this paper has been to highlight how this presents an impoverished view of the properties and capacities that new assemblages of the CE are bringing forth, or could potentially create. That is, a seemingly narrow set of practices and spaces for citizen action (e.g. the High Street) are supplemented and/or challenged by the multifarious practices of the designer-consumer-user-repairer citizen. Indeed, as mentioned above, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation suggests that a new contract is emerging between business and the consumer. In their understanding, this relates to a direct and legally binding agreement between two or more parties. Yet this paper is essentially arguing that broader notions of a contract can be evoked here, where roles, competencies and responsibilities are redistributed and reconfigured throughout the lifetime of products and services, recalibrating the social relations and arrangements that currently favour the purchasing-ownership-disposal model of citizen-consumer practices. Such socially transformative enactments of the CE are thus implicit but under-explored within current debates, and this paper has aimed to highlight the potential for rich engagement, through both further conceptual and empirical exploration. ### 67. Assistant Oh, this one's a gift. It's the Hobson move that *names* what we've been circling around, but from the circular-economy side rather than the practice-theory side. ## What the paper gives you Hobson's 2016 paper builds the concept of **"generative spaces"** for the circular economy — spaces where alternative configurations of production-consumption-use-waste relations actually emerge, as opposed to the mainstream CE imagery of industrial closed-loop systems designed by engineers and policymakers. Key moves: - The mainstream CE imagines citizens as passive acceptors of practices "formulated on their behalf by designers, engineers, economists and policy-makers" (#4G9UV6). The whole paper is a refusal of this. - Instead, Hobson argues for paying attention to **"emergent assemblages"** and **"possibility spaces"** (#BJXAVM) — spaces whose *capacities*, not just their properties, matter. - She wants research to "pay close attention to spaces where disparate forms of the CE may emerge and/or be fostered in forms and ways that current analyses of the CE omits or at least obscures from view" (#EGHW9M). - Repair Cafés are her named exemplar of generative spaces — *"in-person, temporary collectives around repairing everyday goods"* (#CKFDRW). - The figure she's building toward is the **"designer-consumer-user-repairer citizen"** (#4G9UV6) — a citizen whose roles, competencies and responsibilities are redistributed across what would, in the linear economy, be separate moments. ## Why this is so useful for your framing You now have a clean conceptual triangle: - **Schatzki's site** gives you the ontological framing — Brīvbode as a constitutive milieu where practices and material arrangements hold together. - **Hobson's generative space** gives you the *political-economic* framing — Brīvbode as a space where alternative configurations of circulation emerge from the bottom up, in forms that mainstream CE policy cannot see. - **Hobson's "small stories of closing loops"** (2020) gives you the *empirical-vernacular* framing — Marta's "I went around the loop" is one such small story. These are not the same concept, but they converge on the same object. *Site* is the philosophical word, *generative space* is the policy-critical word, and *small loop* is the participant's own word. You can write the thesis as the place where these three vocabularies meet over a former bakery in Riga. ## What's particularly handy A few specific affordances of citing Hobson 2016: 1. **It ties Brīvbode directly to Repair Cafés in the literature.** She names them as the paradigm case of generative spaces. Your Brīvbode + Repair Cafe co-location (#MWM5A7) is then not just an empirical curiosity but a doubly-generative space — two of Hobson's named genres in one room. You are studying the intensification of what she gestures at. 2. **It justifies the multi-practice framing politically.** Hobson's "designer-consumer-user-repairer citizen" is exactly what your participants are. Marta is not a consumer; she is a thrifter-rugmaker-extractor-gifter. Zane is a thrifter-repairer-sewist-volunteer. The reason this multiplicity matters, in Hobson's terms, is that it is the very thing CE policy is missing. 3. **It gives you a way to name what the swapshop is *not*.** Brīvbode is not a closed industrial loop, not a leasing scheme, not a Product Service System designed by an engineer. It is a generative space in Hobson's strong sense — its capacities exceed its formal description. 4. **It aligns your "site holds practices in working relation" framing with critical environmental politics.** This makes the argument legible to policy-adjacent readers who don't read Schatzki but do read Hobson. Two-track citation. ## One paragraph you could just lift into the theory chapter Something like: > Reading Brīvbode through Schatzki's site ontology and Hobson's complementary notion of *generative spaces* (2016) brings these framings into productive alignment. Where Schatzki names the constitutive interplay of practices and material arrangements through which a site exists, Hobson identifies the political stakes of attending to such sites in the context of circular economy debates: mainstream CE discourse has, she argues, 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, #EGHW9M). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generative capacity rests precisely on the multiplicity I have been describing: it 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 swapshop is the kind of site that makes such hybrid roles practicable. ## And one note about its limits Hobson 2016 is more programmatic than empirical — it's calling for research, not reporting much. So citing it positions your thesis as *answering her call* rather than building on her data. That's a strong rhetorical position: she names the gap, you fill it. But it does mean the heavier empirical lifting in CE-and-everyday-life work is done by Hobson 2020 (small stories of closing loops), Holmes 2018 (#XATD2A on diverse economies of provisioning, which directly cites Hobson 2016 on generative spaces), and Tan & Yeoh 2024 on Singapore freecycling. You probably already cite all three. The combination *Hobson 2016 + Hobson 2020 + Holmes + Tan & Yeoh* is a very tight literature cluster for the circular-economy-and-place strand of the framing. ### 68. User yeah read into how the thesis mentions hobson 2016 now (other than your draft i inserted) ### 69. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "4V8VH7", "limit": 15, "query": "Hobson 2016 generative spaces circular" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_id": "4V8VH7", "limit": 10, "query": "Hobson generative space loop" } ``` ### 70. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #ULSUAX Conclusion Matching paragraph #WQZYJP: Reading Brīvbode through Schatzki’s site ontology and Hobson’s complementary notion of generative spaces (2016) brings these framings into productive alignment. Where Schatzki names the constitutive interplay of practices and material arrangements through which a site exists, Hobson identifies the political stakes of attending to such sites in the context of circular economy debates: mainstream CE discourse has, she argues, 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). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generative capacity rests precisely on the multiplicity I have been describing: it 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 swapshop is the kind of site that makes such hybrid roles practicable. 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Matching paragraph #BTDD45: Hobson et al. (2021) argue that research into circular economy consumption work must “move beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household” to examine consumption-based practices in other spaces, including Repair Cafés and community-based circular economy models, whether or not these are explicitly labelled as such. Brīvbode is such a space: a semi-public site where the ordinarily private labour of divestment and acquisition becomes visible and socially acknowledged, and where volunteer labour — sorting, curating, maintaining quality standards, and managing social dynamics — sustains the infrastructure through which things continue to circulate. 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Matching paragraph #C8L8YQ: Hobson, K. (2020) ‘“Small stories of closing loops”: social circularity and the everyday circular economy’, Climatic Change, 163(1), pp. 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02480-z 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Matching paragraph #TJVD8Y: Hobson, K., Holmes, H., Welch, D., Wheeler, K. and Wieser, H. (2021) ‘Consumption work in the circular economy: a research agenda’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 321, 128969. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128969 5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #75D5UH Conclusion Matching paragraph #HM56MD: 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. 6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #23NMLX Consumption Work Matching paragraph #92SD6X: [“Recent research at the intersection of practice theory and circular consumption has begun to foreground the labour involved in sustaining material circulation. Drawing on a practice-theoretical approach, Réka Tölg shows that circular consumption – particularly in the context of clothing – relies on the ongoing enactment of care in everyday practices. This involves not only acquiring and using garments, but also maintaining, repairing, and eventually parting with them in ways that enable their continued circulation. Such practices require the development of skills, awareness, and a sense of responsibility, and are often shaped by socio-material arrangements in both household and retail contexts. At the same time, Tölg highlights that these practices are not straightforward to accomplish, but are characterised by tensions, dilemmas, and constraints within systems still largely organised around linear consumption. In this sense, circular consumption can be understood not as a simple behavioural shift, but as an ongoing accomplishment that entails effort, coordination, and engagement – what has been conceptualised elsewhere as “consumption work” (Hobson et al., 2021).”] 7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #M9WQLY CONCLUSION Matching paragraph #JE7FK2: This thesis is an ethnographic study of a swapshop to investigate how these spaces foster alternative consumption practices that possibly sustain alternative logics of value and ownership. This thesis is a contribution to the studies of circular consumption using ethnographic methods with practice theory approach. 8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Matching paragraph #J4M2WK: We live in a context of overproduction where managing the flow of things in households becomes both a practical and a moral problem. In the case of textiles in particular, large quantities of clothing circulate through markets at increasing speed while average use time continues to decline. Circular economy policies increasingly position reuse and extended product lifetimes as solutions, yet the success of it depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive and socially uneven (Hobson et al. 2021). 9. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #23NMLX Consumption Work Matching paragraph #ZBGB9J: 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. 10. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #23NMLX Consumption Work Matching paragraph #Q26XE6: 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. 11. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Matching paragraph #7VSKWC: Reno, J.O. (2016) Waste away: working and living with a North American landfill. Oakland: University of California Press. 12. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Matching paragraph #577FMZ: The bulk of things circulating in Brīvbode are textiles – mostly clothing, but also home textile. Textiles have been identified as a priority sector in the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2020), and EU Textile Strategy (2022-ongoing) states that textiles should be durable, repairable, reusable, and reuse should be part of the desired system outcome. [..] [Statistics on Baltics as the destination in the circular economies of other countries…] 13. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Matching paragraph #NYQXWE: Holmes, H. (2018) ‘New spaces, ordinary practices: circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning’, Geoforum, 88, pp. 138–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.11.022 14. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #75D5UH Conclusion Matching paragraph #RX9JDU: 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. 15. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction #LAR465 Latvian context and research Matching paragraph #TT4B8P: 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. Approximate matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #ULSUAX Conclusion Score: 0.587 Related paragraph #WQZYJP: Reading Brīvbode through Schatzki’s site ontology and Hobson’s complementary notion of generative spaces (2016) brings these framings into productive alignment. Where Schatzki names the constitutive interplay of practices and material arrangements through which a site exists, Hobson identifies the political stakes of attending to such sites in the context of circular economy debates: mainstream CE discourse has, she argues, 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). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generative capacity rests precisely on the multiplicity I have been describing: it 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 swapshop is the kind of site that makes such hybrid roles practicable. 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.579 Related paragraph #NYQXWE: Holmes, H. (2018) ‘New spaces, ordinary practices: circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning’, Geoforum, 88, pp. 138–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.11.022 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.577 Related paragraph #C8L8YQ: Hobson, K. (2020) ‘“Small stories of closing loops”: social circularity and the everyday circular economy’, Climatic Change, 163(1), pp. 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02480-z 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Score: 0.53 Related paragraph #BTDD45: Hobson et al. (2021) argue that research into circular economy consumption work must “move beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household” to examine consumption-based practices in other spaces, including Repair Cafés and community-based circular economy models, whether or not these are explicitly labelled as such. Brīvbode is such a space: a semi-public site where the ordinarily private labour of divestment and acquisition becomes visible and socially acknowledged, and where volunteer labour — sorting, curating, maintaining quality standards, and managing social dynamics — sustains the infrastructure through which things continue to circulate. 5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.491 Related paragraph #JNBSSG: Eden, S. (2017) ‘Blurring the boundaries: prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 17(2), pp. 265–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540515586871 6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.47 Related paragraph #TJVD8Y: Hobson, K., Holmes, H., Welch, D., Wheeler, K. and Wieser, H. (2021) ‘Consumption work in the circular economy: a research agenda’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 321, 128969. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128969 7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route Score: 0.465 Related paragraph #EW2HC4: 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. 8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #LYTS7L Research methodology: A Practice Freecycle #U3GSXB Ethnography of Practice Score: 0.451 Related paragraph #AL93KK: Following Warde's (2005) argument that consumption is best understood as a moment within practices rather than a practice in itself, the focus in this thesis is on circulation of household goods – the ongoing movement of things through domestic life through acquisition, storage, care, and divestment – with Brīvbode as a site where several of these practice moments converge and become visible and acknowledged within a specific non-monetary mode of exchange. Brīvbode is, in Nicolini's (2017: 28) terms, a nexus: "a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together." 9. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #75D5UH Conclusion Score: 0.451 Related paragraph #5YXGE6: 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. 10. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.449 Related paragraph #C84FMM: Tölg, R. and Fuentes, C. (2025) ‘Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing’, Consumption and Society, 4(2), pp. 213–231. https://doi.org/10.1332/27528499Y2024D000000032 11. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction #LAR465 Latvian context and research Score: 0.446 Related paragraph #BHE8T3: 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. 12. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Score: 0.438 Related paragraph #J4M2WK: We live in a context of overproduction where managing the flow of things in households becomes both a practical and a moral problem. In the case of textiles in particular, large quantities of clothing circulate through markets at increasing speed while average use time continues to decline. Circular economy policies increasingly position reuse and extended product lifetimes as solutions, yet the success of it depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive and socially uneven (Hobson et al. 2021). 13. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #75D5UH Conclusion Score: 0.436 Related paragraph #HM56MD: 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. ### 71. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #ULSUAX Conclusion Matching paragraph #WQZYJP: Reading Brīvbode through Schatzki’s site ontology and Hobson’s complementary notion of generative spaces (2016) brings these framings into productive alignment. Where Schatzki names the constitutive interplay of practices and material arrangements through which a site exists, Hobson identifies the political stakes of attending to such sites in the context of circular economy debates: mainstream CE discourse has, she argues, 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). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generative capacity rests precisely on the multiplicity I have been describing: it 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 swapshop is the kind of site that makes such hybrid roles practicable. 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Matching paragraph #BTDD45: Hobson et al. (2021) argue that research into circular economy consumption work must “move beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household” to examine consumption-based practices in other spaces, including Repair Cafés and community-based circular economy models, whether or not these are explicitly labelled as such. Brīvbode is such a space: a semi-public site where the ordinarily private labour of divestment and acquisition becomes visible and socially acknowledged, and where volunteer labour — sorting, curating, maintaining quality standards, and managing social dynamics — sustains the infrastructure through which things continue to circulate. 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Matching paragraph #C8L8YQ: Hobson, K. (2020) ‘“Small stories of closing loops”: social circularity and the everyday circular economy’, Climatic Change, 163(1), pp. 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02480-z 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Matching paragraph #TJVD8Y: Hobson, K., Holmes, H., Welch, D., Wheeler, K. and Wieser, H. (2021) ‘Consumption work in the circular economy: a research agenda’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 321, 128969. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128969 5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Matching paragraph #J4M2WK: We live in a context of overproduction where managing the flow of things in households becomes both a practical and a moral problem. In the case of textiles in particular, large quantities of clothing circulate through markets at increasing speed while average use time continues to decline. Circular economy policies increasingly position reuse and extended product lifetimes as solutions, yet the success of it depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive and socially uneven (Hobson et al. 2021). 6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route Matching paragraph #EW2HC4: 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. 7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction #LAR465 Latvian context and research Matching paragraph #YNKV5D: 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. 8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #75D5UH Conclusion Matching paragraph #HM56MD: 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. 9. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow Matching paragraph #LHLZ8Y: 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 availability of affordable rental space, especially in high density urban areas. Tan and Yeoh (2024) note how, because of this reason, organisers of Singapore markets must bin or redistribute excess items after every event. They identify availability of rental and storage space as one of the main pre-requisites for functioning freecycling initiatives – thus it is important to note how regular operation in the same physical venue constitutes the practice of freecycling, as it becomes a stable and recurring weekly infrastructure for participants. This enables visitors to sustain a regular visiting rhythm through which, for many of them, freecycling becomes genuinely embedded in everyday life. 10. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation #PBFQ5E Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow Matching paragraph #KMD7AJ: 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, signifying that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. "The emptier the shelves, the more people find," she notes. A different aesthetic displaying abundance of things on offer and decorating with plushies appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements hold competing views about which meanings the practice of freecycling should enact. Material and meaning elements of the practice are not settled but are actively contested through performance. Approximate matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #ULSUAX Conclusion Score: 0.474 Related paragraph #WQZYJP: Reading Brīvbode through Schatzki’s site ontology and Hobson’s complementary notion of generative spaces (2016) brings these framings into productive alignment. Where Schatzki names the constitutive interplay of practices and material arrangements through which a site exists, Hobson identifies the political stakes of attending to such sites in the context of circular economy debates: mainstream CE discourse has, she argues, 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). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generative capacity rests precisely on the multiplicity I have been describing: it 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 swapshop is the kind of site that makes such hybrid roles practicable. 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.436 Related paragraph #C8L8YQ: Hobson, K. (2020) ‘“Small stories of closing loops”: social circularity and the everyday circular economy’, Climatic Change, 163(1), pp. 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02480-z 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES Score: 0.385 Related paragraph #NYQXWE: Holmes, H. (2018) ‘New spaces, ordinary practices: circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning’, Geoforum, 88, pp. 138–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.11.022 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Score: 0.385 Related paragraph #BTDD45: Hobson et al. (2021) argue that research into circular economy consumption work must “move beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household” to examine consumption-based practices in other spaces, including Repair Cafés and community-based circular economy models, whether or not these are explicitly labelled as such. Brīvbode is such a space: a semi-public site where the ordinarily private labour of divestment and acquisition becomes visible and socially acknowledged, and where volunteer labour — sorting, curating, maintaining quality standards, and managing social dynamics — sustains the infrastructure through which things continue to circulate. 5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation #2JEZWG Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home Score: 0.366 Related paragraph #5XUPCJ: The material outcome of one practice present in Brīvbode (domestic divestment: things arrive) is a direct resource for another (sequential acquisition: things are taken), sustaining the circularity between different households and the freeshop. Instead of starting at the “shop”, freecycling in Brīvbode can be viewed as starting with the outward flow of things no longer needed or wanted in the household and the question of what to do with them. The practice of managing this flow (what Počinkova et al. (2023) call voluntary disposal) is what brings most givers to Brīvbode. The swapshop offers them an opportunity for circulating materials as well as a way of managing attachment and detachment from things. Brīvbode is one node in the available infrastructure of divestment, and is distinguished from others by what it means to route things through it. 6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #EBTHSE Not the Bin: Modal Labour and the Informal Route Score: 0.355 Related paragraph #EW2HC4: 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. 7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #L38KUE It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care Score: 0.353 Related paragraph #8JYYXC: 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. 8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #LYTS7L Research methodology: A Practice Freecycle #U3GSXB Ethnography of Practice Score: 0.336 Related paragraph #AL93KK: Following Warde's (2005) argument that consumption is best understood as a moment within practices rather than a practice in itself, the focus in this thesis is on circulation of household goods – the ongoing movement of things through domestic life through acquisition, storage, care, and divestment – with Brīvbode as a site where several of these practice moments converge and become visible and acknowledged within a specific non-monetary mode of exchange. Brīvbode is, in Nicolini's (2017: 28) terms, a nexus: "a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together." 9. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation #PZH45P Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange Score: 0.334 Related paragraph #T8P86W: 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. 10. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation #A3X9XX Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations Score: 0.333 Related paragraph #MHM9Q5: This does not resolve the tension running through the chapter of Brīvbode functioning simultaneously as a moral circularity infrastructure embodying an alternative value regime of exchange and responsible material life – and as a low threshold overflow channel that absorbs the surplus generated by the consumption patterns it aspires to counter. This tension just reflects the observed dynamic of how sustainable practices are embedded in contemporary life. ### 72. Assistant Good — the picture is more interesting than I assumed. Hobson 2016 isn't actually cited yet, but the thesis is already doing Hobson-2016-style work in three places, just under different labels. Let me show you what's already there, because it changes the recommendation. ## What the thesis already does **1. Hobson et al. 2021 in the intro is doing generative-spaces work.** At #BTDD45: > *"Hobson et al. (2021) argue that research into circular economy consumption work must 'move beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household' to examine consumption-based practices in other spaces, including Repair Cafés and community-based circular economy models, whether or not these are explicitly labelled as such. Brīvbode is such a space..."* This is essentially the move Hobson 2016 makes, but cited via the 2021 follow-up paper that is co-authored with Holmes, Welch, Wheeler, and Wieser. The "such a space" formulation is doing exactly the work *generative space* would do — naming Brīvbode as a member of a class of spaces the literature has identified as worth attending to. **2. Nicolini's nexus is already in the methodology chapter.** At #AL93KK — and this is the find: > *"Brīvbode is, in Nicolini's (2017: 28) terms, a nexus: 'a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together.'"* You already have the practice-theoretical site/nexus framing. It's just sitting quietly in the methodology under "Ethnography of Practice" rather than in the theory chapter where it could do architectural work. This is the language we've been groping toward in the last several turns — and it's been in your thesis the whole time. **3. Hobson 2020 "social circularities" is in chapter 5.** At #EW2HC4: > *"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."* This is Hobson's empirical follow-up to the 2016 paper, citing it precisely where the labour-and-care argument needs the relational-circularity vocabulary. ## What this means The Hobson framing is already structurally present in the thesis, but distributed across three different places, in three different vocabularies, none of which acknowledges the others. **Hobson et al. 2021 in the intro, Nicolini in methodology, Hobson 2020 in chapter 5** — three citations, one underlying argument, no through-line. Adding Hobson 2016's *generative spaces* is therefore not a new theoretical move. It's a **consolidating** move. It would: 1. **Tie the existing three citations together** under one explicit framing in the theory chapter, where they belong. 2. **Make the Repair Cafe coupling legible** — the 2016 paper specifically names Repair Cafés as the paradigm generative space, so when you cite the actual co-location at Brīvbode (Zane's #MWM5A7), you can do so as an empirical instance of Hobson's named genre. 3. **Resolve a small unevenness in #BTDD45.** Currently the intro paragraph cites the 2021 *consumption work* paper to make a *spatial* argument ("Brīvbode is such a space"). The 2016 paper is the more natural source for the spatial point; the 2021 paper is the natural source for the labour point. Splitting the citation between the two would tighten the argument. ## Concrete suggestions **One small edit to #BTDD45.** Add Hobson 2016 alongside the 2021 citation, since the spatial framing belongs to it: > *"Hobson (2016) calls for research attention to 'generative spaces' where alternative configurations of the circular economy emerge — Repair Cafés, community-based reuse initiatives, and similar sites that mainstream CE policy tends to overlook. Hobson et al. (2021) extend the argument by calling for research that moves 'beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household' to examine the consumption work performed in such sites. Brīvbode is one such space..."* **One addition to the theory chapter.** The paragraph I drafted in my earlier turn (#WQZYJP, the one you've already inserted) is doing the consolidating work. It explicitly bridges Schatzki's site, Hobson's generative space, and the multiplicity argument — so when a reader gets to it, the threads from intro (#BTDD45) and methodology (#AL93KK) are pulled together. **One pull-up from methodology.** The Nicolini nexus quote at #AL93KK ("a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together") is too good to leave in methodology. Either repeat it in the theory chapter, or move it. It's the cleanest one-line definition of what you're arguing Brīvbode is. **Add Hobson 2016 to the bibliography.** Currently absent — only 2020 (#C8L8YQ) and 2021 (#TJVD8Y) are listed. ## A small recognition You'd already done this work. The framing wasn't missing — it was present in three places that hadn't been put in conversation with each other. What we've been doing across this thread is essentially noticing what your thesis was already arguing and giving it a single vocabulary. The bumblebee was already flying.