can you replace the current introduction to the draft tagged MIKAEL with this
We live in a context of overproduction. Goods move through households at increasing speed, the average lifespan of a garment continues to fall, and the moral burden of managing what arrives — and what leaves — has shifted increasingly onto households themselves. Circular economy policy responds by positioning reuse, repair, and life-extension as solutions, but the success of these measures depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive, infrastructurally uneven, and unevenly distributed across populations (Hobson et al., 2021).
This thesis is an ethnographic study of one site where these everyday practices are concentrated and made visible: Brīvbode, a volunteer-run swapshop in Riga, Latvia. Brīvbode operates without monetary exchange, in a permanent physical location, twice a week, year-round. People bring things they no longer want and take things they do; volunteers sort, curate, and maintain the space; objects circulate, accumulate, and overflow. The thesis examines how this circulation is organised and sustained, and what work it requires from its participants.
Following Warde (2005), I do not treat taking or giving in Brīvbode as a single practice. Brīvbode is better understood as a site where multiple recognisable practices — household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, craft, sociality, volunteering, sufficiency, sorting, resale — are brought into working relation. Freecycling, as I use the term in this thesis, names this bundle: the coordinated configuration of practices that has come to cluster around the swapshop and that the site holds in working relation. It is a useful name precisely because it captures the circular character of what happens there without claiming that a single shared routine has stabilised. Freecycling is in this sense a recognisable and emergent form, not a settled practice entity.
This framing turns out to matter analytically. Brīvbode is a site of circulation in two senses. The first is the obvious one: things move through it. A garment leaves one household, passes across the sorting table, and is enrolled in someone else’s practice — perhaps as a work shirt, perhaps as a costume, perhaps as raw material for a rug. The second sense is less obvious but, I argue, just as important: the elements of practice travel alongside the things. Meanings, competencies, and norms migrate between practices at the same site. The competency of recognising wool from synthetic, learned through years of careful dressing, is recruited into volunteer sorting. The meaning of thrift, which Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012: 75) note has migrated from domestic darning into modes of divestment, becomes attached to the very act of bringing a bag to Brīvbode. A “useless” leftover from one practice — wire offcuts from a hobby workshop, expired covid-test alcohol wipes, a bundle of folk-style mittens — becomes a resource for another. The site is the threshold at which this re-enrolment happens.
The thesis draws on two analytical frameworks. The first is practice theory, particularly Shove, Pantzar and Watson’s (2012) formulation of practices as bundles of materials, meanings, and competencies that travel and recombine. I use this framework to follow how recognisable practices meet, exchange elements, and are coordinated at a particular site, drawing on Shove et al.‘s distinction between bundles and complexes (2012: 95–101) and on Schatzki’s (2002) site ontology to articulate Brīvbode as a nexus (Nicolini 2017: 28) where several practices converge. The second framework is Wheeler and Glucksmann’s (2015) consumption work — the labour required of consumers before or after the moment of exchange, on which consumption itself depends. In the circular economy this work intensifies, and falls disproportionately on those already managing households (Hobson et al., 2021). I extend the concept here to include the volunteer labour of the swapshop and the extended divestment networks through which household surplus reaches it. Together, these frameworks let me ask both what freecycling is as a recognisable configuration and what it costs in labour, skill, and care to sustain.
[the research questions]
How is freecycling — as a bundle of practices coordinated at Brīvbode — organised and sustained, and how do its constitutive materials, meanings, and competencies travel between practices at the site?
What work does this configuration require from participants, and how is that work currently distributed?