# Assistant conversation DEEFHW

- Canonical URL: <https://sheaf.less.rest/DEEFHW>
- Resource IRI: <https://sheaf.less.rest/DEEFHW>
- Type: assistant conversation
- Mode: quick

## Transcript

### 1. User

some thoughts; see mikael draft; tryna figure out how to ground chapter 4 in shove 2012, but also thinking about this... 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. What makes Brīvbode ethnographically valuable is that these processes, usually dispersed across homes, markets, wardrobes, bins, and online platforms, are concentrated in one semi-public site.
In practice-theoretical terms, Brīvbode is a site where elements of domestic consumption are detached, reclassified, and re-linked into practices of circulation. Materials leave households and enter a semi-public infrastructure; competences of sorting, assessing, restraining, curating, and letting go are performed and learned; meanings of waste, generosity, need, dignity, care, thrift, and sustainability are negotiated in action. What makes the swapshop analytically valuable is that these processes are usually dispersed and hidden across households, markets, wardrobes, bins, and online platforms. In Brīvbode, they happen in one room. Sorting takes place in the open, value is argued without price, and competences are shown rather than silently embedded in domestic routine. The swapshop is therefore a practice with the lid off: a site where practice theory’s abstractions become ethnographically observable, but also where their limits become visible. The linking of materials, meanings and competences is not an automatic process; it is labour, and that labour is gendered, relational, morally charged, and sustained through care.
By the labour of practice, I refer to the work required to keep the elements of a practice linked: sorting materials, maintaining meanings, transmitting competences, repairing breakdowns, managing boundaries, and recruiting or retaining participants. In Brīvbode, this labour becomes visible because circulation is not stabilised through price, formal employment, or institutionalised retail systems. Instead, the practice is held together through volunteer judgement, participant restraint, gendered household work, and care.
😃 but i hope my thesis doesn't sound like this
haha
Brīvbode is not simply a container for second-hand objects, and not even only “a practice” of freecycling. It is a site where multiple practices meet, interfere, borrow from one another, and redistribute their elements.
...
It is!

### 2. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `list_documents`

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### 3. Tool result: list_documents

- #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] - 2026 | Ieva Lange
- #FYG32U Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] - 2026 | Ieva Lange

Journal articles (91)
- #QUD55H 'Saving' the city: Collective low-budget organising and urban practice - 2015 | Birke Otto, Hans Vollmer, Heike Derwanz, Paula Bialski | ephemera: theory & politics in organization | 20 pp.
- #K52UPR A Critical Review of the Role of Repair Cafés in a Sustainable Circular Transition - 2021 | Mette Alberg Mosgaard, Rikke Marie Moalem | Sustainability | 26 pp. | doi:10.3390/su132212351
- #4EFC4F After Practice? Material Semiotic Approaches to Consumption and Economy [cited] - 2020 | David M. Evans | Cultural Sociology | 17 pp. | doi:10.1177/1749975520923521
- #9D34UM After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice - 2014 | Alan Warde | Journal of Consumer Culture | 25 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540514547828
- #5Y2AD9 An order of distinction (or, how to tell a collection from a hoard) - 2018 | Katie Kilroy-Marac | Journal of Material Culture | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/1359183517729428
- #FQRNAE Austerity and everyday life: Perspectives on practices of consumption and thrift - 2019 | Alison Hulme | Journal of Consumer Culture | 7 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540519872079
- #9MNC8T Austerity Ireland, the New Thrift Culture and Sustainable Consumption - 2017 | Fiona Murphy | Journal of Business Anthropology | 17 pp. | doi:10.22439/jba.v6i2.5410
- #59QUM6 Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle [cited] - 2017 | Sally Eden | Journal of Consumer Culture | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540515586871
- #X8QHRR Calculating the Environmental Impact Reduction Due to Extended Lifespan of Clothing Through Clothing Swaps - 2025 | Agnė Jučienė, Inga Gurauskienė, Jolita Kruopienė | Sustainability | 22 pp. | doi:10.3390/su17104411
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- #XUHRZA Changing understandings of waste reduction and avoidance in moralities of thrift: A comparison of Mass Observers' narratives three decades apart [cited] - 2022 | Helen Holmes, Ulrike Ehgartner | Geoforum | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.10.014
- #BQ2W57 Circular Consumption Practices as Matters of Care [cited] - 2025 | Elina Närvänen, Malla Mattila, Nina Mesiranta, Outi Koskinen | Journal of Business Ethics | 19 pp. | doi:10.1007/s10551-024-05888-5
- #57LWKZ Cities of care: A platform for urban geographical care research - 2020 | Emma R. Power, Miriam J. Williams | Geography Compass | 12 pp. | doi:10.1111/gec3.12474
- #JXXRQJ Citizen-Consumers as Agents of Change in Globalizing Modernity: The Case of Sustainable Consumption - 2010 | Gert Spaargaren, Peter Oosterveer | Sustainability | 22 pp. | doi:10.3390/su2071887
- #8ZKAT7 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy - 2016 | Kersty Hobson | Progress in Human Geography | 17 pp. | doi:10.1177/0309132514566342
- #MCJT5Q Connecting the multi-level-perspective and social practice approach for sustainable transitions - 2022 | Léon Francis Hirt, Margit Keller, Marlyne Sahakian | Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions | 15 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.eist.2022.05.004
- #UB9EAT Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective [cited] - 2019 | Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero | Sustainable Development | 16 pp. | doi:10.1002/sd.2002
- #Q3G2WY Consumption - 2011 | David Graeber | Current Anthropology | 24 pp. | doi:10.1086/660166
- #N7FUYP Consumption and Commodities - 1995 | D. Miller | Annual Review of Anthropology | 22 pp. | doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.24.1.141
- #RZ8QTE Consumption and Theories of Practice [cited] - 2005 | Alan Warde | Journal of Consumer Culture | 23 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540505053090
- #PSBVW7 Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review - 2018 | Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero | Sustainability | 25 pp. | doi:10.3390/su10082758
- #NUEUVY Consumption Work in the circular economy: A research agenda. [cited] - 2021 | Dan Welch, Harald Wieser, Helen Holmes, Katy Wheeler, Kersty Hobson | Journal of Cleaner Production | 8 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128969
- #MNFABA Disposal and simple living: exploring the circulation of goods and the development of sacred consumption - 2009 | Hélène Cherrier | Journal of Consumer Behaviour | 14 pp. | doi:10.1002/cb.297
- #YBKS64 Everyday life after downshifting: Consumption, thrift, and inequality - 2020 | Jo Lindsay, Kim Humphery, Ruth Lane | Geographical Research | 15 pp. | doi:10.1111/1745-5871.12396
- #TBPJS6 Exploring the role of community-based enterprises in consumers' voluntary clothing disposition via UK swapping events using theory of social practice [cited] - 2023 | Aurelie Le Normand, Claudia E. Henninger, Lucie Počinková, Marta Blazquez Cano | Social Enterprise Journal | 21 pp. | doi:10.1108/sej-02-2023-0017
- #N5VYH8 Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices - 2021 | Aricia F.M. Castelo, Martina Schäfer, Minelle E. Silva | Appetite | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.appet.2020.104978
- #FHZZ6U Freecycling Markets as Sustainable Materialist Movements? Closing Reuse Circularity Loops in Singapore [cited] - 2024 | Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Qian Hui Tan | Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies | 15 pp. | doi:10.3197/whpww.63857928646673
- #SJ3K7R Friends, family and the circulation of used goods: overlooked sustainability practices - 2025 | Dharma Arunachalam, Jo Lindsay, Rob Raven, Ruth Lane | Environmental Sociology | 13 pp. | doi:10.1080/23251042.2025.2510410
- #4AE86F From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City - 2020 | Kersty Hobson | Urban Geography | 5 pp. | doi:10.1080/02723638.2020.1786329
- #4UEQN8 Gift or commodity: what changes hands in the U.S. garage sale? - 1997 | Gretchen M. Herrmann | American Ethnologist | 21 pp. | doi:10.1525/ae.1997.24.4.910
- #B6FWAN Governing transitions in the sustainability of everyday life [cited] - 2010 | Elizabeth Shove, Gordon Walker | Research Policy | 6 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.respol.2010.01.019
- #MRANHJ Grey greening: quiet sustainability at auto salvage yards - 2022 | Pavel Mašek | Geografie | 19 pp. | doi:10.37040/geografie2022127010055
- #MBXQXR Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets [cited] - 2015 | Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren | Culture Unbound | 26 pp. | doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1571143
- #B3CVMW Harnessing the Unruly: Anthropological Contributions in Applied Reuse Projects - 2020 | Anna Bohlin, Staffan Appelgren | kritisk etnografi: Swedish Journal of Anthropology | 17 pp. | doi:10.33063/diva-432451
- #YW8AYL Home and the extended-self: Exploring associations between clutter and wellbeing - 2021 | Caroline J. Rogers, Dr Rona Hart | Journal of Environmental Psychology | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101553
- #ZB3YSD Household consumption at the crossroads: A bibliometric decoding of global sustainability trends, research gaps, and collaborative networks (2015-2025) - 2025 | B.K. Prahani, Hendry Cahyono, Iszan Hana Kaharudin, Kukuh Arisetyawan, Ladi Wajuba Perdini Fisabilillah, M. Satriawan, M.A. Ghofur, N. Suprapto, Ruth Eviana Hutabarat, S. Andari, Wenny Restikasari, Zain Fuadi Muhammad RoziqiFath | E3S Web of Conferences | 10 pp. | doi:10.1051/e3sconf/202564001017
- #UGBANU How temporal orientations trigger, nurture and sustain deep engagement with consumption practices - 2025 | Benjamin Rosenthal | Marketing Theory | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/14705931241264535
- #9GQP2Z In Defense of Consumer Critique: Revisiting the Consumption Debates of the Twentieth Century - 2007 | Juliet B. Schor | The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science | 15 pp. | doi:10.1177/0002716206299145
- #4Y4DVC Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany - 2023 | Petra Kuppinger | Critique of Anthropology | 20 pp. | doi:10.1177/0308275x231194259
- #XUS5YJ Learning like a Minimalist—Learning from a Minimalist. Consumers as Disseminators for Sustainable Clothes Usage - 2021 | Journal of Sustainability Research | 24 pp. | doi:10.20900/jsr20210017
- #QWH9YU Lifestyles of enough exploring sufficiency-oriented consumption behavior from a social practice theory perspective - 2023 | Maren I Kropfeld | Journal of Consumer Culture | 22 pp. | doi:10.1177/14695405221095008
- #VGCYKU Linking social practice theories to the perceptions of green consumption: An overview - 2025 | Samira Jabin, Shah Md Atiqul Haq | Social Sciences & Humanities Open | 12 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.101455
- #R69WZQ Material culture and the circular economy - 2023 | Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen | Frontiers in Sustainability | 4 pp. | doi:10.3389/frsus.2023.1158079
- #ARE7AL Materials changing the performance of the household energy consumption practices - 2025 | Eliisa Kylkilahti, Henna Syrjälä, Liisa Kääntä, Sara-Ellen Laitinen | Journal of Consumer Culture | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/14695405251321405
- #FYWZFY My Journey within Practice-Based Approaches Bandwagon - 2019 | Mika Pantzar | Sociologica | 8 pp. | doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/10203
- #XATD2A New spaces, ordinary practices: Circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning [cited] - 2018 | Helen Holmes | Geoforum | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.11.022
- #R9KEKQ Not moving things along: hoarding, clutter and other ambiguous matter - 2009 | Neil Maycroft | Journal of Consumer Behaviour | 12 pp. | doi:10.1002/cb.298
- #VJ8G58 Object Relations in Accounts of Everyday Life - 2015 | Elizabeth Shove, Jenny Rinkinen, Mikko Jalas | Sociology | 16 pp. | doi:10.1177/0038038515577910
- #CUWPC9 On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair &amp; Care - 2019 | Cindy Isenhour, Joshua Reno | Worldwide Waste | 8 pp. | doi:10.5334/wwwj.27
- #D8EAVV Online Clothing Resale: A Practice Theory Approach to Evaluate Sustainable Consumption Gains - 2020 | Cosette M. Joyner Armstrong, Hyejune Park | Journal of Sustainability Research | 24 pp. | doi:10.20900/jsr20200017
- #AG36RW Paradoxes of openness and distinction in the sharing economy - 2016 | Connor Fitzmaurice, Emilie Dubois Poteat, Juliet B. Schor, Lindsey B. Carfagna, Will Attwood-Charles | Poetics | 18 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2015.11.001
- #86EHHS Practice theory approach to Gen Z’s sustainable clothing consumption in Finland [cited] - 2024 | Olga Gurova | Young Consumers | 19 pp. | doi:10.1108/yc-06-2023-1765
- #XAYNBH Practice-ing behaviour change: Applying social practice theory to pro-environmental behaviour change - 2011 | Tom Hargreaves | Journal of Consumer Culture | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540510390500
- #WVG7HV Quiet sustainability: Fertile lessons from Europe’s productive gardeners [cited] - 2013 | Joe Smith, Petr Jehlicka | Journal of Rural Studies | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.05.002
- #4YG3VP Repair for a Broken Economy: Lessons for Circular Economy from an International Interview Study of Repairers - 2021 | Duncan McLaren, Johan Niskanen, Jonas Anshelm | Sustainability | 15 pp. | doi:10.3390/su13042316
- #AY4Z4C Repair Work as Care: On Maintaining the Planet in the Capitalocene - 2025 | Julia E. Corwin, Vinay Gidwani | Antipode | 21 pp. | doi:10.1111/anti.12791
- #V9QTJP Reuse practices and household consumption work [cited] - 2026 | David M. Evans, Peter Jackson, Rorie Beswick-Parsons | Social &amp; Cultural Geography | 21 pp. | doi:10.1080/14649365.2025.2549709
- #HJXUZN Selling Thrift: Work Practices in an American Thrift Store [cited] - 2023 | Frederik Larsen | Journal of Business Anthropology | 19 pp. | doi:10.22439/jba.v12i1.6914
- #ANC583 Social bases of material consumption: The relationship between social groups and possession of household appliances in Denmark - 2019 | Mette Hove Jacobsen | Journal of Consumer Culture | 20 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540516684190
- #NE9YL5 Sustainability as a Moral Discourse: Its Shifting Meanings, Exclusions, and Anxieties - 2022 | Al Lim, Lav Kanoi, Michael R. Dove, Shoko Yamada, Vanessa Koh | Sustainability | 17 pp. | doi:10.3390/su14053095
- #EPZXEW Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing - 2024 | Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa | BBR, Braz. Bus. Rev. | 25 pp. | doi:10.15728/bbr.2021.1182.en
- #5FD8BE The Advent of Practice Theories in Research on Sustainable Consumption: Past, Current and Future Directions of the Field - 2019 | Filippo Corsini, Francesco Paolo Appio, Franziska Meinherz, Luca Mora, Rafael Laurenti | Sustainability | 19 pp. | doi:10.3390/su11020341
- #GAZV32 The communities and materials of repair: collectively reflecting on repair practices of everyday artefacts - 2026 | Bilge Merve Aktaş, Hazal Gümüş Çiftçi | CoDesign | 21 pp. | doi:10.1080/15710882.2025.2452575
- #P7EWHQ The Force of Things - 2004 | Jane Bennett | Political Theory | 27 pp. | doi:10.1177/0090591703260853
- #7VNTAB The gift of waste: The diversity of gift practices among dumpster divers - 2023 | Olli Pyyhtinen, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen | Anthropological Theory | 23 pp. | doi:10.1177/14634996221117318
- #Q24SW5 The Gift, the Indian Gift and the 'Indian Gift' - 1986 | Jonathan Parry | Man | 22 pp. | doi:10.2307/2803096
- #UMYA27 The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy - 2021 | Kersty Hobson | Environmental Politics | 20 pp. | doi:10.1080/09644016.2020.1816052
- #UTEUAD The logics of frugality: Reproducing tastes of necessity among affluent climate change activists - 2017 | Jean Léon Boucher | Energy Research & Social Science | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.001
- #P88564 The Minimalist Universe of Things. Living with Less in German Speaking Households - 2023 | Heike Derwanz | Home Cultures | 18 pp. | doi:10.1080/17406315.2024.2338007
- #LB5ACW The Political Economy of Circular Economies: Lessons from Future Repair Scenario Deliberations in Sweden - 2023 | Duncan McLaren, Johan Niskanen | Circular Economy and Sustainability | 25 pp. | doi:10.1007/s43615-021-00128-8
- #7RVN6J The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate - 2022 | Catherine Alexander | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 32 pp. | doi:10.1017/s0010417522000159
- #RRPNRF The Sustainability of an Anthropology of the Anthropocene - 2022 | Thomas Hylland Eriksen | Sustainability | 11 pp. | doi:10.3390/su14063674
- #NM4W8T Theories of practices: Agency, technology, and culture - 2011 | Gert Spaargaren | Global Environmental Change | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.03.010
- #GKZ9HP There is no sustainable circular economy without a circular society - 2021 | Charlotte Jensen, Florian Hofmann, Jakob Zwiers, Melanie Jaeger-Erben | Resources, Conservation and Recycling | 2 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2021.105476
- #XDUQVM Through the practice lens: Where is the bandwagon of practice-based studies heading? - 2010 | Gessica Corradi, Luca Verzelloni, Silvia Gherardi | Management Learning | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/1350507609356938
- #MB6S7L Toward an Ecology of Materials - 2012 | Tim Ingold | Annual Review of Anthropology | 20 pp. | doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920
- #7BM5AQ Uncontained accumulation: Hidden heterotopias of storage and spillage - 2018 | Sasha Newell | History and Anthropology | 6 pp. | doi:10.1080/02757206.2017.1397647
- #6EFDXH Unpicking contemporary thrift: Getting on and getting by in everyday life - 2019 | Helen Holmes | The Sociological Review | 17 pp. | doi:10.1177/0038026118797837
- #SHZ6RT Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store - 2019 | Frederik Larsen | Business History | 18 pp. | doi:10.1080/00076791.2017.1418330
- #N7DKM2 Vogel's Net - 1996 | Alfred Gell | Journal of Material Culture | 25 pp. | doi:10.1177/135918359600100102
- #S54TH3 Waste and the superfluous: an introduction - 2017 | Elisabeth Schober, Thomas Hylland Eriksen | Social Anthropology | 6 pp. | doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12422
- #6C82ER Waste is not the end. For an anthropology of care, maintenance and repair - 2017 | Francisco Martínez | Social Anthropology | 5 pp. | doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12436
- #UBF5U3 What does that shirt mean to you? Thrift-store consumption as cultural capital - 2020 | Shelly Steward | Journal of Consumer Culture | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540517745707
- #LB72BP What future for collaborative consumption? A practice theoretical account - 2019 | Gert Spaargaren, Walter Fraanje | Journal of Cleaner Production | 10 pp. | doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.09.197
- #9X3WKH Whose Collection Is It Anyway? An Autoethnographic Account of `Dividing the Spoils' upon Divorce - 2007 | Jackie Goode | Cultural Sociology | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/1749975507082055
- #ZNC4FL WITH and WITHOUT THINGS. AN INTRODUCTION - 2023 | Francisco Martínez, Tomás Errázuriz | Home Cultures | 15 pp. | doi:10.1080/17406315.2024.2347703
- #ZJUEY4 ‘It will Keep Circulating’: Loving and Letting Go of Things in Swedish Second-hand Markets - 2019 | Anna Bohlin | Worldwide Waste | 11 pp. | doi:10.5334/wwwj.17
- #VWPB2S ‘It's Kind of Saving them a Job isn't it?’ The Consumption Work of Household Recycling - 2015 | Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann | The Sociological Review | 19 pp. | doi:10.1111/1467-954x.12199
- #UTUMYN ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care - 2012 | María Puig de la Bellacasa | The Sociological Review | 20 pp. | doi:10.1111/j.1467-954x.2012.02070.x
- #EDFB5G “If I don’t do it, it feels wrong”: embodying environmental ethical reflexivity through cultivation and enactment of practices [cited] - 2024 | Anne Sofie Møller Askholm | Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy | 12 pp. | doi:10.1080/15487733.2024.2350204
- #3F4AVR “Still good life”: On the value of reuse and distributive labor in “depleted” rural Maine [cited] - 2020 | Brieanne Berry, Cindy Isenhour | Economic Anthropology | 16 pp. | doi:10.1002/sea2.12176

Books (20)
- #GABXSA Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies - 1995 | Daniel Miller | 350 pp.
- #UX42KU Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing [cited] - 2016 | Thomas Widlok | 240 pp. | doi:10.4324/9781315671291
- #VC6397 Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes - 2015 | Andrew Brooks | 298 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781350219243
- #8J3FXD Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality [cited] - 2003 | Elizabeth Shove | 236 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781474214605
- #2EDLQU Elusive Consumption - 2004 | Helene Brembeck, Karin M. Ekström | 254 pp. | doi:10.5040/9781474214704
- #BJ6B3C From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Postsocialist Hungary - 2007 | Zsuzsa Gille | 266 pp.
- #4LST57 Household Recycling and Consumption Work [cited] - 2015 | Kathryn Wheeler, Miriam Glucksmann | 249 pp. | doi:10.1057/9781137440440
- #R26U48 Materiality - 2005 | Daniel Miller | 302 pp.
- #Y3KME8 My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries - 2016 | Elizabeth Chin | 248 pp. | doi:10.1515/9780822374268
- #B5KMLA Second-Hand Cultures and Economies of Reuse, Repair, Sharing, and Care - 2025 | Petra Kuppinger | Palgrave Macmillan | 28 pp. | doi:10.1007/978-3-031-99875-1
- #VKBZ23 Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social - 1996 | Theodore R. Schatzki | 256 pp. | doi:10.1017/CBO9780511527470
- #5AXAEJ The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes [cited] - 2012 | Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar | 206 pp. | doi:10.4135/9781446250655
- #83R4U2 The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish - 2006 | Gay Hawkins | 80 pp.
- #R49AUC The Nexus of Practices: Connections, constellations, practitioners - 2017 | Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki | 237 pp. | doi:10.4324/9781315560816
- #3LSRBZ The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill - 2000 | Tim Ingold | 480 pp.
- #6J5MKL The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory - 2001 | Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. 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

### 4. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `get_document`

```json
{
  "id": "4V8VH7"
}
```

### 5. 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

### 6. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "9XAKTW"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

### 7. 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.

### 8. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `get_document`

```json
{
  "id": "5AXAEJ"
}
```

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "document_id": "5AXAEJ",
  "limit": 8,
  "query": "elements materials meanings competences linking practice"
}
```

### 9. Tool result: get_document

DOCUMENT #5AXAEJ
Title: The Dynamics of Social Practice

Outline:
  - 1 #5W2PJB THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
  - 2 #SM2ASL THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
  - 3 #MLWG3R THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
  - 4 #ERYLEX CONTENTS
  - 5 #RJD3SC LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLE
    - 5.1 #AQ5ZUD Figures
    - 5.2 #K42KWM Table
  - 6 #3JT2SD ABOUT THE AUTHORS
  - 7 #47JF6S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  - 8 #WWSYJP 1
  - 9 #MV5P3X THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
    - 9.1 #XKXCG8 INTRODUCING THEORIES OF PRACTICE
    - 9.2 #CGRC4S MATERIALS AND RESOURCES
    - 9.3 #BBQ2U3 SEQUENCE AND STRUCTURE
  - 10 #4F5G4N 2
  - 11 #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
    - 11.1 #Z73JHW MATERIAL, COMPETENCE AND MEANING
    - 11.2 #XZV45L CAR-DRIVING – ELEMENTS AND LINKAGES
      - 11.2.1 #DBJWEC MAKING LINKS
      - 11.2.2 #VEDDZZ BREAKING LINKS
    - 11.3 #EBZCFW ELEMENTS BETWEEN PRACTICES
    - 11.4 #QM4X2J STANDARDIZATION AND DIVERSITY
    - 11.5 #J9P8DZ INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE CAREERS
  - 12 #NX87WU 3
  - 13 #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS
    - 13.1 #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION
      - 13.1.1 #3KWGMM Transportation and access: material
      - 13.1.2 #THMJ59 Abstraction, reversal and migration: competence
      - 13.1.3 #SY5EDK Association and classification: meaning
      - 13.1.4 #YLZQUZ Packing and unpacking
    - 13.2 #WPPBPJ EMERGENCE, DISAPPEARANCE AND PERSISTENCE
  - 14 #A7D5SC 4
  - 15 #NXZT4D RECRUITMENT, DEFECTION AND REPRODUCTION
    - 15.1 #F8JCHW FIRST ENCOUNTERS: NETWORKS AND COMMUNITIES
    - 15.2 #7QBCW8 CAPTURE AND COMMITMENT: CAREERS AND CARRIERS
    - 15.3 #8JX39Z COLLAPSE AND TRANSFORMATION: THE DYNAMICS OF DEFECTION
    - 15.4 #PLFBHW DAILY PATHS, LIFE PATHS AND DOMINANT PROJECTS
  - 16 #9XVXK2 5
    - 16.1 #CXK5CC CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PRACTICES
    - 16.2 #ELA87Q BUNDLES AND COMPLEXES
    - 16.3 #TVA3KY COLLABORATION AND COMPETITION
    - 16.4 #67PN8N SELECTION AND INTEGRATION
    - 16.5 #XC89XB COORDINATING DAILY LIFE
  - 17 #7HCNWJ 6
  - 18 #KTKRHR CIRCUITS OF REPRODUCTION
    - 18.1 #5LUMHC MONITORING PRACTICES-AS-PERFORMANCES
      - 18.1.1 #E8H23B MONITORING PRACTICES-AS-ENTITIES
      - 18.1.2 #TCT35W CROSS-REFERENCING PRACTICES-AS-PERFORMANCES
      - 18.1.3 #CRNFAD CROSS-REFERENCING PRACTICES-AS-ENTITIES
      - 18.1.4 #Z5LZBV Aggregation
      - 18.1.5 #JEXR3M Elements of coordination
    - 18.2 #ZUAQBH INTERSECTING CIRCUITS
  - 19 #4JFLZ9 7
  - 20 #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
    - 20.1 #Q8XDZB REPRESENTING ELEMENTS AND PRACTICES
      - 20.1.1 #2A3N85 CHARACTERIZING CIRCULATION
      - 20.1.2 #BFDM4Q COMPETITION, TRANSFORMATION AND CONVERGENCE
    - 20.2 #QPH46U REPRODUCING ELEMENTS, PRACTICES AND RELATIONS BETWEEN THEM
      - 20.2.1 #RA7LJ2 TIME AND PRACTICE
      - 20.2.2 #UJXB44 SPACE AND PRACTICE
      - 20.2.3 #SKGSBB DOMINANT PROJECTS AND POWER
  - 21 #6P2ZMD 8
  - 22 #QRSCLP PROMOTING TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE
    - 22.1 #VC26KP CLIMATE CHANGE AND BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
      - 22.1.1 #8GFJNF Basis of action
      - 22.1.2 #AJ757K Processes of change
      - 22.1.3 #AMQ7FN Positioning policy
      - 22.1.4 #RCW67Z Transferable lessons
    - 22.2 #WNL5BX PRACTICE THEORY AND CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY
      - 22.2.1 #8WHQQJ Configuring elements of practice
      - 22.2.2 #4F8F39 Configuring relations between practices
      - 22.2.3 #YVMFU5 Configuring careers: carriers and practices
      - 22.2.4 #NBLH65 Configuring connections
    - 22.3 #LYZ8XN PRACTICE-ORIENTED POLICY MAKING
  - 23 #L9W9UH REFERENCES
  - 24 #3VZ9WM INDEX

### 10. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 70
  Context:
    #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS
      #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION
        #YLZQUZ Packing and unpacking
  Matching excerpt #Z7DKTH:
      First, materials are the only elements that literally move in the sense of being physically transported. While competences and images appear to circulate, critical processes have to do with localized forms of de- and re-linking, a feature about which we have more to say below. Second, materials have characteristics (weight, fragility etc.) that affect, but which are only sometimes transformed by, processes of transportation. By contrast, meanings and competences are routinely modified as their reach and range extends or contracts. Third, with materials as with competences and meanings, the rate and extent of actual and potential circulation depends on the existence or otherwise of appropriate infrastructures, for instance, of transportation or mediation. Fourth, processes of codification

2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 38
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
      #Z73JHW MATERIAL, COMPETENCE AND MEANING
  Matching excerpt #8PTVJJ:
      This basic scheme reveals little about the nature of the linking entailed in keeping a practice together, it tells us nothing about who is involved, how access to relevant elements is distributed or how instances of integration themselves transform and generate new competences, meanings and materialities. However, it does underline the centrality of linkage: if specific configurations are to remain effective, connections between defining elements have to be renewed time and again. This suggests that stability and routinization are not end points of a linear process of normalization. Rather, they should be understood as ongoing accomplishments in which similar elements are repeatedly linked together in similar ways.

3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 134
  Context:
    #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
  Matching excerpt #S57YQ5:
      elements (materials, meanings, competences). Practices-as-entities are constituted through such integrations (Chapter 2). Practices change when new elements are introduced or when existing elements are combined in new ways. Elements of meaning, materiality and competence are themselves outcomes of practice. Although they are generated and changed through moments of enactment, elements – being part of several practices at once – have somewhat independent lives of their own (Chapter 3). If practices are to survive they need to capture and retain practitioners willing and able to do this integrating and therefore willing and able to keep them alive (Chapter 4). Relations between practices take different forms – some collaborative, some competitive, some weak, some strong. Whatever form they take, such relations matter for the trajectories of the elements and individual practices of which composite bundles and complexes of practice are made (Chapter 5). Finally, the connections involved, between elements and practices and between one practice and another, are maintained and reproduced through intersecting circuits of reproduction that have dynamic qualities of their own (Chapter 6).

4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 43
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
      #XZV45L CAR-DRIVING – ELEMENTS AND LINKAGES
  Matching excerpt #GXYEMN:
      In theory, one might represent the development of driving (or any other practice) through a series of snapshots, each capturing the materials, meanings and competences involved at different moments. Figure 2.2 provides a simple sketch of the elements of which driving was made in the USA in the first decade of the twentieth century.

5. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 43
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
      #XZV45L CAR-DRIVING – ELEMENTS AND LINKAGES
        #DBJWEC MAKING LINKS
  Matching excerpt #X7X3FE:
      If practices are composed of materials, meanings and competences, histories of practice need to take note of the conjunction of all three elements at once . In this they differ from conventional histories of the development and diffusion of cars, many of which focus on technical and organizational innovations in manufacturing and on Ford's contribution in particular

6. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 57
  Context:
    #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS
  Matching excerpt #TVDX4P:
      In Chapter 2 we argued that practices like driving develop as links between defining elements are made and broken. In so far as this is true, the potential for practices to spread and take hold depends, at least in part, on the ready availability of requisite elements. If we are to understand how practices are distributed within and between societies, we need to think about how materials, meanings and forms of competence circulate and persist. This requires a shift of emphasis. Whereas Chapter 2 concentrated on connections between elements, this chapter discusses what one might think of as generic features or ‘elemental’ characteristics. In proceeding as if these could be somehow separated out, and in suggesting that materials, meanings and competences travel and endure in distinctly different ways, we seem to go against the grain of the previous chapter, in which we made much of the point that elements constitute each other and change through processes of integration . This is no accident. By moving between analytic frames, some chapters prioritizing links and connections, others concentrating on elements, practitioners or forms of feedback, we examine the dynamics of practice from different angles. At the same time, we try to keep sight of the interdependencies involved.

7. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 38
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
      #Z73JHW MATERIAL, COMPETENCE AND MEANING
  Matching excerpt #UG44UW:
      In what follows we work with the idea that practices are defined by interdependent relations between materials, competences and meanings. This deliberately streamlined approach has many advantages, but like all other such accounts it supposes that elements, however they might be defined, are somehow ‘out there’ in the world, waiting to be linked together. If we go along with the idea that practices exist when elements are integrated, we need to recognize two related possibilities: one is that relevant elements exist but without being linked (proto-practice); the second is that practices disintegrate when links are no longer sustained. Figure 2.1 illustrates these three scenarios.

8. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 137
  Context:
    #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
      #Q8XDZB REPRESENTING ELEMENTS AND PRACTICES
        #2A3N85 CHARACTERIZING CIRCULATION
  Matching excerpt #TA88QJ:
      artefacts 'script' bodily performance and the types of competence required to produce configurations that work (Akrich, 1992). This is much the same as saying that objects act as vectors or carriers of other elements of practice. Since practices-as-performances are culturally and historically situated, elements are unlikely to be integrated in identical fashion in every setting (Shove and Pantzar, 2005). Even so, we have argued that it is useful to think about how elements travel and to consider the implications and consequences of these trajectories for the chances that relevant sets of meanings, materials and competences might coincide (such that practices might be reproduced), and for how these elements are distributed (and thus for who might qualify as an actual or potential practitioner).

Approximate matches

1. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 71
  Context:
    #XG9NDT THE LIFE OF ELEMENTS
      #6H9VRT MODES OF CIRCULATION
        #YLZQUZ Packing and unpacking
  Score: 0.633
  Related excerpt #R2TDPN:
      Although we have discussed them separately, competence, material and meaning are often so closely related that if one element should travel alone (abstracted and packed in isolation), it is likely to remain dormant until joined by others capable of bringing it into the frame of a living practice. This observation reminds us that relevant elements need to co-exist if practices are to extend or endure. Having commented on how elements travel, we now turn to the ways in which they emerge, disappear and persist.

2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 134
  Context:
    #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
  Score: 0.618
  Related excerpt #S57YQ5:
      elements (materials, meanings, competences). Practices-as-entities are constituted through such integrations (Chapter 2). Practices change when new elements are introduced or when existing elements are combined in new ways. Elements of meaning, materiality and competence are themselves outcomes of practice. Although they are generated and changed through moments of enactment, elements – being part of several practices at once – have somewhat independent lives of their own (Chapter 3). If practices are to survive they need to capture and retain practitioners willing and able to do this integrating and therefore willing and able to keep them alive (Chapter 4). Relations between practices take different forms – some collaborative, some competitive, some weak, some strong. Whatever form they take, such relations matter for the trajectories of the elements and individual practices of which composite bundles and complexes of practice are made (Chapter 5). Finally, the connections involved, between elements and practices and between one practice and another, are maintained and reproduced through intersecting circuits of reproduction that have dynamic qualities of their own (Chapter 6).

3. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 38
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
      #Z73JHW MATERIAL, COMPETENCE AND MEANING
  Score: 0.601
  Related excerpt #UG44UW:
      In what follows we work with the idea that practices are defined by interdependent relations between materials, competences and meanings. This deliberately streamlined approach has many advantages, but like all other such accounts it supposes that elements, however they might be defined, are somehow ‘out there’ in the world, waiting to be linked together. If we go along with the idea that practices exist when elements are integrated, we need to recognize two related possibilities: one is that relevant elements exist but without being linked (proto-practice); the second is that practices disintegrate when links are no longer sustained. Figure 2.1 illustrates these three scenarios.

4. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 102
  Context:
    #9XVXK2 5
      #TVA3KY COLLABORATION AND COMPETITION
  Score: 0.597
  Related excerpt #6MB84V:
      forms of competence, and on their capacity to capture these resources (Chapter 3, 'The life of elements'). In this section we explore the suggestion that bundles and complexes arise and disappear as a consequence of competition and/or collaboration between practices.

5. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 46
  Context:
    #W6VMCW MAKING AND BREAKING LINKS
      #XZV45L CAR-DRIVING – ELEMENTS AND LINKAGES
        #DBJWEC MAKING LINKS
  Score: 0.585
  Related excerpt #ZY9YTJ:
      We have already said that new practices involve novel combinations of new or existing elements. To this we now add that such integrations are themselves transformative: material, meaning and competence are not just interdependent, they are also mutually shaping, as is indicated in Figure 2.3.

6. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 135
  Context:
    #GUVB7V REPRESENTING THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
      #Q8XDZB REPRESENTING ELEMENTS AND PRACTICES
  Score: 0.585
  Related excerpt #7CA95Q:
      The more challenging issue, though, is whether it makes sense, in general terms, to think of practices as integrations of elements and to then group these into three impressively broad categories. In developing this approach we took our inspiration from Reckwitz and from his suggestion that practices consist of interdependent relations between elements including ‘forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, “things” and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’ (2002: 249). In working with these ideas and using them to understand how practices circulate and change, we have taken endless liberties with the categories of materiality, meaning and competence. We have classified cast-iron stoves, skateboards, ink, infrastructures, bicycles and wing-mirrors as material elements as and when it suits us, paying little or no attention to their different and distinctive qualities. Our treatment of meaning and competence has been no more systematic. Accordingly, states of emotion have been folded into ‘meaning’, a term that also encompasses the symbolic significance of participation. Our justification is that however slippery it might be, this analytic strategy has allowed us to develop a method of thinking about the dynamics of practice, starting from first principles. By treating elements as building-blocks of practice, we have been able to identify emergent patterns and connections and say something about how these are made. In addition, the language of elements has allowed us to describe processes of transformation, diffusion and circulation and to extend theories of practice in these directions.

7. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 160
  Context:
    #QRSCLP PROMOTING TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE
      #VC26KP CLIMATE CHANGE AND BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
        #RCW67Z Transferable lessons
  Score: 0.58
  Related excerpt #6WJNFM:
      details of which reflect distinctive accumulations of meaning, materiality and competence and the relative positioning of one practice with respect to others.

8. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 30
  Context:
    #MV5P3X THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE
      #BBQ2U3 SEQUENCE AND STRUCTURE
  Score: 0.577
  Related excerpt #7QAEGP:
      Towards the end of this chapter we reflect on the emergence, persistence and disappearance of these three types of elements and on the potential for accumulating and storing materials, meanings and forms of competence. In addressing these themes, Chapter 3 explores the lives of elements to which practitioners must have access if practices are to be performed.

### 11. Assistant

Good news: your draft paragraphs are already speaking fluent Shove. "Detached, reclassified, re-linked" is Shove/Pantzar/Watson's own grammar from chapters 2–3 of *Dynamics of Social Practice*. You don't need to import the framework — you need to land it on two or three specific anchor passages so the reader sees you're doing it deliberately.

## Three Shove 2012 anchors that do most of the work for chapter 4

**1. "Making and breaking links" as ongoing accomplishment** (#8PTVJJ, p. 38)
> "stability and routinization are not end points of a linear process of normalization. Rather, they should be understood as ongoing accomplishments in which similar elements are repeatedly linked together in similar ways."

This is the passage that authorises your "labour of practice" move. Even better, the *same paragraph* explicitly names what their scheme leaves out: "it tells us nothing about who is involved, how access to relevant elements is distributed or how instances of integration themselves transform and generate new competences, meanings and materialities." That's basically Shove handing you the gap your gendered/care/relational reading fills. Quote it, then say: this is where the ethnography goes.

**2. Modes of circulation: material / competence / meaning** (Ch 3, #XG9NDT, esp. #Z7DKTH p. 70)
> "materials are the only elements that literally move… critical processes have to do with localized forms of de- and re-linking."

Brīvbode is *exactly* one of those "localized forms" — a physical site where de-linking from one household practice and re-linking into another happens in one room, observably. This is the cleanest justification for why the swapshop is analytically interesting in Shove's own terms.

**3. "Elements between practices"** (#EBZCFW, Ch 2 §3) and **bundles/complexes** (Ch 5, #CXK5CC, #ELA87Q)
Your closing line — "It is a site where multiple practices meet, interfere, borrow from one another, and redistribute their elements" — is Shove's bundles/complexes language. Cite Ch 5 there. Your existing thrift→disposal citation in #CLU5VP (Shove et al. 2012 via Gregson) is already in this register; you can foreground it as a *motif* of the chapter rather than a one-off.

## On your three drafts

- The first version reads like notes, second is the keeper for prose. The "lid off" metaphor is vivid but risks cuteness — I'd keep it once, in the chapter intro, then drop it.
- The "labour of practice" paragraph is the strongest move because it defines a concept, not just evokes an atmosphere. Lead with the Shove quote (#8PTVJJ) → say their scheme is silent on who does the linking → introduce labour of practice → preview that in Brīvbode this labour is gendered, relational, morally charged. That lineage will make Mikael happy.
- "Brīvbode is a practice with the lid off" is good but doesn't earn its keep unless you also say why the lid is normally on (households, price, retail logistics absorb the labour invisibly). Consider: *normally these processes are absorbed into price, into the household, into bins; in Brīvbode they are externalised into a single semi-public room.* That's a Shove-compatible claim with empirical bite.

## One structural suggestion

Chapter 4's current intro (#PL9BXR–#L252MY) is doing trajectory-of-things framing. If you want to ground the chapter in Shove 2012, you need ~150 words of explicit framework-setting between #PL9BXR and #EKYQ3W: introduce materials/competences/meanings, cite #8PTVJJ, name the "labour of practice" extension, and then descend into the empirical sections. Right now the framework is doing its work without being named, which is fine for a reader who already knows Shove and risky for one who doesn't.

And no, your thesis does not sound like that — it sounds like someone who has actually been in the room.

### 12. User

YLZQUZ i thought was quite nice... but hmm yeah...

### 13. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `read`

```json
{
  "blocks": [
    "YLZQUZ"
  ],
  "expand": true
}
```

### 14. Tool result: read

DOCUMENT #5AXAEJ
The Dynamics of Social Practice

SECTION #YLZQUZ Packing and unpacking

EXCERPT #DDW65K p. 70
  We began this chapter by wondering about how the materials, competences and meanings of eating toast for breakfast circulate, and hence about how and where this might become (or remain) a normal thing to do. This led us to comment, element by element, on some of the routes and means of travel potentially involved. Rather than trying to provide a comprehensive catalogue of all possible forms of circulation we have picked on a few examples and used them to illustrate a handful of simple observations.

EXCERPT #Z7DKTH p. 70
  First, materials are the only elements that literally move in the sense of being physically transported. While competences and images appear to circulate, critical processes have to do with localized forms of de- and re-linking, a feature about which we have more to say below. Second, materials have characteristics (weight, fragility etc.) that affect, but which are only sometimes transformed by, processes of transportation. By contrast, meanings and competences are routinely modified as their reach and range extends or contracts. Third, with materials as with competences and meanings, the rate and extent of actual and potential circulation depends on the existence or otherwise of appropriate infrastructures, for instance, of transportation or mediation. Fourth, processes of codification

EXCERPT #MVL26Q p. 71

EXCERPT #WTABLX p. 71

EXCERPT #LD9ACL p. 71
  and de-codification matter for the circulation of competence and meaning, but not for material. Fifth, some kinds of know-how can only be acquired and can only 'travel' if there is a base or foundation of existing competence on which to build. This limits the population of potential carriers and the extent to which specific competences can move. Sixth, acquiring new forms of skill often takes time. By contrast, meanings (i.e. forms of association) can change and emerge and can travel far and fast. That said, the effective appropriation of meanings and competences depends on local capacities to embed, 'reverse' and interpret. Such capacities are unevenly distributed and are, in turn, born of practices past.

EXCERPT #RXBW6A p. 71
  Looking back at the processes involved we can identify similarities as well as differences in how elements travel. One striking feature is that movements of all forms routinely involve what we might think of as moments of packing and unpacking. This is quite literally the case for materials, and is metaphorically so for elements of meaning and competence. Codification and abstraction, both forms of preparation, are often required. On arrival, the capacity to unpack – that is, to appropriate and decode – is correspondingly crucial and equally transformative. This is important in that processes of packing and unpacking are both defined and configured by local relations, histories and conditions. When in transit, and in so far as such a concept makes sense, elements might be momentarily free of such bonds, but there is no such independent life for elements that are embedded in practice.

EXCERPT #R2TDPN p. 71
  Although we have discussed them separately, competence, material and meaning are often so closely related that if one element should travel alone (abstracted and packed in isolation), it is likely to remain dormant until joined by others capable of bringing it into the frame of a living practice. This observation reminds us that relevant elements need to co-exist if practices are to extend or endure. Having commented on how elements travel, we now turn to the ways in which they emerge, disappear and persist.

### 15. Assistant

Yeah, packing/unpacking is genuinely the most useful Shove move for your chapter — better than the "lid off" metaphor because it's *theirs*, not yours, and it does real work. Look what it lets you say:

**Brīvbode is a site of dense, simultaneous, visible un/packing.**

- Donors arrive with bags that are literally packed but also metaphorically packed: each garment carries competences (how to wear it, how to wash wool), meanings (the class register it indexes, the previous owner's aura), and a history of attachment. Domestic divestment is a *first round of unpacking* — the donor strips the object of its place in their wardrobe, often with the help of YouTube tidying consultants (#CWZ4L2) or a biographical rupture (#Z2Y4K8).
- Volunteers do a *second round of unpacking and repacking*: assessing fibre and construction (#76T3WR), sorting into "women's clothing as a tree with many branches" (#BCDC5C), curating shelves to signal value (#KMD7AJ). This is exactly Shove's "capacity to unpack — that is, to appropriate and decode" (#RXBW6A) — and notice that this capacity is *unevenly distributed* in Brīvbode (Rasa's "most trained eye," novices like Madara still learning).
- Receivers do a *third unpacking* — into their own wardrobe, their own meanings of dignity, novelty, craft, restraint. Viesturs's "purgatory for things" (#Z4WUR2) is literally a metaphor of unpacking-and-cleansing: the object is stripped of the previous owner's energy before being repacked into a new life.

So Shove's claim that elements are "momentarily free of such bonds" while in transit (#RXBW6A) — that liminal moment — is what Brīvbode *materially houses*. The shelves are the in-transit zone made physical. That's a clean theoretical claim that earns the ethnography.

**Why your "hmm yeah" instinct is right too:** packing/unpacking flattens the labour. Shove writes as if codification and decoding just happen. Your chapter shows they don't: someone has to do them, those someones are mostly women, and the work is morally charged. So you can use packing/unpacking as the framework concept *and* still pivot to your "labour of practice" extension — the un/packing happens because volunteers do it, not because elements have inherent travel properties.

Concretely: if you want to ground 4.2 (#PBFQ5E "Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow") in Shove, this is the move. The site *is* the unpacking infrastructure. Quote #RXBW6A once at the top, then let the ethnography of Rasa unlocking the door, the sorting table, the trained eye, do the rest.

### 16. User

can you explain "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."?

### 17. Assistant

Sure. That sentence is doing two jobs: invoking a standard practice-theory distinction, and promising a specific analytic move with it.

## The distinction (Schatzki via Shove)

- **Practice-as-entity**: the practice considered as a recognizable, nameable thing that exists across time and people — "freecycling" as something you can describe, point to, study, and that has rules, expectations, a typical shape. It's the abstraction.
- **Practice-as-performance**: the practice as it is actually enacted, here, now, by these specific people with these specific objects. The Thursday queue. Rasa unlocking the door. Viesturs trying to systematise women's clothing. Each performance reproduces — or strains, or alters — the entity.

Shove et al. lean on this constantly: the entity only exists *because* it is repeatedly performed, but each performance also has the potential to deviate, drift, or break. The entity is the pattern; performances are the instances; neither is real without the other.

## What your sentence is promising

"Moving between" the two means: I will sometimes describe what freecycling *is* in Brīvbode (its norms, its moral economy, its expected shape) and sometimes show what *happens* in concrete moments — and I'll be especially interested in where these don't match.

"Friction and tension where the two pull against each other" is the productive part. Examples already in your chapter:

- The **entity** says Brīvbode is exchange, not charity (#QU37KZ, #KBESND). The **performance** sometimes includes resellers and heavy-takers, and Rasa's working accommodation — "what choice do I have but to believe… we support small businesses" (#7FPBUS) — is performance straining against entity.
- The **entity** says items should be clean, in good condition, brought "as you would give to a friend" (#F9CK8T). The **performance** includes expired covid tests, cut mosquito nets, single-use sugar packets (#HN8W7V). The entity's threshold is renegotiated in every shift.
- The **entity** says Brīvbode is a non-monetary alternative to consumption. The **performance** sometimes makes it a "place to dump it all and go buy new things" (#9CFEH4). Same practice, two pulls.
- Aiga's case (#YNY54V): she has internalised an entity-level meaning ("genuine need, low threshold"), but a single performance — someone commenting on what she brought — disturbs the link, and her future participation changes.

## Why this framing is doing work for chapter 4

It justifies your method of toggling between conceptual passages and ethnographic close-ups. It also flags in advance that you're not writing a tidy account where Brīvbode-as-entity is simply illustrated by performances; the chapter will keep finding moments where the two are out of alignment, and those moments are where the analysis lives.

If you want a slightly tighter rewrite:

> Throughout the chapter I move between freecycling as practice-entity — its norms, expected shape, and moral economy — and as practice-performance, attending especially to moments where the two pull against each other and where the work of holding them together becomes visible.

That last clause also quietly sets up the "labour of practice" idea you want to introduce.

### 18. User

really i kind of basically wonder how — and why? — to take this shove practice theory seriously and use it as a basis for the chapter 4... not to disparage it I'm really just wondering like I want a zoom out and remember what's going on here lol

### 19. Assistant

Yeah. Step back. Here's the honest version.

## What Shove 2012 is actually for

Practice theory in the Shove/Pantzar/Watson register was written to do one specific thing: shift the unit of analysis in sustainability research away from the individual rational consumer (who needs more information, better incentives, attitude change) toward the *practice* — the patterned, materially embedded, socially shared way of doing something. Showering, driving, eating, freecycling. The point of saying "look at materials/meanings/competences" is to insist that you can't change consumption by changing minds, because the practice is doing the holding, not the person.

That's the polemic. In 2012 it was useful because the field was drowning in behaviour-change frameworks. It still is.

## Why it earns its keep in your chapter 4

Three concrete things and not many more:

1. **It lets you call Brīvbode "a practice of circulation" rather than "a swapshop."** That's not stylistic — it shifts the object of study from a venue to a patterned activity that recruits people, redistributes elements, and persists across performances. Your whole argument that Brīvbode is *not just* a container of stuff depends on this reframing.

2. **It gives you permission to hold heterogeneous meanings together without resolving them.** Quiet sustainability, articulated sustainability, dignity, novelty, thrift, craft, restraint — practice theory says a practice can be sustained by mutually incompatible meanings as long as the doings cohere. That is the load-bearing claim of section 4.7 and the conclusion. Almost no other framework lets you make it as cleanly.

3. **It gives you the entity/performance toggle**, which is how you keep pulling out the friction (overflow vs. alternative, charity vs. exchange, free vs. exchange in Madara's head). Without it, those tensions read as contradictions to be resolved. With it, they read as the constitutive dynamic of the practice.

That's it. That's what Shove buys you. Three tools.

## What Shove 2012 is *not* for, and why your skepticism is healthy

- It is famously thin on **power, gender, labour, affect, care**. Elements "travel," practices "recruit carriers," circuits "reproduce" — all in the passive voice, as if no one were doing anything. Your ethnography is built out of women doing work, moral judgment, emotional regulation, friendship. The framework keeps abstracting away what your fieldwork most clearly shows.
- It is **diagnostic more than explanatory**. It tells you *that* materials/meanings/competences are linked. It rarely tells you why this specific configuration here, in Riga, in 2024, with this post-Soviet history and these geopolitical anxieties. For that you need Alexander on thrift, Bankovska on Latvian care, Bohlin & Appelgren on Swedish reuse, Widlok on sharing.
- It can become a **vocabulary tax**: rephrasing strong ethnographic observations into practice-theoretic locutions to make them sound theoretical, when they were already doing fine.

## So what's actually going on in your thesis

Practice theory is one of three frames in your scaffolding, not the master frame. Chapter 4's job is *circulation* — and Shove's framework is the cleanest vocabulary for circulation, so it is load-bearing there. Chapter 5's job is *care and labour* — and there Wheeler & Glucksmann's consumption work, plus Puig de la Bellacasa / Tronto on care, will do more of the work. The "labour of practice" sentence you drafted is the *hinge* between the two — it's where you tell the reader: I've used Shove to describe the structure of circulation; now I'm going to show you what holds it up, and that part Shove can't see.

That's a strong position. You're not a disciple, you're not a critic, you're using the framework where it's sharp and pivoting where it's blunt. Mikael will respect that more than full obedience.

## A tip for not losing your nerve mid-chapter

When you feel the chapter going stiff, ask: *would I notice this if I didn't have practice theory in my head?* If yes, write the observation; cite Shove only if it sharpens it. If no — if practice theory is *making you see something* you would otherwise miss — then it's earning its keep, lean in.

The framework is a torch, not a costume. You're nearly there.

### 20. User

it does seem quite nice to me this notion "Brīvbode is not simply a container for second-hand objects, and not even only “a practice” of freecycling. It is a site where multiple practices meet, interfere, borrow from one another, and redistribute their elements." btw i am mikael i am just helping with the thesis work haha

### 21. Assistant

Ha, hello Mikael. That changes the register a bit — let me be more direct.

You're right that the line is doing more work than it looks. Three things to notice:

**It silently solves a definitional problem.** "What is Brīvbode?" is a question the thesis keeps deferring — is it a swapshop, a freeshop, an organisation, an infrastructure, a practice, a community? The line reframes the question itself: stop asking what Brīvbode *is* as a singular noun, and instead describe what *meets* there. That's a much stronger anthropological move than picking one of the available labels.

**"Interfere" is the load-bearing verb.** "Meet, borrow, redistribute" are friendly Shove-Ch.5-bundles language. *Interfere* is not — it's hers. It acknowledges that the practices passing through Brīvbode sometimes work at cross-purposes: domestic decluttering versus volunteer curation; the moral economy of exchange versus class-stigma management; quiet sustainability versus pressure-valve disposal. Most of chapter 4's empirical tension is explained by the word "interfere." I'd encourage Ieva to keep that verb and not let it get edited toward something tamer.

**It's actually closer to Schatzki/Hui/Shove 2017 (*Nexus of Practices*, #R49AUC) than to Shove 2012.** Shove 2012 is mostly about individual practices and their elements; the site-as-meeting-point framing is Schatzki's nexus, which the 2017 volume tries to operationalise. If you want to give the line theoretical scaffolding without piling more Shove 2012 onto it, *Nexus* is the citation. It also gives Ieva an honest exit from the limits of the 2012 book — practice-as-bundle / practice-as-nexus is precisely where the framework starts engaging power, intersection, and friction.

**Concrete suggestion for the chapter:**

Right now this sentence is buried in the conclusion-ish drift of one of her drafts. It deserves to be the *thesis* of chapter 4, sitting near the top of the chapter intro. Something like:

> Brīvbode is not simply a container for second-hand objects, nor only a single practice of freecycling. It is a site where multiple practices — domestic divestment, wardrobe management, volunteer organising, craft, mutual aid, sustainability talk, class performance — meet, interfere, borrow from one another, and redistribute their elements. This chapter follows what happens at those meetings.

Then the rest of chapter 4 becomes a tour of the interferences: 4.1 is divestment-meets-shop, 4.3 is curation-meets-overflow, 4.4 is exchange-meets-charity, 4.7 is sustainability-meets-thrift. The structure she already has *is* this argument, it just needs the framing sentence promoted to the front and named.

Bonus: with this framing, the "labour of practice" extension she's drafting becomes more obviously necessary, because the meetings don't manage themselves — someone (mostly women, mostly volunteers) is doing the work of keeping the practices articulated to each other. The nexus is held together by labour. That's a publishable line.

### 22. User

oh, huh, yeah, that book is interesting... The material components of practices can be similarly understood as intersections between multiple practices. Elements of practices are 'a point of connection between them' – albeit not fixed and static points but ones more akin to 'zones of overlap and intersection' (Shove et al., 2012: 113) or 'a form of connective tissue that holds complex social arrangements in place, and potentially pulls them apart' (Shove et al., 2012: 36). While not using the concept of material 'elements', Schatzki highlights the ability of practices to 'overlap': 'a particular doing, for instance, might

belong to two or more practices by virtue of expressing components of these different practices' organizations' (2002: 87). Since practices are seen by Schatzki to be 'intrinsically connected to and interwoven with objects' (2002: 106), it follows that objects might similarly be points of overlap and intersection between multiple practices.

### 23. Assistant tool calls

#### Tool call: `search_text`

```json
{
  "document_id": "R49AUC",
  "limit": 5,
  "query": "zones of overlap and intersection connective tissue points of connection"
}
```

### 24. Tool result: search_text

Exact matches

1. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 72
  Context:
    #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES
      #C4CY9W Variation within practices
        #8F6WU9 Variation in terms of practitioners or materials at the intersection of practices
  Matching excerpt #DCEVRD:
      The material components of practices can be similarly understood as intersections between multiple practices. Elements of practices are 'a point of connection between them' – albeit not fixed and static points but ones more akin to 'zones of overlap and intersection' (Shove et al. , 2012: 113) or 'a form of connective tissue that holds complex social arrangements in place, and potentially pulls them apart' (Shove et al. , 2012: 36). While not using the concept of material 'elements', Schatzki highlights the ability of practices to 'overlap': 'a particular doing, for instance, might

2. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 75
  Context:
    #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES
      #C4CY9W Variation within practices
        #5EQ45L Variation in terms of groups and categories
  Matching excerpt #JJZS62:
      While the bodies of practitioners and materiality of objects function as tangible points of intersection between practices, there is also a range of more ambiguously tangible things that can be similarly positioned. For Shove, Pantzar and Watson, meanings exist alongside materials as elements of practices that are shared and therefore 'zones of overlap and intersection' (2012: 113). Likewise, Schatzki discusses how components such as rules can apply to multiple practices (2002: 87). The diverse traces left by meanings, rules, concepts or categories can be difficult to follow as they weave through the nexus of practices. In order to focus this final subsection,

3. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 46
  Context:
    #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE
      #NTQ7W5 Connective tissue: a method for understanding how complexes of practice change over time
  Matching excerpt #HHSHZP:
      Having argued that complexes of practices are held together by forms of connection that are multiply interlinked (by connective tissue) and that have various qualities, we now consider how complexes of practices change. Our starting question was this: how can we account for the changes (and lack of changes) over the last 150 years in the complexes of practices that make up hospital life? To answer this, we need to account for changing complexes over time and for changes in how these complexes are constituted. One response is to suggest that the connective tissue of a given complex of practices, its qualities of connection and relationships between the different types of connection, has a history. What we mean is that past interconnections shape qualities of contemporary complexes of practices that matter for the kinds of connections they make and enable in the present and the future. Understanding, in these terms, the connective tissue that holds complexes of practices together allows us to consider the significance of past and present interconnections . These lines of enquiry offer an alternative, sociological way of thinking about how past activity matters for present and future social action.

4. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 48
  Context:
    #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE
      #LSMJSP Conclusion
  Matching excerpt #E9P4WL:
      We are calling for a version of practice theory which begins with complexes of practices and not 'a practice' and that focuses on relationships between connections and on how different types of connection matter for each other. We have developed an approach which is concerned from the outset with how complexes of practices hang together. Central to our framework is the idea of a connective tissue that both holds complexes of practices together and that is itself an essential feature of the practices involved. With this idea in place, it is possible to focus on the different qualities of connective tissue, and the interconnections between those qualities, to understand changing complexes of practices over time.

5. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 37
  Context:
    #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE
      #JWCJBK Introduction
  Matching excerpt #T5HSZP:
      In what follows, we propose that in order to understand how complexes of practices change, we need to consider the multiple ways in which practices hang together and to show how these different types of connection matter for one another and ultimately for the reproduction of the complex itself. Our ambition is to build the foundations of a theory of practice (and of change) that is concerned from the outset with relationships between connections ( interconnections ). In our schema, new elements of practice are not the source of change. Rather trajectories of change are an expression of the ways in which practice complexes interconnect . In our description of these interconnections we put forward an understanding of complexes of practices as held together by a connective tissue that is itself an essential feature of practices.

Approximate matches

1. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 40
  Context:
    #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE
      #JWCJBK Introduction
        #DQ889U (Inter)connections in complexes of practices
  Score: 0.557
  Related excerpt #87KMDS:
      In the following sections we give examples of three different qualities of connective tissue, 2 namely temporal, material-spatial 3 and jurisdictional. In each section we begin by drawing out important and useful ways of thinking about how practices hang together and then build from these ideas to show how the jurisdictional, temporal and material-spatial qualities of the connective tissue interconnect to form enduring, morphing practice complexes across time.

2. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 39
  Context:
    #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE
      #JWCJBK Introduction
  Score: 0.517
  Related excerpt #M4GR2L:
      We begin by briefly mapping some of the ways in which theorists of practice have dealt with connections between practices in order to situate our notion of connective tissue. In the subsequent sections, we develop three qualities of connective tissue in more detail, namely jurisdictional qualities, temporal qualities and material-spatial qualities. In the final section we focus on interconnections among these three qualities to show how such a focus helps to understand better how complexes of practices change and stay the same.

3. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 48
  Context:
    #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE
      #LSMJSP Conclusion
  Score: 0.469
  Related excerpt #4EVV9B:
      Taking the interconnections of connective tissue as a starting point is significantly different to focussing on the constitution and trajectories of specific practices. It also contrasts with work that has focussed on singular dimensions of connectivity. Instead, we have sought to account for multiple registers of change at the same time. We consequently argue against the conceptualisation of connective qualities as either background or as part of a practice, instead we contend that they are both. Finally, we suggest that no particular interconnection should have ontological privilege, but rather, that understanding the character of interconnection is a question for empirical research.

4. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 72
  Context:
    #9ZA2Z7 VARIATION AND THE INTERSECTION OF PRACTICES
      #C4CY9W Variation within practices
        #8F6WU9 Variation in terms of practitioners or materials at the intersection of practices
  Score: 0.457
  Related excerpt #DCEVRD:
      The material components of practices can be similarly understood as intersections between multiple practices. Elements of practices are 'a point of connection between them' – albeit not fixed and static points but ones more akin to 'zones of overlap and intersection' (Shove et al. , 2012: 113) or 'a form of connective tissue that holds complex social arrangements in place, and potentially pulls them apart' (Shove et al. , 2012: 36). While not using the concept of material 'elements', Schatzki highlights the ability of practices to 'overlap': 'a particular doing, for instance, might

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: 0.448
  Related excerpt #QJ9QVM:
      The 'hanging together of people's lives' depends in part on interconnected material entities, that is the material arrangements amidst which practices are enacted. Materiality for Schatzki connects human activity. However, conceptualising 'material arrangements' in this way as somehow 'outside of practices' loses something of the constitutive property of materiality as described by Shove et al. (2012). So while Shove, Pantzar and Watson position materials as constitutive of practice and Schatzki positions material entities as part of separate arrangements that connect practices, in our notion of connective tissue we want to capture both the constitutive and connective features of materiality, by positioning it as a material-spatial quality of connective tissue.

### 25. Assistant

Yeah, that passage is gold for chapter 4 — it's basically Hui giving Ieva the citation she needs. Let me flag what's actually most useful in the volume.

That passage you quoted is from Hui's chapter on variation and intersection (#9ZA2Z7, the specific bit at #DCEVRD). It does the conceptual move. But for chapter 4 the *methodologically* exemplary chapter is Shove, Trentmann & Wilk's "Qualities of Connective Tissue in Hospital Life" (#U8ANZK), where the case study is structurally analogous to Ieva's: take one complex empirical site, ask how multiple practices hang together there, and use "connective tissue" as the analytic. Their three qualities — jurisdictional, temporal, material-spatial (#87KMDS) — map onto her chapter sections almost too neatly:

- **material-spatial**: the room itself, the shelves, the sorting table, the textile container infrastructure (#WW8YUW)
- **temporal**: Thursday/Friday rhythm, the queue, batch divestment timed to life events (#WEBXCF, #2PU5ZY)
- **jurisdictional**: the entity-level claims about exchange-not-charity, the negotiated thresholds of acceptability, the volunteer-led curatorial authority (#KBESND, #F9CK8T)

That's a publishable structure, and it's already what chapter 4 is doing implicitly.

## Why this is better than Shove 2012 for her purposes

Shove 2012 talks about elements that "travel" and practices that "recruit" — passive voice problem. The 2017 volume is much more honest: connective tissue is "an essential feature of the practices involved" (#E9P4WL), it has *qualities* you can study empirically, and crucially Hui-Shove-Schatzki argue that "no particular interconnection should have ontological privilege" — what holds the complex together "is a question for empirical research" (#4EVV9B). That sentence is permission to let the ethnography decide, which is exactly what Ieva's material wants to do.

## The strong line this enables

If she wants the chapter to land hard, the move is:

> Brīvbode is not simply a container for second-hand objects, nor only a single practice of freecycling. It is a site where multiple practices — domestic divestment, wardrobe management, volunteer curation, craft, mutual aid, sustainability talk, class performance — meet, interfere, borrow from one another, and redistribute their elements. Each garment passing across the sorting table is a point of overlap (Hui 2017) between several of these practices at once. What is unusual about Brīvbode, ethnographically, is that the connective tissue that normally holds such complexes together invisibly — distributed across homes, bins, retail logistics, and online platforms — is *materialised* in a single room and tended by hand.

That last clause is the original contribution. Hui-Shove-Schatzki give you connective tissue as a concept; Ieva's ethnography shows what it looks like when it has to be tended in person, by named women, in a shop in Riga. The "labour of practice" idea then has a clean home: it's the labour of *tending the connective tissue*, which the 2017 volume gestures at but doesn't really theorise.

## One caveat

The Hui–Shove–Schatzki framing is still strikingly impersonal — "tissue holds," "complexes change" — and it shares with the 2012 book a tendency to write practices as agentive and people as carriers. Ieva's care/feminist-economy reading is still doing critical work even against the 2017 framework. So she's not just adopting the nexus framing, she's noting what it still abstracts away: that connective tissue does not maintain itself, and that the maintenance is gendered, voluntary, morally charged labour. That's the chapter's argument, with the right scaffolding now visible.

### 26. User

ah this is from the thesis chapter 2: 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.

### 27. Assistant

Good — that means the conceptual ground is already laid. Chapter 4 doesn't have to import the bundles/complexes apparatus, it just has to cash in the promise chapter 2 made. That actually simplifies the writing task quite a bit.

But there's a small productive tension to make visible. Chapter 2 says: *I analyse freecycling in Brīvbode as a practice entity and as performed.* That frames freecycling as **one** practice. The chapter 4 line you both like — "Brīvbode is a site where multiple practices meet, interfere, borrow from one another" — wants to treat Brīvbode as a **bundle/complex** in which freecycling emerges from the intersection of several adjacent practices, rather than as a stable practice that has carriers.

Those aren't contradictory but they're a shift in resolution, and it's worth naming the shift instead of letting it happen quietly. Something like:

> Chapter 2 introduced freecycling as a practice with the entity/performance distinction in view. In what follows I push the analysis one resolution finer: Brīvbode is best understood not as the venue of a single practice called freecycling, but as a complex (Shove et al. 2012; Hui, Shove and Schatzki 2017) in which freecycling itself emerges from the dense intersection of several practices — domestic divestment, wardrobe management, volunteer curation, craft sourcing, sustainability talk, class performance. Each of these has its own elements, careers, and recruitment logics; what makes Brīvbode analytically interesting is the density of their intersection in one room.

That move also lets her use her own chapter 2 vocabulary against itself in a productive way: the "stickiness" she introduced is genuinely an empirical claim about Brīvbode. The site has high stickiness — material co-presence, weekly rhythm, named persons, repeat visits, accumulated routines — which is why what could be a loose bundle has been moving toward a complex, possibly toward a new practice entity in its own right (the "freecycling in Latvia" she gestures at). That last point is the seed of her contribution to the literature: most of the practice-theory work on swapshops (Le Normand et al., Camacho-Otero et al., Eden) studies them as instances of clothes-swapping practice. Ieva can argue that in Latvia she's watching a complex thicken into a practice, in real time. That's a stronger ethnographic claim than "I describe freecycling at one site."

One small typographical thing for chapter 2: the Nicolini reference looks like it's to his chapter in the *Nexus* volume — worth checking it's cited consistently with how the *Nexus* volume's other chapters get cited (Hui 2017, Shove et al. 2017, etc.). The citation density of "Shove et al. 2012" doing all the bundles/complexes work is a bit heavy; mixing in the 2017 volume relieves that.