# Assistant conversation Q83665 - Canonical URL: - Resource IRI: - Type: assistant conversation - Mode: quick ## Transcript ### 1. User there are two versions of the thesis in the workspace, a DRAFT (ieva's) and MIKAEL tagged one, we're thinking of taking chapter 5 and using it in ieva's draft, but can you read through and see what's the difference and if they're kinda compatible, etc? ### 2. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `list_documents` ```json {} ``` ### 3. Tool result: list_documents - #4V8VH7 Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop [MIKAEL] - 2026 | Ieva Lange - #WG8SNC Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop [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 - #AVNZLE Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing [cited] - 2025 | Christian Fuentes, Réka Tölg | Consumption and Society | 19 pp. | doi:10.1332/27528499y2024d00000032 - #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 & 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 & 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": "WG8SNC" } ``` #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "4V8VH7" } ``` ### 5. Tool result: get_document THESIS #WG8SNC Title: Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia Outline: - 1 #S4CQ5M Introduction - 1.1 #PHBM7V Study context and research questions - 1.2 #JZR5Y4 Latvian context and research - 1.3 #2VAN88 A note on terms - 1.4 #LEKBCM The structure of the thesis - 2 #3ZH5VW Practice, Consumption and Its Work: A Theoretical Framework - 2.1 #JDPAM7 Theories of Practice - 2.2 #S8XM48 Theories of Practice to Study Alternative Practices? - 2.3 #338APQ Consumption practices - 2.4 #KQQPCD Consumption Work - 3 #T6FBMR Ethnography of Practice in Brīvbode - 3.1 #SGFK9W The site - 3.2 #N86FBL Setting the scene: A day in Brīvbode - 3.3 #4UFU6W Ethnography of Practice - 3.4 #Q7M3AW Participant observation - 3.4.1 #MA4HRX Fieldwork diary - 3.5 #M37X4S Interviews - 3.6 #PD5N2F Data analysis - 3.7 #2KXKR9 Research ethics - 4 #LESJ77 The Circulation of Things in Brīvbode and Things That Sustain It - 4.1 #DQD5GC Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home - 4.2 #V7EWH9 Materials in Brīvbode: Co-presence and Flow - 4.3 #M332QQ Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation - 4.4 #RATF8K Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange - 4.5 #7D88QB Letting Go: Attachment Without Price - 4.6 #8TW5R7 What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition - 4.7 #MZRUZ4 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability? - 5 #ZHD57W The Work of Circular Consumption - 5.1 #7QG8KD Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care - 5.2 #8KVQ86 Time to Give: Volunteers and Sufficiency Lifestyle - 5.3 #G3G7LX Modal labour across socioeconomic modes - 5.4 #MWZSAP Processual labour: exchange networks and gendered work - 6 #S9GXZE Conclusion - 7 #F7NEEX SUMMARY - 8 #4MK8MD LIST OF SOURCES - 9 #DF5UUN KOKKUVÕTE ### 6. Tool result: get_document THESIS #4V8VH7 Title: Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop 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 Practice Theory and Consumption Work - 2.1 #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice - 2.2 #WULWDF Retheorizing Practices - 2.3 #HQ4PZX Consumption as a Moment of Practices - 2.4 #23NMLX Consumption Work - 2.5 #2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices - 2.6 #ULSUAX Conclusion - 3 #LYTS7L Research Methodology: Participating in Practice - 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 Keep It Moving: the Circulation of Practices - 4.1 #2JEZWG Varieties of Divestment - 4.2 #PBFQ5E Sorting the Shelves - 4.3 #QP7HMF Reading the Room - 4.4 #PZH45P "We are not a charity!" - 4.5 #7Z8WUY Values of Letting Go - 4.6 #W2WRDC Taking Things, Seriously - 4.7 #GTJY22 Quiet, Sustainability - 4.8 #A3X9XX Conclusion - 5 #82G2QE Hold It Together: Consumption Work as Care - 5.1 #N8D3HT Time to Give, Time to Live - 5.2 #SLFJ9K Caring for Priceless Things - 5.3 #EBTHSE Informal Modes of Labour - 5.4 #L38KUE Women and the Work of Networks - 5.5 #75D5UH Conclusion - 6 #M9WQLY CONCLUSION - 7 #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES - 8 #TY2EB4 KOKKUVÕTE ### 7. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "ZHD57W", "82G2QE" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 8. Tool result: read THESIS #WG8SNC Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #ZHD57W The Work of Circular Consumption PARAGRAPH #8N6PWM Rasa, the principal manager of Brīvbode, compared the swapshop’s operation to the flight of a bumblebee: while seemingly defyng the laws of aerodynamics, it somehow manages to fly in practice. The comparison foregrounds the felt fragility of the initiative, even though it has operated consistently for years now. This chapter examines the work that keeps Brīvbode running. Where the previous chapter examined how freecycling is constituted as a social practice, in this chapter I want to foreground what that practice costs and how the work is distributed across participants in different socioeconomic modes. PARAGRAPH #P6G4ZM The chapter is organized by two complementary registers. Consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann 2015) names the tasks the practice demands – acquiring, sorting, maintaining, divesting, transporting – and tracks how they are distributed across technical, modal, and processual dimensions of the division of labour. Care work, in the feminist tradition and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), names the relational and ethical orientation through which participants take this labour on, often without recognising it as work at all. PARAGRAPH #CDN38A In circular economy contexts, becoming a circular consumer requires varied and unevenly distributed forms of consumption work whose nature and scope have been underplayed in circular economy debates, but which has significant implications for whether such initiatives can succeed (Hobson et al., 2021). As Mesiranta et al. (2025: 25) observe, even frontrunner consumers who have integrated circular practices into their lives perceive them as laborious and at times troublesome. PARAGRAPH #6A7QBT Work and care are close and overlapping concepts in this account. As Bankovska (2020: 13) observes in her ethnography of the Latvian organic food movement, drawing on Graeber (2018: 156), care is not always a joyful or pleasant act – it involves unanticipated effort, obligation, hesitation, and sometimes disgust. In this sense care resembles work: activities performed because they need to be done rather than because they are intrinsically rewarding. The chapter uses consumption work as its organising framework while recognising that the boundaries between consumption work, volunteer labour, and care work are difficult to discern in practice. SECTION #7QG8KD Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care PARAGRAPH #4ZFXS3 In retail, price is a formal evaluation that functions to slows acquisition and signals value. When price is removed a moral and more relational valuation comes to the fore. Valuation work is the ongoing effort of assessing what is worth taking and bringing, and what should be left or discarded. As Beswick-Parsons et al. (2025) note, those committed to reuse develop an ability to perceive value where others do not, and this evaluative skill is key to circular consumption. PARAGRAPH #DGTQ5V The shift is most acute for volunteers, who absorb the valuation labour donors and visitors do not. Anna describes how she has developed her intuition for the gap between donor self-assessment and actual quality: "I really know it won't be good even before I've opened the bag. I ask them: 'Is everything really okay in there?' 'Yes, yes, only the best!' And you open it, and there are moth-eaten pillows, piss-soaked blankets." This competency has been developed over years of handling what arrives. The work of maintaining quality – assessing, sorting, deciding what goes out and what does not – is constant and largely invisible to visitors who mostly only the finished presentation. PARAGRAPH #7A624T Curation extends valuation work beyond sorting into knowing and managing people's needs. Rasa describes it as having "a filter". She sometimes holds specific items for specific regular visitors based on accumulated knowledge about their life circumstances: a particular colour of top for a visually impaired visitor, a wedding gift set aside for a regular who recently moved from homelessness into social housing. This is care work and consumption work simultaneously – relational knowledge that cannot be systematised or delegated, and that makes Brīvbode function as something more than a drop-off point. PARAGRAPH #T7L6G5 For visitors, the absence of price requires a new framework for what counts as legitimate taking. As a novice to freecycling practice, Madara was able to recall how disorienting was her first visit: "At first it felt a bit like I was stealing." She resolved this by reframing the transaction: "I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word 'free'." For her, freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition: "Someone maybe sees 'free' and thinks – everything is free, let's take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way." The absence of price shifts valuation work onto participants, requiring them to develop frameworks of evaluation that the market would otherwise supply automatically. PARAGRAPH #VZJLNX The labour of divestment also varies by route. Selling online is preferred when an item retains monetary value, and it requires photographing, writing descriptions, communicating with buyers, arranging delivery or meetings. As one participant noted, for items that might still have some value, "you have to pull yourself together, photograph it and put it somewhere." Brīvbode lowers this work considerably: it is a known destination where divestment requires neither finding a buyer nor judging a recipient. In Wheeler and Glucksmann's terms, Brīvbode redistributes consumption work – absorbing some of it through volunteer labour while releasing participants from other forms of it. SECTION #8KVQ86 Time to Give: Volunteers and Sufficiency Lifestyle PARAGRAPH #CYJRDR Brīvbode is sustained by volunteers for many of whom participation is only possible because their lives are organized around sufficiency – a practice cluster in its own right, characterised by flexible time, low monetary consumption, and small combined income streams. Tan and Yeoh (2024) note that, while material inputs in freecycling markets are readily available, the human labour required to organise and run them is consistently short in supply. As Viesturs poses it: “I understand that the lifestyle I live is complete luxury these days, at least for this part of the world. To have free time, to decide myself what to do with my time – that is the main resource. The most important thing that a person can donate to Brīvbode is their time.” PARAGRAPH #8ALWX3 The sufficiency orientation is visible in how volunteers approach the management of resources in Brīvbode as well. When a new stove was needed, Rasa and her partner welded one themselves using upcycled components: gas canisters, springs from an old sofa, a drain fitting. Rasa framed it matter-of-factly: “But what do you do if you don’t want to pay €1000 for a stove? You pick up the angle grinder yourself.” In the spirit of mutual exchange, in return for her partner’s invested time, she promised him a week of help with the tedious final sanding phase of his own motorboat project. PARAGRAPH #V48MMJ This is repair and upcycling competency, sufficiency orientation and collaborative volunteer labour combined in prioritising making do with what is available as both a practical skill and life orientation. Rasa described a similar approach to her own consumption practices: it is more advantageous for her to work less in formal employment and rather invest time in planning meals, researching purchases and visiting secondhand shops than to earn more and consume more easily to keep her preferred level of wellbeing. SECTION #G3G7LX Modal labour across socioeconomic modes PARAGRAPH #FYRETJ Wheeler and Glucksmann’s modal dimension of consumption work attends to how labour is distributed across different socioeconomic arrangements – market and non-market, paid and unpaid, formal and informal. In their original research context of household waste recycling, consumption work feeds into a formal municipal waste management system: people prepare, wash, sort and transport materials, performing labour that contributes to a formal institutional process. The question is who bears the costs at each stage and under what arrangements. PARAGRAPH #2B3QA6 Brīvbode occupies a specific and undertheorized position in the circular economy landscape, neither a household nor a formal market institution, not a charity, but a site encouraging DIY mentality, both alleviating some work from participants and creating others. PARAGRAPH #2TJJSZ While Brīvbode is indirectly embedded in wider textile collection infrastructure by divesting its material surplus to it, its operation as an informal volunteer initiative is modally different and not part of a formal economy. The chain of work usually connects one household to another. Objects leaving one home pass through the swapshop and arrive in someone else's home where a new set of consumption work tasks begin – storing, integrating, eventually deciding what to do when the object might no longer be wanted. PARAGRAPH #H5QAHU [tags: fragment] Structurally – companies divest their surplus to — volunteers who deal with the consequences. Textile collectors collaborate with clothing wholesalers who move clothing further along the streams. Latvia itself is at the receiving end of circular economy streams from the Nordic Countries, the UK. PARAGRAPH #L9HB8X 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 #EKSMPT [tags: placeholder] Is it too vague to apply circular economy and consumption work to Brīvbode? PARAGRAPH #WR6R4X [tags: fragment] Evans (2020) also warns that “consumption” risks becoming too vague. PARAGRAPH #EFXZ5M Brīvbode brings together different forms of work – unpaid volunteering, household management, neighbourly help, care work, and informal exchange – in ways that blur distinctions between market and non-market activity and make the labour difficult to recognise as work at all, even though the system depends on it. As Mesiranta et al. (2025) describe, community-based circular consumption initiatives perform care work that more marketised arrangements cannot. Sequential reuse, as Hobson (2020) argues, depends not on material availability alone but on the social circularities – the relational labour – that keep things moving between people. PARAGRAPH #ZYUP5Q [tags: needs_revision] Rasa spoke of her experience of working at the swapshop in Berlin where people were encouraged to participate in the operation of the shop – bringing things and leaving was discouraged, presupposing help with putting it on the hangers and placing. PARAGRAPH #AEVP7W [tags: needs_revision] “Cilvēki paši izkarina lietas, itkā uztur kārtību. Mums tas arī sākotnēji bija, bet tad sākām paši šķirot un izlikt mantas. Mums tie apmēri ļoti lieli, salīdzinot ar viņiem.” PARAGRAPH #WPGJPL [tags: needs_revision] It used to be the intention in Lastādija as well, yet later they moved to doing the work themselves – the volume of things incoming is comparatively large to the shop in Berlin. PARAGRAPH #Y6UURX [tags: fragment] Similarly, in Berlin, there was an option to repair things, but nothing was done for the person. Shown how to operate a sewing machine. Repair Cafe takes place in Brīvbode monthly. PARAGRAPH #98GUGE [tags: needs_revision] Tur pat uz vietas varēja arī salabot lietas. Bet tavā vietā neviens nekad to nerādīja - tevi apmācīja, parādīja, kā strādā šujmašīna, bet viss bija jādara tomēr pašiem apmeklētājiem. PARAGRAPH #VPK4HA [tags: needs_revision] Blakus Krišjānis palīdz vienam pārim labot putekļusūcējrobotu. Dagnis palīdz vecākai sievietei labot Straumes dzirnaviņas. Sievietei ar Straumes dzirnaviņām Dagnis diezgan stingri un agresīvi stāsta: “Jums ir patērētāja domāšana; cilvēkiem patīk mest naudu uz problēmām) SECTION #MWZSAP Processual labour: exchange networks and gendered work PARAGRAPH #TAJYUD Wheeler and Glucksmann's processual dimension attends to how labour is distributed across the full span of a consumption process. In Brīvbode, this dimension is most visible in the extended divestment networks through which household surplus reaches the swapshop. PARAGRAPH #UYW8E2 This work is consistently organised through women's labour. PARAGRAPH #ZJNQJE Miller's (1998) research on shopping demonstrates that consumption is often organised around care for others rather than individual satisfaction, and that women frequently function as moral agents in household consumption as they are the ones acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods in relation to the needs of children, partners, and wider social networks, and operates on knowledge of what’s best for them. PARAGRAPH #R59RL6 Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) find a similar gendered pattern in recycling: women typically take responsibility for sorting while men handle transport. The fieldwork conducted for this thesis reflects this consistently. PARAGRAPH #CARJKR [tags: fragment] Beswick-Parson’s findings are less uneven. PARAGRAPH #WML37C [tags: fragment] With regards to Brīvbode, the gendered ––– PARAGRAPH #LDP95V [tags: fragment] Given the pull of divestment, the practice recruited others through the networks of the most embedded participants. PARAGRAPH #6RN9DR Anna states it directly: “It's on me. I'm the one who supplies everyone with clothes and shoes.” PARAGRAPH #VQGYTN Silvija organises all divestment decisions in her household and says her husband “would just throw it in the bin.” This is empirically consistent across research and observations by different authors. In Latvia PARAGRAPH #4MX6HK Men's role, where it appears, is typically transport and carrying the bags that women have sorted, selected, and prepared. PARAGRAPH #GKEMDU The reach of Brīvbode extends considerably beyond those who physically visit it. Several of the most embedded participants perform substantial divestment work not only for themselves but for neighbours, colleagues, and family members, functioning as logistics nodes through which others' surplus flows to the freeshop. Marija's neighbours give her things to take to Brīvbode as she is a frequent visitor and the role has naturalised into her social identity in the building. Māra coordinates pickups from at least five neighbours, takes requests for specific items, and is the only one of her immediate network who actually visits – the rest route their divestment through her. Anna's work colleagues prepare parcels for her to deliver: “They use me. They prepare the bags I need to bring to Brīvbode. And then they say: 'Can you look for something for my teenage daughter?'” PARAGRAPH #PG5V2Y Madara does divestment work for her aunt whose belief that worn objects carry the energy of previous owners prevents her from donating. In order to get to Brīvbode, the objects must pass through Madara first. "I know that most likely they would simply be thrown away or burned." But the most laborious divestment case came from Aiga, who spent months coordinating the recirculation of her relatives' possessions after a relocation, making thirty trips to Brīvbode. A single call to a clearance firm would have resolved everything in one visit, Aiga says, but she chose the harder route because she could not allow things to be discarded: "Sometimes you really do want to just throw it out, but that inner feeling simply won't let me." This is consumption work as a self-imposed ethical burden of activities that need to be done out of obligation. PARAGRAPH #EWT5TA [tags: needs_revision] “Ira stāsta, kā lūgusi savu kaimiņu Marku, kurš pat tikai divas dienas ir Rīgā, tad brauc uz Spāniju, aizbraukt uz Imantu (viņam laikam arī pašam ir bijušas kādas darīšanas Imantā), lai savāktu kādas sievietes mantas, ko vest uz Brīvbodi. Viņa Irai zvanījusi, bet sanākušas tikai visādas klapatas. Mantu daudz, bet tās visas tāpat jāved uz konteineru. Sievietei ir ap 90 gadu, viņa slikti redz. Dažreiz viņa vedot mantas uz Brīvbodi ar taksi, tērējot naudu, bet Iru dzīvoklī atsakās laist, jo tur esot bardaks.” PARAGRAPH #AXD3VQ Consumption work is both currently gendered and being transmitted along gendered lines. Kristīne takes her daughters to Brīvbode and uses the visits as occasions for explicit moral education: discussing why they are giving things away, what makes a good divestment decision, what is too worn to donate. She sometimes goes without them to avoid the tears when they want things back; other times the difficulty is the point. "It's also an opportunity to talk about things." The children are learning material quality, the ethics of giving, and the difference between good enough to donate and good enough only to discard. PARAGRAPH #4CB65U The thesis also attends to the gendered distribution of this work. Ethnographic research has demonstrated that consumption is often organised around care for others, and that women often function as moral agents in household consumption, regulating what goes in and out of households (Miller, 1998, Reno, 2016). Shopping and consumption practices can be seen as acts of care, where people choose items with loved ones in mind, reflecting their role in family and social networks. PARAGRAPH #SPVVMK Lindsay et al. (2024) finds that women consistently spend more time on sustainable household practices than men, and that “sustainability labour” tends to be more absorbed into existing patterns of gendered domestic work rather than redistributed. PARAGRAPH #L6RXR2 the practice of divestment requires competencies that include emotional regulation and the capacity to detach from objects. Māra is developing these competencies deliberately. PARAGRAPH #F595S6 [tags: placeholder] BURDEN PARAGRAPH #8FEFX3 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 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 #ZZ7XRR 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 #UMCGMV [tags: placeholder] (moral economies of access and restraint) PARAGRAPH #5UGKZC [tags: needs_revision] "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." 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.” 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 #YFLJ5U [tags: needs_revision] 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.” PARAGRAPH #ZV985K [tags: needs_revision] "Es esmu krājēja. Jā, es esmu krājēja." 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." 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 #2USKRS [tags: needs_revision] "Es labāk šobrīd lēnā garā atbrīvojos... man nav vienkārši žēl paņemt somu un aizbraukt." 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 #ZRFACW [tags: needs_revision] "Pieķeršanās jautājums tiek risināts. Viņš ir procesā." "Brīvbode palīdz, tā teikt, šim procesam attīstīties." "Šobrīd jau ir uz robežas, tāpēc es saku, ka ir jāatvadās jau no tā, kas jau ir atrasts." 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 #W28969 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. THESIS #4V8VH7 Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop SECTION #82G2QE Hold It Together: Consumption Work as Care PARAGRAPH #DM28T4 Rasa, the principal manager of Brīvbode, compared the swapshop’s operation to the flight of a bumblebee: while seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics, it nevertheless continues to fly. This chapter examines the work that keeps it flying. Where Chapter 4 followed the things and the elements of practice through Brīvbode and showed how the bundle of freecycling coordinates several practices at once, this chapter turns to what holding that bundle in working relation costs and to the people who pay for it — in time, skill, and effort, and in the relational and ethical attention that the tasks of circulation demand. That labour is largely unpaid, unevenly distributed, and absorbed into existing practices of household management. PARAGRAPH #EF5DET The chapter is organised by two complementary registers. Consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann 2015) names the tasks the bundle demands — acquiring, sorting, maintaining, divesting, transporting — and tracks how they are distributed across the technical, modal, and processual dimensions of the division of labour. Care work, in the feminist tradition and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), names the relational and ethical orientation through which participants take this labour on, often without recognising it as work at all. The two registers are not alternatives but coordinates: practice-arrangement bundles like Brīvbode are held together at once by tasks that need doing and by the dispositions through which people make them their own. PARAGRAPH #S6HFAC Bankovska’s (2020) ethnography of the Latvian organic food movement bridges the two registers ethnographically. Drawing on Graeber (2018: 156), she observes that care is not always a joyful act but often involves unanticipated effort, obligation, hesitation, and disgust — labour that has to be done because the alternative is unbearable. The boundaries between consumption work, care work, and volunteer work are difficult to maintain in practice, and that is precisely what allows the labour that sustains Brīvbode to remain largely invisible to participants and to circular economy policy alike (Hobson et al. 2021). SECTION #N8D3HT Time to Give, Time to Live PARAGRAPH #5SHEQN Brīvbode is sustained by volunteers for many of whom participation is only possible because their lives are organized around sufficiency – a practice cluster in its own right, characterised by flexible time, low monetary consumption, and small combined income streams. As Tan and Yeoh (2024) note, while material inputs in freecycling markets are readily available, the human labour required to organise and run them is consistently short in supply. As Viesturs puts it: “I understand that the lifestyle I live is complete luxury these days, at least for this part of the world. To have free time, to decide myself what to do with my time – that is the main resource. The most important thing that a person can donate to Brīvbode is their time.” PARAGRAPH #BTZ4RL The sufficiency orientation is visible in how volunteers approach the management of resources in Brīvbode as well. When a new stove was needed, Rasa and her partner welded one themselves using upcycled components: gas canisters, springs from an old sofa, a drain fitting. Rasa framed it matter-of-factly: “What do you do if you don’t want to pay €1000 for a stove? You pick up the angle grinder yourself.” In the spirit of mutual exchange, in return for her partner’s invested time, she promised him a week of help with the tedious final sanding phase of his own DIY motorboat project. PARAGRAPH #KSB7XK This is repair and upcycling competency, sufficiency orientation and collaborative volunteer labour combined in prioritising making do with what is available as both a practical skill and life orientation. Rasa described a similar approach to her own consumption practices: it is more advantageous for her to work less in formal employment and rather invest time in planning meals, researching purchases and visiting secondhand shops than to earn more and consume more easily to keep her preferred level of wellbeing. PARAGRAPH #FT6K3G The volunteers’ time-rich, sufficiency-oriented lives make Brīvbode’s unpaid consumption work possible. They are also what makes possible a form of community-based care that non-profit organisations and local communities can offer to “balance marketised care,” with “clothes-swapping events” listed alongside repair cafés and community fridges as exactly this kind of arrangement (Mesiranta et al. 2025: 26). Sufficiency is the structural condition for both consumption work and care work: it is what makes the labour Brīvbode requires possible, and what allows that labour to be undertaken as care. SECTION #SLFJ9K Caring for Priceless Things PARAGRAPH #U7QJHT Valuation work is the ongoing effort of assessing what is worth taking and bringing, and what should be left or discarded. Tölg (2025) describes valuation as comprising both evaluation — judging whether something is valuable — and valorising — the process of making it so — and shows that consumers rely on a range of valuation devices such as garment tags, retail staff knowledge, and resale platforms to perform this work. In retail, the price signal is the most legible such device, quietly slowing acquisition and supplying a shorthand for worth. When it is removed, that work does not disappear; it shifts onto participants and volunteers, drawing on moral and relational registers instead. As Beswick-Parsons et al. (2025) note, those committed to reuse develop the ability to perceive value where others do not, and this evaluative skill is a key competence of circulation work. PARAGRAPH #KWPAYN The shift is most acute for volunteers, who absorb the valuation labour donors and visitors do not. Anna describes how she has developed her intuition for the gap between donor self-assessment and actual quality: “I really know it won’t be good even before I’ve opened the bag. I ask them: ‘Is everything really okay in there?’ ‘Yes, yes, only the best!’ And you open it, and there are moth-eaten pillows, piss-soaked blankets.” This competency has been developed over years of handling what arrives. The work of maintaining quality — assessing, sorting, deciding what goes out and what does not — is a form of consumption work that in commercial retail would fall to paid warehouse or quality-control staff; here it is absorbed by volunteers as a constant and largely invisible competency that visitors, who see only the finished presentation, mostly miss. PARAGRAPH #7X9BV4 Curation extends valuation work beyond sorting into knowing and managing people’s needs. Rasa describes it as having “a filter.” She sometimes holds specific items for specific regular visitors based on accumulated knowledge about their life circumstances: a particular colour of top for a visually impaired visitor, a wedding gift set aside for a regular who recently moved from homelessness into social housing. This is care work and consumption work simultaneously — the kind of matching labour that in retail is performed automatically through pricing, display, and inventory systems, but here depends on Rasa’s relational knowledge of specific people, which cannot be systematised or delegated, and which makes Brīvbode function as something more than a drop-off point. PARAGRAPH #4HW9DD For visitors, the absence of price requires a new framework for what counts as legitimate taking. Madara recalled how disorienting the freeness was on her first visit: “At first it felt a bit like I was stealing.” She resolved this by reframing the transaction: “I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word ‘free’.” For her, freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition: “Someone maybe sees ‘free’ and thinks – everything is free, let’s take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.” Her self-imposed restraint is itself valuation work — a moral framework constructed in the absence of the device that would otherwise supply one. PARAGRAPH #4EZCAK Divestment, too, is shaped by valuation. When an item retains monetary value, participants take on the labour of online selling — photographing, writing descriptions, communicating with buyers, arranging meetings. As one participant noted: “you have to pull yourself together, photograph it and put it somewhere.” Brīvbode lowers this work considerably: it is a known, walkable destination that absorbs some of the divestment labour through volunteers and releases participants from finding a buyer or judging a recipient. PARAGRAPH #A2APRY Across donating, curating, taking, and divesting, valuation in Brīvbode is at once consumption work — the labour of sorting, assessing, and redistributing — and care work, in the form of attention to what specific things will mean for specific people. Without the shorthand of price, both come into the open. SECTION #EBTHSE Informal Modes of Labour PARAGRAPH #SZG4E8 If §5.2 traced the valuation work the absence of price creates, this section turns to the kind of arrangement in which that work takes place. Wheeler and Glucksmann’s modal dimension names how labour is distributed across different socioeconomic arrangements — paid and unpaid, formal and informal, market and non-market, household and institution — and how the same task takes on a different character depending on which arrangement it is embedded in. The same act of sorting used clothes is paid retail work in a thrift chain, contracted labour at a municipal textile collection point, unpaid domestic labour at home, and something else again at Brīvbode. The question this section asks is what kind of arrangement Brīvbode is, modally speaking, and what difference its form makes for the labour that runs it and the people it recruits. PARAGRAPH #QQ9MKA Brīvbode is indirectly embedded in wider textile collection infrastructure, but the chain of work usually connects one household to another. Objects leaving one home pass through the swapshop and arrive in someone else’s home where a new set of consumption work tasks begin – storing, integrating, eventually deciding what to do when the object might no longer be wanted. PARAGRAPH #EW2HC4 Along this chain, unpaid volunteering, household management, neighbourly help, care work, and informal exchange come together in ways that blur distinctions between market and non-market activity and make the labour difficult to recognise as work at all, even though the system depends on it. This is precisely the kind of community-based care that, as Mesiranta et al. (2025) argue, marketised arrangements cannot perform: sequential reuse depends not on material availability alone but on what Hobson (2020) calls social circularities — the relational labour that keeps things moving between people. PARAGRAPH #VA7PZF Some participants choose Brīvbode precisely because they do not want to perform labour for formal waste management institutions – they prefer the more relational, informal route. This is a modal choice: the same divestment work takes a different socioeconomic form depending on the route chosen, and Brīvbode's modal distinctiveness is part of what recruits and retains its participants. PARAGRAPH #RCC9LM The modal choice is therefore also an ethical one. Brīvbode’s particular configuration of unpaid, informal, household-to-household labour is what allows consumption work to be performed as care, and care to be performed as a recognisable mode of circulation. SECTION #L38KUE Women and the Work of Networks PARAGRAPH #8JYYXC Wheeler and Glucksmann's processual dimension attends to how labour is distributed across the full span of a consumption process. In Brīvbode, this dimension is most visible in the extended divestment networks through which household surplus reaches the swapshop. The work that sustains Brīvbode is continuous with domestic consumption work which is consistently organised through women's labour. PARAGRAPH #PNGSGT Miller's (1998) research on shopping demonstrates that consumption is often organised around care for others rather than individual satisfaction, and that women frequently function as moral agents in household consumption as they are the ones acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods in relation to the needs of children, partners, and wider social networks. Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) find the same gendered pattern in recycling: women typically take responsibility for sorting while men handle transport. The fieldwork conducted for this thesis reflects this consistently. Anna states it directly: "It's on me. I'm the one who supplies everyone with clothes and shoes." Silvija organises all divestment decisions in her household and says her husband "would just throw it in the bin." Men's role, where it appears, is typically transport and carrying the bags that women have sorted, selected, and prepared. PARAGRAPH #3BY9GH The reach of Brīvbode extends considerably beyond those who physically visit it. Several of the most embedded participants perform substantial divestment work not only for themselves but for neighbours, colleagues, and family members, functioning as logistics nodes through which others' surplus flows to the freeshop. Marija's neighbours give her things to take to Brīvbode as she is a frequent visitor and the role has naturalised into her social identity in the building. Māra coordinates pickups from at least five neighbours, takes requests for specific items, and is the only one of her immediate network who actually visits – the rest route their divestment through her. Anna's work colleagues prepare parcels for her to deliver: "They use me. They prepare the bags I need to bring to Brīvbode. And then they say: 'Can you look for something for my teenage daughter?'" What looks like consumption work performed on behalf of others is, in Tölg and Fuentes’s (2025) terms, also care for neighbours and for the imagined future users of the things — the logistical labour and the relational orientation are inseparable. PARAGRAPH #Y344XY Madara does divestment work for her aunt whose belief that worn objects carry the energy of previous owners prevents her from donating. In order to get to Brīvbode, the objects must pass through Madara first. "I know that most likely they would simply be thrown away or burned." The most laborious divestment case came from Aiga, who spent months coordinating the recirculation of her relatives' possessions after a relocation, making thirty trips to Brīvbode. A single call to a clearance firm would have resolved everything in one visit, Aiga says, but she chose the harder route because she could not allow things to be discarded: “Sometimes you really do want to just throw it out, but that inner feeling simply won’t let me.” This is consumption work in Bankovska’s (2020) sense of care not-work — labour that is unremunerated, hard to see as work from the outside, and yet performed because the alternative is unbearable. It is care as obligation that cannot be put down. PARAGRAPH #VCEUP7 Consumption work is both currently gendered and being transmitted along gendered lines. Kristīne takes her daughters to Brīvbode and uses the visits as occasions for explicit moral education: discussing why they are giving things away, what makes a good divestment decision, what is too worn to donate. She sometimes goes without them to avoid the tears when they want things back; other times the difficulty is the point. "It's also an opportunity to talk about things." The children are learning material quality, the ethics of giving, and the difference between good enough to donate and good enough only to discard — competencies that are simultaneously consumption-work skills and the dispositions of care that Bankovska (2020) shows being transmitted across generations in the everyday work of provisioning. PARAGRAPH #SZVP2G What neither sufficiency nor valuation quite revealed, the processual dimension makes visible: the labour of Brīvbode is gendered not only structurally but ethically — women carry it because they have always carried care, and the consumption-work skills it requires are inseparable from the care dispositions through which they are taken on. SECTION #75D5UH Conclusion PARAGRAPH #5YXGE6 This chapter has examined the labour that sustains freecycling in Brīvbode, finding it distributed across structural, ethical, and gendered dimensions that existing circular economy frameworks tend to overlook. Wheeler and Glucksmann’s consumption work concept names the structure: tasks that paid institutions would perform in formal retail or waste management contexts are here absorbed by unpaid volunteers and participants, distributed across modal and processual dimensions that stretch well beyond the freeshop itself. The feminist ethics of care and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), together with Bankovska’s (2020) care not-work and Graeber’s (2018) account of work as what just needs to be done, name the orientation: much of this labour is not transferred from institutions onto reluctant consumers but self-imposed through ethical commitment and care – activities people perform because they cannot bring themselves not to. Miller (1998) names who bears it: consistently and disproportionately women, from household sorting and routing to managing others’ generosity to transmitting these competencies to the next generation. PARAGRAPH #HM56MD Circular consumption requires substantial labour, and that labour is unevenly distributed. Sustainability of initiatives like Brīvbode depends on a structural condition – the sufficiency-oriented, time-rich, predominantly female volunteer and participant base that circular economy policy rarely names or supports (Hobson et al., 2021). Some of this labour is unreflexive and habituated – Aiga's inner feeling that prevents easy disposal, Marija's building logistics naturalised into her social role. Some is deliberate and effortful – Kristīne's category-by-category method, Madara working on her impulse-acquiring. Both are labour, but they are differently visible, and the unreflexive forms are the hardest to see and the hardest for policy to reach. PARAGRAPH #RX9JDU What Brīvbode reveals — and what makes it analytically valuable for circular economy debates — is that the absence of price does not produce a frictionless flow of materials. It produces a different kind of work: gendered, ethically motivated, absorbed into household routines, and sustained by people who have organised their lives to be able to do it. Recognising this work as both consumption work and care work is the first step toward circular economy policy that can see it, support it, and not depend on its invisibility. ### 9. Assistant I read both Chapter 5s end to end. Here's the comparison. ## What they share Both chapters are organised by Wheeler and Glucksmann's three dimensions of consumption work (technical/valuation, modal, processual), use the same core fieldwork material (Anna on bag quality, Rasa's "filter," Madara's "I switch off the word free," the welded stove, Aiga's thirty trips, Kristīne's daughters, Anna "It's on me," Māra as logistics node), and lean on the same scaffolding of references (Mesiranta et al. 2025, Tölg & Fuentes 2025, Hobson 2020/2021, Tan & Yeoh 2024, Beswick-Parsons et al. 2025, Miller 1998, Bankovska 2020, Graeber 2018). The bumblebee opener and the sufficiency/volunteer argument are nearly word-for-word in places. ## What's different **Frame and title.** Ieva's draft #ZHD57W is "The Work of Circular Consumption" — the work is the subject. MIKAEL's #82G2QE is "Hold It Together: Consumption Work as Care" — work *and* care as paired registers, with the chapter explicitly framed as the second half of a Keep It Moving / Hold It Together pair. **Section order and shape.** - Draft: Valuation → Sufficiency/volunteers → Modal → Processual. No conclusion. - MIKAEL: Sufficiency (#N8D3HT) → Valuation (#SLFJ9K) → Modal (#EBTHSE) → Processual (#L38KUE) → Conclusion (#75D5UH). Leading with sufficiency lets MIKAEL set up "time-rich, sufficiency-oriented lives" as the *structural condition* for all the work that follows, and the conclusion pulls the three dimensions back together. The draft just stops. **Polish.** Draft still has ~10 paragraphs tagged `fragment`, `placeholder`, or `needs_revision` — untranslated Latvian quotes (#AEVP7W, #98GUGE, #VPK4HA, #EWT5TA, #5UGKZC, #YFLJ5U, #ZV985K, #2USKRS, #ZRFACW), the literal placeholder "BURDEN" (#F595S6), and the question to self "Is it too vague to apply circular economy and consumption work to Brīvbode?" (#EKSMPT). MIKAEL is clean prose throughout. **Theoretical integration.** MIKAEL pulls Tölg's evaluation/valorising distinction into the valuation section, repeatedly returns to Bankovska's "care not-work" as a thread, and ends each section with a synthesising sentence linking work and care. The draft cites the same authors but the synthesis sentences aren't there yet. **Content MIKAEL drops.** The draft's tail includes material that's not in MIKAEL: the Berlin swapshop comparison (#ZYUP5Q, #WPGJPL, #Y6UURX), the Repair Café observations (#VPK4HA), the moral-economies-of-restraint coda, Aiga on hoarding and war anxiety (#ZV985K, #2USKRS), Māra on letting-go-as-process (#ZRFACW), and "Brīvbode as infrastructure for letting go" (#W28969). Some of this is genuinely valuable and not duplicated elsewhere. ## Compatibility with your draft Mostly yes, with three real frictions: 1. **Cross-references.** MIKAEL #DM28T4 says "Chapter 4 followed the things and the elements of practice through Brīvbode and showed how the **bundle of freecycling coordinates several practices at once**." That "bundle" language belongs to MIKAEL's Chapter 2 (#WULWDF Retheorizing Practices, #2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices) and his Chapter 4 framing. Your Chapter 2 (#3ZH5VW) and Chapter 4 (#LESJ77) don't set up the bundle vocabulary the same way. You'd need to either (a) tweak that opener to match your Chapter 4's "how freecycling is constituted as a social practice" framing — which is what your draft already says — or (b) import some of the bundle framing into earlier chapters. 2. **Title coupling.** "Hold It Together" is the back half of MIKAEL's "Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together" thesis title and "Keep It Moving" Chapter 4. If you adopt MIKAEL's Chapter 5 title as-is it will feel orphaned next to your Chapter 4 "The Circulation of Things…" Either re-title the chapter or borrow the Keep/Hold pairing for Chapter 4 too. 3. **Salvage list.** Before swapping, decide what to do with the draft-only material — Berlin comparison, the hoarding/war-anxiety/attachment cluster (#ZV985K, #2USKRS, #ZRFACW, #W28969), and the moral-economies-of-restraint coda. Some belongs in Chapter 4 (letting go is already your §4.5 #7D88QB), some could be folded into MIKAEL's processual section as additional empirical depth. ## Concrete next step Importing MIKAEL's Chapter 5 is a real upgrade in polish, organisation, and theoretical synthesis, and it's substantively faithful to the same argument and material. The cleanest path: paste in MIKAEL's chapter, rewrite the opening paragraph (#DM28T4) to match your existing Chapter 2/4 vocabulary, retitle to fit your thesis title, and graft the salvageable letting-go/hoarding paragraphs from your draft into the processual section or back into Chapter 4. Want me to draft a revised opening paragraph that bridges MIKAEL's chapter to your existing Chapter 2 and Chapter 4? ### 10. User yeah please ### 11. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "3ZH5VW", "LESJ77" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 12. Tool result: read THESIS #WG8SNC Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #3ZH5VW Practice, Consumption and Its Work: A Theoretical Framework PARAGRAPH #NDFZY6 This chapter develops a theoretical framework for the thesis, connecting several bodies of work: a practice-theoretical approach to consumption with a focus not only on acquisition and attachment, but also divestment and disposal, and consumption work as a framework for naming the labour that circulation demands and examining how it is distributed. SECTION #JDPAM7 Theories of Practice PARAGRAPH #YQKL3Z The central theoretical grounding for this thesis is practice theory – or rather theories of practice – a heterogeneous cluster of approaches in humanities and social sciences in which practice serves as the primary unit of analysis for understanding human life and sociality. Shifting away from individual motivations and attitudes, behaviours and choices (ABC) based models for change, for example, practice theory rather examines how those doings are organized socially. It enables looking at the interconnectedness of the social and material realms with an emphasis on the role of objects, infrastructures and technology in practice enactment and maintenance. Evolved in a lineage from Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1984) in social sciences, in the past decades theories of practice have been influential and applied across various domains in social sciences and humanities, constituting what has been called a practice turn (Warde, 2014). PARAGRAPH #A7Z4Z5 While varied definitions of social practice exist, Warde suggests a minimal definition: “An organized, and recognizable, socially shared bundle of activities that involves the integration of a complex array of components: material, embodied, ideational and affective. Practices are sets of ‘doings and sayings’; they involve both practical activity and its representations" (Warde, 2005: 134). PARAGRAPH #A9PGW3 A key analytical distinction in practice theory is between a practice as an entity and a practice as a performance. A practice-as-entity is a recognizable social form – freecycling, sorting, secondhand acquisition – that persists across time, has a history, and can recruit and lose practitioners. A practice-as-performance is a specific, situated enactment by a particular person at a particular moment: the actual doing. Practices as entities are reproduced through performances, and transformed when those performances recombine their constituent elements in new ways (Shove et al., 2012). PARAGRAPH #78TH3V A particularly influential contribution, especially in anthropological approaches to practice, is the work of Elisabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson (2012) in which the authors offer a deliberately compact three-component framework for analysing practices: practice as entity. Shove and colleagues define a practice element frame consisting of meanings, materials, and competencies. “Meanings” refer to the ideas, aspirations, shared understandings and related values that give practice its purpose and make it intelligible for practitioners and guide how practices are performed. “Materials” refer to objects involved and used in practice, necessary technologies and infrastructure through which practices are enacted. It also refers to bodies and physicality. “Competencies” are the skills (across cognitive and physical realms) and practical knowledge necessary for participation in a practice, including understanding how to use objects, follow rules, and navigate social norms. PARAGRAPH #TPZHUA The authors acknowledge that the model sacrifices some nuance to analytical clarity, yet argue that it is analytically productive, especially for studying how practices change and develop when their elements are reconfigured. It allows looking at practices as entities with their own histories and trajectories – recruiting or losing practitioners, appearing and disappearing. This threefold structure of elements of practice has been used widely across disciplines as it offers a clear conceptual approach for empirical research. PARAGRAPH #U9P8XF 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. SECTION #S8XM48 Theories of Practice to Study Alternative Practices? PARAGRAPH #DL5F3W Practice theory, as developed by Elisabeth Shove, has been applied a lot to analyze stable, dominant, and largely unreflected practices that are taken for granted in everyday domestic routines (Shove 2003), particularly the inconspicuous consumption of energy and resources in affluent Western societies that drives resource use beyond planetary boundaries. Shove has even argued that “investigations into the beliefs and actions of self-confessed environmentalists represent something of a distraction. What counts is the big, and in some cases, global swing of ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted practice…” (Shove, 2003: 9). PARAGRAPH #K2L3ZX Yet as Welch and Warde (2015) note, this strategic move away from environmentalists’ motivations has come at a cost, leading to a neglect of the cultural dimensions of sustainable consumption (Spaargaren 2013). Other authors have argued for a greater attention to non-hegemonic practices that serve as alternatives to mass consumption (e.g. Speck and Hasselkuss 2015). Practice theories are useful here too, as a tool for understanding how more sustainable alternatives might become normalised or integrated into existing consumption routines. PARAGRAPH #W6Q7WJ Freecycling at Brīvbode sits at an interesting angle in this argument – it has both conventional and unconventional elements. It is not a widely shared, fully stabilised routine practice in Shove’s sense. Yet the practices it draws on – household divestment, secondhand acquisition, sequential use of goods – are not unusual in Riga or Latvia; what is less common is their organisation within a permanent, non-monetary exchange site. It is also a practice that is becoming more prevalent, as similar spaces and infrastructures appear more in Latvia. PARAGRAPH #QUNMVX Recent work in second-generation practice theory has begun to reintroduce questions of ethics, culture, and reflexivity into analyses of consumption (Askholm, 2024; Welch et al., 2020). Earlier approaches tended to focus on routine and inconspicuous practices, often sidelining the role of evaluative judgement and cultural meaning. This study engages with this emerging direction by examining how practices of freecycling involve not only routine forms of circulation, but also moments of reflection, valuation, and ethical consideration. SECTION #338APQ Consumption practices PARAGRAPH #G7K3UZ Practice theories have been widely applied in studies of sustainability and consumption. Whereas previously widespread theories of consumption in the 1980s and 1990s often treated it as a matter of individual choice and identity-making (Belk, 1998; Featherstone 1991), theories of practice enabled attending to consumption patterns that emerge from the practices in which people are engaged, rather than mainly from their preferences or intentions. This decentring of the individual marked a significant departure from both the rational-choice models of consumer behaviour research and the identity-focused approaches of consumer culture theory. PARAGRAPH #BCWHTG Warde’s (2005) paper “Consumption and theories of practice” is widely regarded as the first programmatic application of practice theory to consumption studies (Welch & Warde 2015). Its central contribution was to reconceptualise consumption as “not itself a practice but rather a moment in almost every practice” (Warde 2005: 137). Warde conceptualizes consumption not as a separate domain of social life organised around the acquisition of goods, but as an integral component of social practices through which people organize their daily lives. People consume in the course of doing other things: e.g. maintaining a household, raising children, managing seasonal change, responding to gifts received, keeping warm, eating, moving around. As Warde (2005: 146) puts it, from this perspective “the concept of ‘the consumer’ ... evaporates. Instead the key focal points become the organization of the practice and the moments of consumption enjoined.” PARAGRAPH #74CE82 There is also a particular affinity between consumption and sustainability studies. Welch and Warde (2015) identify three reasons for it. Firstly, much of the environmental impact of consumption stems from routine practices – such as showering or doing laundry – that involve significant, yet often unnoticed, use of energy and resources (Shove, 2003). For such inconspicuous, resource intensive practices analysis of consumption as symbolic display and presentation of self that was more prevalent in consumption studies before is less relevant than attention to the material and social arrangements that sustain them. Secondly, because goods and services are primarily used for the accomplishment of social practices rather than for consumption per se. Thirdly, practice theory can provide a way out of discussions of the “value–action” gap – the persistent discrepancy between reportedly pro-environmental values which by contrast are not reflected in a person’s behaviour – by redirecting focus on the ways resource intensive practices capture and retain their practitioners. PARAGRAPH #6N4CE5 This thesis aligns with practice theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption that attend to the full cycle of goods through domestic life – considering not only the goods and materials people acquire, but also divestment and disposal (Ehgartner and Holmes, 2022). For example, Evans (2020) responds to this by proposing an expanded definition of consumption as a process involving multiple moments beyond acquisition. Following Warde (2005), he identifies appropriation – the use, personalisation, and incorporation of goods into everyday life – and appreciation – the personal and symbolic frameworks through which goods are evaluated and enjoyed. To these he adds three further moments: devaluation, the loss of economic or symbolic value; divestment, the loss of personal meaning and the unravelling of attachments; and disposal, the physical act of getting rid of things (Evans 2020: 345). Taken together, these six moments constitute consumption as a full cycle rather than a single event. Evans notes that a case could be made for simplifying this further, though – replacing the three acquisition related moments with a single concept of attachment, and the three divestment related moments with detachment ¬ a formulation that captures the emotional and relational dimensions of both acquiring and letting go (Evans, 2020: 347). PARAGRAPH #T3B4TZ This expanded definition of consumption to include detachment (divestment, disposal) is at the basis of this thesis. Brīvbode can thus be understood as a consumption site in both directions: people come to divest goods that have reached the end of their household life, and they come to acquire goods that may be entering a new phase of their biography. The swapshop is a node in the ordinary circulation of goods through domestic life, distinguished by its non-monetary character and physical permanence. SECTION #KQQPCD Consumption Work PARAGRAPH #BSAQVJ If practice theory explains how the circulation of goods is socially organised, consumption work names what that circulation costs. Practice theory’s focus on competencies – the skills and know-how through which practices are enacted – tends to emphasize how things are done rather than the effort and resources required to do them. Labor-centric views (e.g. through the concepts of consumption work or care work) instead highlight the laborious aspects of these practices, including the work of acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods and can address this gap directly. This is important in order to examine how circular consumption creates responsibilities and in what ways new forms of consumption work are distributed through populations. PARAGRAPH #BBC3T6 Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) contend that secondhand markets involve consumption work – sorting, cleaning, repairing. “Consumption work”, for them, refers to the range of tasks required of consumers, before or after they consume, on which consumption itself is predicated – the work that must be done before or after the moment of exchange for consumption to be possible at all. Their framework encompasses technical dimensions – the allocation of tasks and skills to different people; modal dimensions – interdependencies of work across different social and economic arrangements; and processual dimensions – the connections of labour across the full span of a consumption process (Wheeler & Gluckmann, 2015: 35-36). In circular economy contexts, Hobson et al. (2021) argue, this work intensifies: responsible divestment requires more effort than simply throwing things away, and the additional demands fall disproportionately on those who are already doing most of the household management work. PARAGRAPH #PPL64A In a recent study of household reuse practices, Beswick-Parsons, Evans and Jackson (2025) identify specific forms of consumption work involved in everyday circular consumption – decanting, stock management, recirculating – and argue that reuse practices are more prevalent and more varied than existing policy commentary assumes. Their analysis provides empirical precedent for examining consumption work and for attending to the range of tasks that participation in reuse practices requires. They conclude that future transitions to reuse might depend less on establishing new practices, driven by narratives of green consumerism, but rather greater attention should be paid to wider changes, including the transformation of supply chains to align with and facilitate the range of ‘reuse work’ currently observed within everyday domestic spaces. PARAGRAPH #9PJVGZ Consumption work and practice theory in this thesis are complementary frameworks. Following the argument developed above in section 2.2., consumption work describes what practices demand from their carriers rather than what individuals choose to do. The labour is in the practice; the questions of what kind of labour and who bears it are questions about the social organisation of practice and whose bodies and time it recruits. THESIS #WG8SNC Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #LESJ77 The Circulation of Things in Brīvbode and Things That Sustain It PARAGRAPH #WAXG2D This chapter examines freecycling as a practice constituted by its physical venue and the materials flowing through it, the meanings that recruit and retain its 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 #T4KGFC The chapter follows the trajectory of things moving through Brīvbode. It begins with the incoming flow: how and in what cases people divest from their households, how meanings shape what arrives, and how Brīvbode is positioned among other possible divestment routes. It turns to the site itself to see how its material elements sustain the circulation, as well as how the competencies and norms at play allow participants to cope with the constant pressure of overflow. PARAGRAPH #VYZL4E 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. SECTION #DQD5GC Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home PARAGRAPH #GWPLH5 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 #PW535S 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 #9NLYAX 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 in a balanced manner 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. It 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 #JKAWGH Divestment in Brīvbode is distributed across time unevenly and concentrated around rhythms of domestic material arrangements and particular life events. People typically bring things in batches – no longer wanted items are set aside and accumulate at home until, e.g. a bag is full and is then divested to Brīvbode. Moving home, renovation, seasonal clearing, and sorting through a deceased relative’s belongings generate larger pulses of divestment. Participants described sorting through an entire previous owner’s life when buying a flat, routing things to Brīvbode and to friends when downsizing, helping relatives to divest after moving home. PARAGRAPH #PBQS93 The size of the home is a very constitutive material element for divestment practice: smaller living spaces generate a more immediate need to move things out, requiring both strong competency for managing household material streams and established divestment routes for what must leave. Brīvbode functions as one such route. PARAGRAPH #37UKJJ The ideal of a decluttered home operates together with this material pressure as a cultural script with its own media (Instagram, TV shows), institutionalised competency – organising courses and the appearance of professional organising consultants, and moral vocabulary. While we sort boxes of clothing on a quieter day, a fellow volunteer Gundega mentions how she usually puts on tidying consultant TV shows when she sorts at home, though the volume of advice tends to produce anxiety – “no one person can remember all the advice”. Viesturs has not been in the target audience of cultural scripts of decluttering: "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 #C9LBXL Whatever induces the decision to divest – the pressure of a small apartment, the influence of a tidying consultant, or simply a bag that has grown too full – the question of where to send things carries its own moral weight for some participants. 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 #KWWD2H Participants who divest in Brīvbode mentioned the non-transparency of the textile container system in comparison to the freeshop. Both routes offer removal, but participants expressed 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 as peculiar. In this case, the divestment is completed affectively by seeing an item was taken. The opportunity for other visitors to access the materials directly is valued, while the textile collection management system is deemed too distanced to imagine who benefits. PARAGRAPH #WVXZYE However, in absence of a specific receiver, while trying to negotiate the appropriate value and quality standards for items meant for circulation, givers also use constructed figures of receivers, 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 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 #9R3TPX The threshold of acceptability in Brīvbode is negotiated situationally, and this uncertainty often becomes 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 keeps visiting, but prefers to not stay long and leave her things quickly. The imagined receiver who accepts everything gives way to the real social encounter where standards are negotiated. I also sometimes brought things in my backpack but ended up not taking them out as on second thought they seemed too worn or not suited. The supply arriving in Brīvbode is shaped by these contested meanings and participant competencies of evaluating items as appropriate and the rhythms of domestic life. As such it is often unpredictable. PARAGRAPH #9L35AB 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, on another occasion divested a bag full of colourful folk-style knitted mittens – laid out on the table, those attracted many visitors’ attention that day. This uncertainty of supply is itself part of what sustains participant engagement with the practice through meanings of “serendipity” and moments of unexpected “good catch”. PARAGRAPH #PU358Y On observation, Brīvbode does function as a divestment route for items that more regulated reuse channels would not accommodate: sometimes unfinished repair projects and textile fragments, old photographs and magazines, not entirely complete jigsaw puzzles. Sometimes volunteers would remark that if an item that seemed “too good” was brought to Brīvbode, they would look for signs of wear and tear or hidden defect suspecting a reason it had been routed here and not sold. They are aware 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. PARAGRAPH #HB3ASP Fieldwork observations reveal different versions and scales of what counts as usable and worthy: a collection of single-use sugar packages – taken; a bundle of expired covid tests – I spent a while unpacking four alcohol wipes from each test and later watched a woman take them; carefully washed butter and yogurt plastic containers brought to Brīvbode were disposed of by volunteers 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. The trajectory was 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 #LADPFL Divestment is normalised and sought after (Sigaard, 2026). 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. The same logic that makes divestment easy also can make Brīvbode available as a pressure valve. 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 #V7EWH9 Materials in Brīvbode: Co-presence and Flow PARAGRAPH #2DGPX9 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 #3L5U98 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. 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. PARAGRAPH #RZBJ6S It helps that the things are “right there”. Physical instead of virtual co-presence shapes the quality of encounters between people and objects, as Tan and Yeoh (2024) note. Writing about freecycling markets in Singapore, they observe that “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 #YS9XFA 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 in Brīvbode, as it becomes a stable and recurring weekly infrastructure for participants and allows this embodied co-presence with the things. PARAGRAPH #8THWTU Physical permanence and regularity also enables visitors to sustain a visiting rhythm through which, for many of them, freecycling becomes genuinely embedded in everyday life. 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, majority of visitors come regularly, and 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. Viesturs noted his observation how many regular visitors took things and brought them back on the next visit and it seemed to him the things themselves were secondary to maintaining the social rhythm of visitation. PARAGRAPH #QKVTS2 The space itself is not a neutral background to these social rhythms but an active element in shaping them. 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 – leaving more space between things, signifying that quality items can be found in Brīvbode via similarity to retail environment. "The emptier the shelves, the more people find," she notes. A different aesthetic displaying abundance of 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 #TT62UQ Both aesthetics are held against the reality of managing overflow. The site makes it visible in a way that households ordinarily conceal: there is no “away” to throw your things. The physical experience of overflow is a constant of volunteering, and bags often arrive faster than they can be processed. During a 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 #JEUQUV Within the material realm, Brīvbode is also embedded in and dependent upon broader infrastructural arrangements in order to manage the overflow it cannot absorb. 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.” The divestment logic that operates in households – and the same embodied relief when things can finally go – is present in Brīvbode too. PARAGRAPH #YJUVMV The swapshop passes leftover textiles to textile collection containers – as researchers of post-consumer textile flows in Latvia were attempting to estimate, up to 30 % of the received flow (Akule et al. 2023). 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 continue operating – in a pragmatic, improvised manner – because of this material entanglement instead of trying to resolve the full material cycle on its own. SECTION #M332QQ Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation PARAGRAPH #AVGVRR 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 several overlapping dynamics: the more feminised character of household consumption management, the higher volume and faster turnover of clothing produced for women and the smaller and more stable character of men’s wardrobes. As noted in the methodology chapter, this both shapes and conditions how men participate in Brīvbode. They are present in the practice, but on a lesser scale and with different practice career tendencies – while men’s clothing is sought after, they often look for books to circulate in second hand markets, CD’s, electronics. PARAGRAPH #SMBWJN 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: "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 #2G8R2D 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 #7RDVC3 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. PARAGRAPH #AH6D9Q This is observable even in the circulation of food items, which, although not central, are also present in Brīvbode. In many community-based exchange initiatives, 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: open packages may be accepted when brought by known visitors, suggesting that assessments of safety and acceptability are negotiated socially. PARAGRAPH #33F4ZX Nevertheless, a relatively 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 the 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. This is the typical pattern: rather than formal refusal, workers might suggest that an item could be washed and brought back, or simply delay decisions until the donor has left. However, this open negotiation was also remarked as a skill among volunteers – some were better at it than others. PARAGRAPH #6HKQE4 Working in Brīvbode is characterized by constant sorting decisions, trying to maintain an acceptable level of presentation and quality standards of items. This work of maintaining quality and the work of maintaining relationships sometimes pull in different directions – at times I heard people felt uneasy about Viesturs openly commenting on things they had brought. At the same time, this informality that makes such comments possible is also what keeps the space relational rather than professionalised. The balance between lenience and care is negotiated in every shift. SECTION #RATF8K Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange PARAGRAPH #2WSJSF 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 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. It 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 #YXRTLD 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 #S9EP68 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 #43RNBT Brīvbode operates on a similar logic: the physical space mediates between participants, making it possible to take without performing need. The tension around resellers that Widlok identifies is also present. Widlok’s observation that give boxes tend to be understood within a moral register of charity is what Brīvbode’s organisers are working against. Whether it succeeds is a matter of degree: for some participants the charitable interpretation persists regardless, while for others the exchange logic is stronger – good finds and opportunity to return bridge mutuality of an imagined community. PARAGRAPH #62T2Y2 The imperative to keep things flowing to avoid overflow creates a certain tolerance in case of suspicion for 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 items previously divested to Brīvbode, sold at the Āgenskalns flea market the following weekend, which Rasa acknowledges as straightforwardly unpleasant. Yet because it is not always possible to prove, there is also a working accommodation, and Rasa’s position is one of pragmatic acceptance: “At the same time it seems – if he'll find the next user for the thing anyway, the function is fulfilled. Better they make a little money and the thing finds its person, than some hoarder takes it and the things end up in a container." She laughs: "Well, what choice do I have but to believe… We support small businesses." This reveals a hierarchy of meanings operating within Brīvbode’s moral economy. The object’s arrival to a sequential user is weighed as more important than the forbidden monetary transaction that may or may not occur along the way. The ethos of non-monetary exchange can be subordinated to the deeper logic of circulation. Besides, if visitors come with something in return and the exchange logic is fulfilled, further trajectory is difficult to control. PARAGRAPH #KCQ7XW 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 functionally 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 #7D88QB Letting Go: Attachment Without Price PARAGRAPH #K6XZFU 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. In Brīvbode, this anchor is absent, and some participants articulate the shift in their relationship to objects directly. PARAGRAPH #AXSL6P Rasa describes how price normally operates as a binding force which Brīvbode alleviates: PARAGRAPH #9MDCHN “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." PARAGRAPH #JRZ82V She is pragmatic about this beyond Brīvbode too, recalibrating her commitment to acquisition: PARAGRAPH #3HAL9H “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." PARAGRAPH #CD5KR8 This speaks to attachment as a longer process that unfolds over time and is difficult to predict at the moment of acquisition – a recognition that the relationship between a person and an object is not settled by the decision to take it. PARAGRAPH #H26FZ5 The possibility of an easy return after trial in Brīvbode follows this logic. Bringing something back if it does not settle into the participant's life further loosens the relationship between taking and keeping, allowing 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 #4CSAEK With the removal of monetary context and the immediate opportunity to divest, also more spontaneous decisions become possible. 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. These are spontaneous bodily judgements that initiate the kind of immediate circulation. PARAGRAPH #Z3V39A The same conditions that enable this freedom can also make acquisition more frequent and less deliberate. The non-monetary regime does not automatically produce more careful consumption, as that depends on the meanings participants bring to it. The following chapter examines the work they invest in managing their own relationship to things. SECTION #8TW5R7 What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition PARAGRAPH #G5EA4H 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 wider and socially more 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 #4Z9UY2 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 #UGE8L6 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 #NS2UXX 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 #ZHD4LW 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 #S8N3GP 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 #ADEJXV 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 #BUPMY2 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 #V3MXDZ 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 #JK6BXJ 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 #MZRUZ4 Quiet or Reflected Sustainability? PARAGRAPH #E9BSYX Viesturs positions Brīvbode against charity 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." Viesturs is not only describing the meanings that sustain his own participation, but also making a claim about which meanings should be foregrounded for practice-as-entity to recruit and retain more practitioners. Orientation to this meaning is present in Brīvbode and practically expressed through organising photo shoots and parties, encouraging a certain playfulness with clothing. PARAGRAPH #MBBKRJ 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 #67PETP 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. PARAGRAPH #9ECPFY 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). Their practices have sustainable dimensions they do not necessarily name or claim. PARAGRAPH #UMU3WF The normalization of secondhand consumption in Latvia provides a productive context for this concept. Survey data from the Central Baltic Region found that more than half of Latvian respondents were most likely to describe their experience of secondhand shopping as one of indifference, with only 5% choosing "proud" as a description of how buying secondhand makes them feel (Gurova and Joro, 2025). For a country where secondhand goods constitute around 40% of the clothing market, the practice carries less stigma and less moral weight than it holds in other contexts, although, as shown earlier, these orientations carry their own e.g. class and generational nuances. PARAGRAPH #H6JBAC Several participants in this study trace their orientations toward thrift and reuse to generational experience of scarcity in the early post-Soviet period rather than to any sustainability aspiration, a pattern consistent with quiet sustainability. Māra’s story about her mother points to the instability of this orientation when new elements enter the practice landscape: as a petite woman who had difficulty finding clothing in Soviet times, her mother maintained her clothing very carefully. But later when second-hand shops appeared “it went to the other extreme”, Māra laughs. The competency of careful maintenance and the meaning of thrift did not automatically transfer – instead the abundance of cheap secondhand goods disrupted the sufficiency orientation that was previously based on scarcity. Quiet sustainability, in this account, depends on the material conditions sustaining it and is not a stable inheritance. PARAGRAPH #P3YNMR Luīze is at the other end of the spectrum in this context. For her sustainability as a meaning is articulated and foregrounded, and participation in freecycling is explicitly framed in terms of ecological responsibility and the wider politics of avoiding fast fashion and microtrends. A third configuration is found with Līva who discusses 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. 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. Brīvbode sits within this normalization rather than outside it. ### 13. Assistant Here's a revised opening for Chapter 5 that drops the "bundle / practice-arrangement" vocabulary MIKAEL imports from his Chapter 2/4 and instead bridges to your existing Chapter 4 (#LESJ77, organised by materials, meanings, competencies) and Chapter 2 (#3ZH5VW, where you already set up consumption work as complementary to practice theory and name the technical/modal/processual dimensions). It would replace MIKAEL's #DM28T4, #EF5DET, and #S6HFAC. --- **Paragraph 1** (replaces #DM28T4) Rasa, the principal manager of Brīvbode, compared the swapshop's operation to the flight of a bumblebee: while seemingly defying the laws of aerodynamics, it nevertheless continues to fly. This chapter examines the work that keeps it flying. Where the previous chapter followed things through Brīvbode and showed how the materials, meanings, and competencies of freecycling hang together as a practice, this chapter turns to what holding that practice in working relation costs and to the people who pay for it — in time, skill, and effort, and in the relational and ethical attention that the tasks of circulation demand. That labour is largely unpaid, unevenly distributed, and absorbed into existing practices of household management. **Paragraph 2** (replaces #EF5DET) The chapter is organised by two complementary registers introduced in Chapter 2. Consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann 2015) names the tasks the practice demands — acquiring, sorting, maintaining, divesting, transporting — and tracks how they are distributed across the technical, modal, and processual dimensions of the division of labour. Care work, in the feminist tradition and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), names the relational and ethical orientation through which participants take this labour on, often without recognising it as work at all. The two registers are not alternatives but coordinates: a practice like freecycling in Brīvbode is held together at once by tasks that need doing and by the dispositions through which people make them their own. **Paragraph 3** (replaces #S6HFAC) Bankovska's (2020) ethnography of the Latvian organic food movement bridges the two registers ethnographically. Drawing on Graeber (2018: 156), she observes that care is not always a joyful act but often involves unanticipated effort, obligation, hesitation, and disgust — labour that has to be done because the alternative is unbearable. The boundaries between consumption work, care work, and volunteer work are difficult to maintain in practice, and that is precisely what allows the labour that sustains Brīvbode to remain largely invisible to participants and to circular economy policy alike (Hobson et al. 2021). --- ## What I changed and why - **"bundle of freecycling coordinates several practices at once" → "materials, meanings, and competencies of freecycling hang together as a practice"** — matches your Chapter 4's three-element analytical frame and uses Shove et al.'s "hang together" language you already cite in #U9P8XF. - **"practice-arrangement bundles like Brīvbode" → "a practice like freecycling in Brīvbode"** — drops Schatzkian vocabulary your Chapter 2 doesn't set up. - **Added "introduced in Chapter 2"** — anchors the work/care pairing in your #BSAQVJ and #9PJVGZ where you already say consumption work names what circulation costs and is complementary to practice theory. - Kept MIKAEL's third paragraph nearly verbatim — Bankovska/Graeber/Hobson is already on your shelf and you cite all three. Two small downstream things to watch when you paste in the rest of MIKAEL's chapter: 1. **#SZG4E8** opens "If §5.2 traced the valuation work the absence of price creates…" — that's MIKAEL's section order. In your numbering it would be §5.2 if you keep MIKAEL's order (Sufficiency → Valuation → Modal → Processual), or you'd need to renumber if you reorder. 2. **Chapter title.** "Hold It Together: Consumption Work as Care" assumes the Keep/Hold pairing. If you want to keep your existing thesis title and Chapter 4 title, something like "The Work of Circulation: Consumption Work as Care" preserves MIKAEL's analytical move without requiring the title-level pairing. ### 14. User how about mikael's introduction and conclusions, what's their compatibility and what can be used from mikael's in ieva's? ### 15. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "S4CQ5M", "ZF9EYF", "S9GXZE", "M9WQLY" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 16. Tool result: read THESIS #WG8SNC Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #S4CQ5M Introduction SECTION #PHBM7V Study context and research questions PARAGRAPH #ET5CGT We live in a context of overproduction. Goods, especially textiles, move through households at increasing speed while the average use time continues to drop (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2019). Circular economy policies increasingly position wider reuse and extended product lifetimes as responses to the environmental costs associated with these patterns, yet their success depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive and socially uneven (Hobson et al., 2021). PARAGRAPH #ULMUVH [tags: needs_revision] Hobson et al. (2021) encourage research into circular economy consumption work “beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household” to examine consumption-based practices in other spaces where individuals come together around circular practices, regardless of whether these activities are explicitly labeled as “circular economy”. Other authors have reinforced this call for studies of community based dimensions of circular consumption (Luukkonen et al., 2024, Mesiranta et al., 2025). This thesis is an ethnographic study of a circular community initiative – the social practice of freecycling – the circulation of things within a non-monetary context – in Brīvbode, a volunteer-run swapshop1 in Riga. Brīvbode operates outside the formal circular economy framework: it is a “shop” without formal market transactions, no producer responsibility schemes or measured material flows. Yet it keeps secondhand goods in local circulation and fits within the principles of extending object lifetimes and keeping materials in use. PARAGRAPH #YD7C7G The study is situated in a changing practice landscape. Latvia introduced mandatory textile collection in 2023, new secondhand sales platforms are expanding the routes available for sequential flows of household goods, swapping and reuse initiatives have multiplied in Riga and beyond in recent years. A study of Brīvbode contributes to understanding this changing practice landscape by offering an empirical account of one specific site where divestment, acquisition, and non-monetary exchange come together. PARAGRAPH #BBEX33 The thesis examines how freecycling is organised and sustained as a social practice and what work it requires from its participants. Freecycling is viewed as a socially embedded, materially organized practice, and in this thesis it is situated within broader debates on sustainable consumption practices. PARAGRAPH #8KGR58 Being an emerging practice itself, freecycling in Brīvbode draws on practices that are familiar to participants – household sorting, secondhand acquisition, sequential use of goods, and places them in a new context of non-monetary exchange, offering practitioners new ways of relating to objects and people (Holmes, 2018). PARAGRAPH #WJWLUN The thesis draws on two main analytical frameworks. The first is practice theory, following Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012) and Warde (2005), which allows analysing freecycling as a practice constituted by materials, meanings, and competencies, and attending both to the practice as an entity with its own wider trajectory and to its everyday performances. The second is the concept of consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015; Hobson et al., 2021), which provides a lens for attending to the labour involved in sustaining circular consumption and how it is distributed. Here it is extended to the non-formal context of a swapshop and the divestment networks that connect it to surrounding households. In this context consumption work is entangled with care work: much of the labour that sustains Brīvbode is performed because of felt moral obligation and relational commitment. Together these frameworks allow the thesis to attend to both what freecycling is as a recognisable social form, and what it costs in labour, skill, and care to sustain it. PARAGRAPH #DP3WS5 The thesis is guided by two research questions: PARAGRAPH #2YGQR6 How is freecycling organised and sustained in Brīvbode as a non-monetary, non-domestic site – what materials, meanings and competencies constitute it and how do they interact? PARAGRAPH #USUKUK What work does freecycling in Brīvbode require from participants, and how is that work currently distributed? PARAGRAPH #FYR2GE The study is based on participant observation in Brīvbode combined with fifteen semi-structured interviews with visitors, regular participants, and volunteers. My own participation as a volunteer shaped the fieldwork and is reflected in the analysis. PARAGRAPH #SLM6T8 [tags: placeholder] “Circular economy frameworks, as developed in EU policy, are primarily oriented toward industrial supply chains, producer responsibility, and the systemic redesign of material flows at scale. Informal, community-based initiatives like Brīvbode operate largely outside this framework – they are not measured, not regulated, and not funded through circular economy mechanisms – yet they perform circular economy work in practice: keeping goods in use, extending object lifetimes, and diverting materials from waste streams. Hobson (2016) describes such initiatives as generative spaces of everyday activism, arguing that they occupy a productive but undertheorized position at the intersection of sharing and circular economy frameworks. They are neither fully legible to circular economy policy nor fully captured by sharing economy research, yet they enact circularity at the local, relational scale” SECTION #JZR5Y4 Latvian context and research PARAGRAPH #BQL56B Historically, second-hand in Latvia has been more commonly associated with acquisition rather than divestment. The colloquial term humpalas – derived from humānā palīdzība (humanitarian aid) – reflects the history of donated clothing arriving from abroad, particularly in the post-socialist period. In this context, second-hand goods were framed as assistance in times when access to consumer goods was limited rather than as part of a reciprocal or circular system, and organised opportunities for individuals to pass on their own items in organised ways were typically confined to informal exchanges or charitable donations. PARAGRAPH #2FNP5J A shift began with the emergence of more institutionalised divestment infrastructures, such as the opening of the first Otrā Elpa charity shop in Riga in 2009. These initiatives introduced new channels for divestment, and gradually moved second-hand consumption from a one-directional flow of aid toward a more participatory system of reuse. Data indicates that second-hand acquisition remains a significant part of the textile market in the Baltic States: a 2023 representative survey found that 55% of Latvian participants currently buy second-hand clothing (Akule et al., 2023), and in 2018 second-hand accounted for around 40% of textile consumption in Latvia (Watson et al., 2020). PARAGRAPH #ZUZRYW In recent years the landscape has diversified further, with online groups, neighbourhood swapping events, book and plant exchange shelves, digital resale platforms, and informal stall-based initiatives all forming part of a dispersed network of everyday circulation practices. PARAGRAPH #C9QV43 Various exchange, divestment and second hand alternatives are currently available and are routinely used by people in Riga – online groups, charity shops and textile collection containers – but what sets Brīvbode apart is the operation on a physical site, the exchange without regulated monetary transaction, and a sustained volunteer infrastructure that makes repeated visits possible and socially meaningful. It is open every week, year-round, and this regularity is central to what it offers – a route for acquisition and divestment, but also a predictable rhythm that participants can build into their everyday routines. PARAGRAPH #YXMJTH [tags: fragment] In recent years, a range of initiatives for circulation and reuse of everyday goods have emerged in Latvia, indicating a growing and also increasingly institutionalised diversification of non-market and low-cost access practices. Access to infrastructure not distributed evenly (Akule et al. 2013). PARAGRAPH #YPJ4ED Similar practices have long operated in digital environments, with specified online groups facilitating the redistribution of goods between users, e.g. “Atbrīvojies no lietām” (“Rid yourself of things”) – the names of these groups also indicate them as stemming from divestment, initiated by the giver as an opportunity to gain freedom from the burden of unwanted ownership. PARAGRAPH #95WC5S In recent years more informal small scale infrastructures have become visible in urban space, such as book and plant exchange shelves located in libraries, clinics, educational institutions and cafés. Organised events, such as neighbourhood-based swapping, contribute to this landscape. Also smaller scale informal initiatives exist, for example, a participant told me about a trader who has set up a swapshop-like space in an unused stall in Matīsa market in Riga, maintaining it alongside her own activities. According to my interlocutors, such spaces attract regular users and form part of a dispersed network of everyday circulation practices. PARAGRAPH #8T92AA At the same time, practices of leaving items in semi-public spaces – such as stairwells or next to waste containers – continue to operate as low-threshold forms of divestment, blurring the boundary between disposal and reuse. Second-hand retail chains remain a strong presence and provide access to low-cost goods that at times (e.g. special clearance days) approach free consumption. Other hybrid models combine elements of exchange and redistribution, such as the waste management company’s CleanR exchange point “Nomales” or the national reuse platform platform lietovelreiz.lv. PARAGRAPH #BTMNVC [tags: placeholder] [Although, for participants this aspect is not always significant, Brīvbode sustains domestic reuse, without sending things to other countries (although leftovers are absorbed by the textile collection system.] PARAGRAPH #RVJMJU The first “library of things” in Riga was opened at the library of Goethe Institute in 2021, and this spring another two were established – in Sarkandaugava neighbourhood (currently announced as working until February 2027 within a project framework) and another in the nearby coastal town of Carnikava (running alongside a swapshop, opened by in collaboration with a waste management company). PARAGRAPH #CAFCR8 [tags: needs_revision] Data indicates that second-hand acquisition remains a significant part of the textile market in the Baltic States, particularly in Latvia, where it accounts for a substantial share of total consumption. In 2018 around 40% of textile consumption in Latvia was second-hand (Watson et. al., 2020). The collection system in Latvia has undergone rapid expansion and formalization through new legislation. Latvia introduced mandatory separate textile collection in 2023, reflecting the broader EU regulatory direction established by the Circular Economy Action Plan and the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles. PARAGRAPH #J7U4SR [tags: needs_revision] A 2023 representative survey found that 55% of Latvian participants currently buy second-hand clothing, a rate similar to Estonia (61%) and Finland (56%). PARAGRAPH #8P4BJ8 [tags: placeholder] The bulk of things circulating in Brīvbode are textiles. Textiles have been identified as a priority sector in the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2020), and EU Textile Strategy (2022-ongoing) states that textiles should be durable, repairable, reusable, and reuse should be part of the desired system outcome. [..] [Statistics on Baltics as the destination in the circular economies of other countries…] PARAGRAPH #25T35D [tags: needs_revision] There are high volumes of used textile imports from other Nordic countries to the Baltics. There is high expertise especially in manual sorting for reuse and the cost of labour is low compared to the other Nordic countries. Most of the second-hand sales in the Baltics consist of imported textiles rather than domestic textiles. PARAGRAPH #N275XP [tags: needs_revision] There is great inequality in the world of second-hand clothing, and how it is distributed. For example, the amount of second-hand clothing flowing into Kenya from around the world, has grown and up to 900 million items was sent to Kenya in 2021. This amount to 17 garments for each Kenyan every year. Out of these, almost 150 million items came from the EU and the UK. (Ibid.) There are similar countries around the world, where there is only a limited amount of new clothing sold and used clothes make up most of the apparel market. The imports of second-hand clothing have undermined the local production of clothes, and market traders have shifted from selling new local to used foreign clothes, as these products have higher profit margins. 15 It could be argued that this is also to some extent the case for Latvia, as most of the second-hand market there consists of imported textiles and the second-hand market is 40% of the whole apparel market there. PARAGRAPH #X2SDNW [tags: needs_revision] Atkritumu apsaimniekošanas uzņēmumu sadarbība ar vairumtirgotājiem, kas lielu daļu saņemto tekstila preču eksportē. SECTION #2VAN88 A note on terms PARAGRAPH #J3TSH2 Choosing the right terms to refer to Brīvbode is not straightforward. For one, no word currently exists in Latvian to describe the practice, and the available English terms each carry connotations that fit only partially. PARAGRAPH #FVVVFA The name “Brīvbode” is a more or less localization of the term “freeshop” – a known term that is also sometimes used in research articles: “brīv-” means “free”, while “bode” alludes to the cosy scale and affectionate oldschool character of a small shop, associated with a persona of bodnieks or bodniece – the person who attends to it and mediates the relations with visitors. Some regulars of Brīvbode use the diminutive “bodīte”, a form of endearment very common in Latvian. PARAGRAPH #RWL5HN However, the organizers have a complicated relationship with the term “freeshop”. As Brīvbode manager Rasa shared in an interview, the name already existed when she joined the initiative and they were trying to come up with alternative names in the beginning but did not manage to replace it. Their preferred term is “swapshop” which I also use in this thesis. “Swapshop”, as I discuss in Chapter 4, positions Brīvbode as a site of exchange rather than charity. However, as a descriptive term for “what actually happens there” I consider swapping not suitable enough, as it overstates the symmetry and implies an exchange with one to one logic, which is not the case in Brīvbode. In this thesis, I use the term “freecycling” to refer to the what is done in Brīvbode, as it emphasises the circularity aspect of the practice. While freecycling has its own specific origin, associated with the Freecycle Network, an online platform for giving things away locally, I use the term nonetheless because it captures the non-monetary circulation of goods without implying directness of swapping or the one-directionality of donation. SECTION #LEKBCM The structure of the thesis PARAGRAPH #5V2EL3 The thesis is organised as follows: Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature, situating the study within debates on practice theory and sustainable consumption and consumption work. Chapter Three describes the methodology, including the fieldwork context, interview approach, and analytical framework. Chapter Four, the first empirical chapter, examines Brīvbode as a site of freecycling practice: the materials flowing through it, the plural meanings and competencies that sustain giving and taking, and the non-monetary context that shapes the flows. Chapter Five turns more closely to the labour that sustains the flows described in Chapter Four, applying Wheeler and Glucksmann's consumption work framework to analyse the work performed by volunteers, participants, and the extended divestment networks that connect Brīvbode to surrounding households. The thesis concludes by drawing together the empirical findings and reflecting on what Brīvbode reveals about the conditions under which circular consumption practices can be sustained in everyday life. THESIS #4V8VH7 Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop SECTION #ZF9EYF Introduction PARAGRAPH #J4M2WK 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). PARAGRAPH #ADQD9U 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. PARAGRAPH #XKELL5 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. PARAGRAPH #SNLDAM 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. PARAGRAPH #BTDD45 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. PARAGRAPH #UBJLE3 The thesis is guided by two research questions: PARAGRAPH #PYHGNL 1. 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? PARAGRAPH #NSNSQ3 2. What work does this configuration require from participants, and how is that work currently distributed? SECTION #LAR465 Latvian context and research PARAGRAPH #Y38N9B Historically, second-hand in Latvia has been more commonly associated with acquisition rather than divestment. The colloquial term humpalas – derived from humānā palīdzība (humanitarian aid) – reflects the history of donated clothing arriving from abroad, particularly in the post-socialist period. In this context, second-hand goods were framed as assistance in times when access to consumer goods was limited rather than as part of a reciprocal or circular system, and organised opportunities for individuals to pass on their own items in organised ways were typically confined to informal exchanges or charitable donations. PARAGRAPH #SRVVZ4 A shift began with the emergence of more structured divestment infrastructures, such as the opening of the first Otrā Elpa charity shop in Riga in 2009. These initiatives introduced new channels for divestment, and gradually moved second-hand consumption from a one-directional flow of aid toward a more participatory system of reuse. Data indicates that second-hand acquisition remains a significant part of the textile market in the Baltic States: a 2023 representative survey found that 55% of Latvian participants currently buy second-hand clothing (Akule et al., 2023), and in 2018 second-hand accounted for around 40% of textile consumption in Latvia (Watson et al., 2020). PARAGRAPH #BHE8T3 In recent years the landscape has diversified further, with online groups, neighbourhood swapping events, book and plant exchange shelves, digital resale platforms, and informal stall-based initiatives all forming part of a dispersed network of everyday circulation practices. PARAGRAPH #4FP5K7 Various exchange, divestment and second hand alternatives are currently available and are routinely used by people in Riga – online groups, charity shops and textile collection containers – but what sets Brīvbode apart is the operation on a physical site, the exchange without regulated monetary transaction, and a sustained volunteer infrastructure that makes repeated visits possible and socially meaningful. It is open every week, year-round, and this regularity is central to what it offers – a route for acquisition and divestment, but also a predictable rhythm that participants can build into their everyday routines. PARAGRAPH #7LMSFU [tags: placeholder] The contemporary Latvian reuse landscape is therefore best understood as a patchwork of routes rather than a single circular system. Some routes are institutional and increasingly formalised, such as textile collection containers, charity shops, municipal reuse points and waste-management company initiatives; others are commercial, such as Andele Mandele and Vinted, where second-hand circulation remains organised through price, platform labour and buyer–seller coordination; still others are informal and neighbourhood-based, such as Facebook groups, book-exchange shelves, ad hoc swapping events and semi-public leaving practices. These routes differ not only in what they circulate, but also in what kinds of work they require: photographing and listing, carrying bags, trusting unknown recipients, sorting for quality, or simply having access to a car, time, storage and information. Access to reuse infrastructure is therefore unevenly distributed, and Brīvbode should be situated within this wider, uneven ecology of circulation rather than treated as an isolated initiative. PARAGRAPH #2CU6EC Similar practices have long operated in digital environments, with specified online groups facilitating the redistribution of goods between users, e.g. “Atbrīvojies no lietām” (“Rid yourself of things”) – the names of these groups also indicate them as stemming from divestment, initiated by the giver as an opportunity to gain freedom from the burden of unwanted ownership. PARAGRAPH #YNKV5D In recent years more informal small scale infrastructures have become visible in urban space, such as book and plant exchange shelves located in libraries, clinics, educational institutions and cafés. Organised events, such as neighbourhood-based swapping, contribute to this landscape. Also smaller scale informal initiatives exist, for example, a participant told me about a trader who has set up a swapshop-like space in an unused stall in Matīsa market in Riga, maintaining it alongside her own activities. According to my interlocutors, such spaces attract regular users and form part of a dispersed network of everyday circulation practices. PARAGRAPH #NQNRFE At the same time, practices of leaving items in semi-public spaces – such as stairwells or next to waste containers – continue to operate as low-threshold forms of divestment, blurring the boundary between disposal and reuse. Second-hand retail chains remain a strong presence and provide access to low-cost goods that at times (e.g. special clearance days) approach free consumption. Other hybrid models combine elements of exchange and redistribution, such as the waste management company’s CleanR exchange point “Nomales” or the national reuse platform platform lietovelreiz.lv. PARAGRAPH #C9N497 The first “library of things” in Riga was opened at the library of Goethe Institute in 2021, and this spring another two were established – in Sarkandaugava neighbourhood (currently announced as working until February 2027 within a project framework) and another in the nearby coastal town of Carnikava (running alongside a swapshop, opened by in collaboration with a waste management company). PARAGRAPH #TT4B8P Data indicates that second-hand acquisition remains a significant part of the textile market in the Baltic States, particularly in Latvia, where it accounts for a substantial share of total consumption. In 2018 around 40% of textile consumption in Latvia was second-hand (Watson et. al., 2020). The collection system in Latvia has undergone rapid expansion and formalization through new legislation. Latvia introduced mandatory separate textile collection in 2023, reflecting the broader EU regulatory direction established by the Circular Economy Action Plan and the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles. PARAGRAPH #T5G2TS A 2023 representative survey found that 55% of Latvian participants currently buy second-hand clothing, a rate similar to Estonia (61%) and Finland (56%). SECTION #MUKRGA A note on terms PARAGRAPH #5P28WG Choosing the right terms to refer to Brīvbode is not straightforward. For one, no word currently exists in Latvian to describe the practice, and the available English terms each carry connotations that fit only partially. PARAGRAPH #JLS4NG The name “Brīvbode” is a more or less localization of the term “freeshop”: “brīv-” means “free”, while “bode” alludes to the cosy scale and affectionate oldschool character of a small shop, associated with a persona of bodnieks or bodniece – the person who attends to it and mediates the relations with visitors. Some regulars of Brīvbode use the diminutive “bodīte”, a form of endearment very common in Latvian. PARAGRAPH #8S9QR2 However, the organizers have a complicated relationship with the term “freeshop”. As Brīvbode manager Rasa shared in an interview, the name already existed when she joined the initiative and they were trying to come up with alternative names in the beginning but did not manage to replace it. Their preferred term is “swapshop” which I also use in this thesis. “Swapshop”, as I discuss in Chapter 4, positions Brīvbode as a site of exchange rather than charity. However, as a descriptive term for “what actually happens there” I consider swapping not suitable enough, as it overstates the symmetry and implies an exchange with one to one logic, which is not the case in Brīvbode. In this thesis, I use the term “freecycling” to refer to the what is done in Brīvbode, as it emphasises the circularity aspect of the practice. While freecycling has its own specific origin, associated with the Freecycle Network, an online platform for giving things away locally, I use the term nonetheless because it captures the non-monetary circulation of goods without implying directness of swapping or the one-directionality of donation. SECTION #FVXBEK The structure of the thesis PARAGRAPH #ALLPXH The thesis is organised as follows: Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature, situating the study within debates on practice theory and sustainable consumption and consumption work. Chapter Three describes the methodology, including the fieldwork context, interview approach, and analytical framework. Chapter Four, the first empirical chapter, examines Brīvbode as a site of freecycling practice: the materials flowing through it, the plural meanings and competencies that sustain giving and taking, and the non-monetary context that shapes the flows. Chapter Five turns more closely to the labour that sustains the flows described in Chapter Four, applying Wheeler and Glucksmann's consumption work framework to analyse the work performed by volunteers, participants, and the extended divestment networks that connect Brīvbode to surrounding households. The thesis concludes by drawing together the empirical findings and reflecting on what Brīvbode reveals about the conditions under which circular consumption practices can be sustained in everyday life. THESIS #WG8SNC Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia SECTION #S9GXZE Conclusion PARAGRAPH #8KPJKE This chapter shows freecycling in Brīvbode as constituted by the interaction of materials, meanings, and competencies that together make the practice what it is. The materials of freecycling – the permanent physical site, the DIY retail aesthetic, the things circulating – actively constitute the practice. Brīvbode sits at the receiving end of the overproduction it aspires to address, and the material pressure of what arrives shapes everything from curatorial disagreements to the quality of social encounters. PARAGRAPH #473QVB The meanings sustaining freecycling are plural and do not need to be shared or mutually coherent across all practitioners. Dignity, aesthetic autonomy, experimentation, craft, social contact, and practical convenience bring different carriers to the same site. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogeneous orientations together, actively maintained against the pressure of resellers, heavy-takers, and charity-seekers, yet flexible enough to accommodate them against the pressure of material overflow. Sustainability is one available meaning among many and is held unevenly and in tension with the consumption patterns participants bring with them. PARAGRAPH #Q355SL Together these elements sustain a practice that is simultaneously an alternative caring system and a low-threshold overflow channel for the overproduction it aspires to address. This tension does not resolve. It is, perhaps, what Brīvbode actually is: an honest response to a structural condition rather than a solution to it. PARAGRAPH #KBFLL3 Wheeler and Glucksmann's consumption work concept names the structure: tasks that paid institutions would perform in formal retail or waste management contexts are here absorbed by unpaid volunteers and participants, distributed across modal and processual dimensions that stretch well beyond the freeshop itself. Bankovska and Graeber name the motivation: much of this labour is not transferred from institutions onto reluctant consumers but self-imposed through ethical commitment and care – activities people perform because they cannot bring themselves not to. Miller names who bears it: consistently and disproportionately women, from household sorting and routing to managing others' generosity to transmitting these competencies to the next generation. PARAGRAPH #4F3GVD Circular consumption requires substantial labour, and that labour is unevenly distributed. Initiatives like Brīvbode depend on a structural condition – the sufficiency-oriented, time-rich, predominantly female volunteer and participant base that circular economy policy rarely names or supports. PARAGRAPH #F3XQHG [tags: fragment] This thesis is a contribution to the studies of circular consumption using ethnographic methods with practice theory approach. PARAGRAPH #SHYDFK This thesis brings together practice-theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption and consumption work for a study of a site beyond the household — of goods circulation within a context of non-monetary exchange. PARAGRAPH #AK7JTK This thesis set out to examine how freecycling is organised and sustained in Brīvbode as a site of non-monetary exchange, and what work it requires from participants. The two empirical chapters have answered these questions in turn. PARAGRAPH #QU29MU Sustainability is real but uneven. For some practitioners it is the primary meaning; for long-term volunteers it has receded into the background of a routinized practice; for others it sits in genuine tension with consumption patterns that continue regardless. The practice continues across all these configurations, which is itself the point: Brīvbode demonstrates that sustainable outcomes do not require sustainable motivations. But it also demonstrates that circular consumption can coexist with overproduction – Brīvbode is simultaneously an alternative caring system and a low-threshold overflow channel for the surplus it aspires to address. This tension does not resolve. PARAGRAPH #P23EGN Freecycling is sustained by substantial labour that is unpaid, largely invisible, and unevenly distributed. The consumption work framework reveals three dimensions of this. Technically, tasks are distributed across participants in ways that reflect and reproduce gendered household labour: women sort, evaluate, prepare, transport, and manage not only their own divestment but that of neighbours, colleagues, and family members who route their surplus through embedded participants. Men's role, where it appears, is typically physical transport of bags that women have assembled. The practice is not only currently feminized — it is being transmitted along gendered lines to the next generation, as Kristīne's visits with her daughters illustrate. PARAGRAPH #STQP9F Modally, Brīvbode occupies a distinctive position outside the formal circular economy — absorbing the overflow, receiving some of the surplus that formal retails ystems will not handle and divest some of its own streams to textile collection systems. It is sustained by volunteer labour organized around sufficiency lifestyles with volunteers who have traded income for time, reduced monetary consumption, and found meaning in unpaid contribution. PARAGRAPH #TBZJZU Processually, the work stretches beyond the freeshop itself. The labour of divestment begins at home before anything arrives, and the networks through which things reach Brīvbode extend across households in ways that make the reach of the initiative considerably wider than its physical visitor count would suggest. PARAGRAPH #E3N629 [tags: fragment] The thesis provides an empirical account of freecycling as a social practice in a specific site and context. PARAGRAPH #QENYUC [tags: fragment] It extends the consumption work framework beyond the household to a semi-public community site, PARAGRAPH #MAQR6R and adds restraint as a form of consumption work – the deliberate self-regulation that the non-monetary arrangement demands from participants who do not want to accumulate. Third, it argues that the sustainability of informal circular economy initiatives like Brīvbode depends on structural conditions — sufficiency-organized time, feminized domestic labour, informal networks of care — that circular economy policy consistently fails to name, measure, or support. What circular economy metrics count as material flows are moved by labour that does not appear in any metric. PARAGRAPH #E8ZYQ6 Brīvbode sustains itself in its pragmatic, improvised manner, employing DIY and sufficiency ethos. Through meanings of playfulness, joy of exchange it recruits practitioners who participate – volunteers, visitors, many of whom are a very regular presence. PARAGRAPH #9NH9PY A site of social contact, anchored in the persona of volunteers. People show up, sort, carry and keep returning. It is an initiative that has attracted people over the years – operating with volumes larger than the initial place that it borrowed the practice from. PARAGRAPH #DL635Z [tags: placeholder] Imperfections of the world. PARAGRAPH #Y5F3R4 [tags: fragment] Meanwhile, it holds a tension in structure – site of overflow, the experience of which can be very embodied and overwhelming. This might also be needed – to witness the material flows of contemporary world. PARAGRAPH #GEDSDA The thesis does not resolve the question of whether circular consumption, even when sustained and socially meaningful, produces sufficient rather than merely circular consumption. Brīvbode enables reuse, but it does not automatically reduce overall consumption and constitution of need. Following Warde's argument that consumption is a moment within practices rather than a practice in itself, what people are doing in Brīvbode is often better described as household management, divestment, social participation, or care for others. The circular economy framing captures part of this but not all of it. PARAGRAPH #7RSGPZ [tags: fragment] Future research might attend more closely how circular consumption initiatives “sit” with constitution of need – how the need to consume more is possibly challenged. PARAGRAPH #FSGHQU [tags: fragment] Sustainability transitions require systemic reconfiguration of normality (Shove, 2003). PARAGRAPH #2NMEE7 [tags: fragment] Freecycling in Brīvbode is constituted by materials, meanings, and competencies. PARAGRAPH #QD7W7W The permanent physical site that allows the rhythmic embodied co-presence of visitors and things, the entangled material arrangements of Brīvbode with wider international flows of second hand goods and its own relation to the textyle collection. Material elements are strongly constitutive of the practice. PARAGRAPH #AW8T4L The meanings that recruit and retain practitioners are plural and do not need to be shared: dignity, aesthetic autonomy, experimentation, craft, social contact, and practical convenience all bring different carriers to the same site. While alternative, they simultaneously overlap with some of the meanings present in capitalist consumption –... No single meaning cluster would generate sufficient volume, and the meanings do not need to be compatible. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogeneous orientations together, as it is actively maintained as a normative achievement against the pressure of resellers, heavy-takers, and charity-seekers in Brīvbode, while also remaining flexible enough to accommodate them against the pressures of overflow. PARAGRAPH #BVECZ7 Competencies of sorting, evaluating quality without price signals, reading social norms, managing one's own acquisition impulses are more demanding than the low-threshold appearance of the site suggests. The practice recruits people it can teach; its threshold is social and evaluative rather than formal. PARAGRAPH #SDW4LB Brīvbode is a site where the ordinarily private and dispersed practices of domestic material life become visible. The continued existence of the swapshop – sustained through regular volunteer labour, participant labour, and a relatively stable social and material infrastructure – can be read as evidence of the demand that household goods circulation generates for divestment routes that, while taking some degree of effort, are socially acknowledged. PARAGRAPH #ATT6VQ Brīvbode operates within the conditions of overproduction, where the circulation of goods is shaped as much by excess as by need. While it enables reuse and access, it also absorbs the material overflow generated elsewhere. The labor of managing excess – the sorting, the deciding, the transporting, the emotional work of letting go – falls unevenly on people, is often invisible, and that becomes especially evident in circular economy contexts where more participation is needed. While some consumption work is alleviated in Brīvbode, it is replaced by other types. PARAGRAPH #CZYJCR Participation in Brīvbode is a form of consumption work, and understanding it as such reveals both what the swapshop enables and what it demands. Consumption work in the context of the swapshop: the effort of finding, sorting, or repurposing items, as well as the broader social practices around bringing and taking items from Brīvbode – decluttering, home organising, dealing with the needs of family members. PARAGRAPH #2QJU9A Brīvbode is at once an answer to a household problem and an arena where people work out possibly alternative relations to things. PARAGRAPH #K3J9L9 [tags: placeholder] improvised solution that does not presuppose a lot of resources… except sufficiency lifestyle? PARAGRAPH #JDHYA8 [tags: placeholder] THE TENSION BETWEEN HABIT (practice) AND INTENTION (trying to change?) Is practice unreflexive? Also work can be unreflexive… People are reflecting all the time, but what keeps them in the practice? The stickiness of it… PARAGRAPH #3D89DU [tags: placeholder] Results, relevance, contribution. Also limitations and recommendations for future studies (very briefly) Further research might –– move into constitution of need… (Shove and Rinkinen) In line with Warde (2005). Circular consumption is one thing, but does it matter how you get things if it’s still an overflow? PARAGRAPH #B2GXY5 Brīvbode's moral economy is negotiated, situational practice where the meaning of "right circulation" is worked out in real time rather than determined in advance. PARAGRAPH #DQX9VT [tags: fragment] the labour sustains circulation entirely outside the formal economy PARAGRAPH #UVS9NA [tags: needs_revision] Un te gan jau var peiminēt to, kā pašiem brīvprātīgajiem šis jautājums vairs tiktāl nenodarbina prātu un viņi vnk ieņem un iemieso to savu lomu tajā lietu apritē kā zināmā mērā pašsaprotamu. PARAGRAPH #MEQ7PN [tags: fragment] It's circular but not always sufficient PARAGRAPH #9UXFBE Circular consumption is happening, but it's embedded in the same system of overproduction it aspires to counter. PARAGRAPH #FXMPV5 So Brīvbode is a site of circular consumption, but one that reveals the limits of the concept — circular consumption can coexist with overproduction, and calling something circular doesn't resolve the question of whether it's sufficient. PARAGRAPH #EQUQ8Q Circular consumption requires substantial labor; that labor is unevenly distributed; and the sustainability of initiatives like Brīvbode depends on a structural condition – the sufficiency-oriented, time-rich, mostly female volunteer and participant base. PARAGRAPH #SNFMDG [tags: fragment] Some of this work is unreflexive and habituated, some is deliberate and effortful. PARAGRAPH #P76F2Q [tags: needs_revision] Transactions of consumption work: “Rasa saka, ka darbs Brīvbodē dažreiz ļauj viņai nejusties vainīgai par to, ka viņa nesašķiro atkritumus.” PARAGRAPH #2FJ3E6 [tags: needs_revision] Līva L.: "Tā drēbju stanga... man liekas, viņa vēl kādam varētu noderēt. Un es neesmu to vēl tā kā izrisinājusi." A clothes rail that no longer has a place in her apartment but which she cannot yet bring herself to take anywhere – the sense that something is still good, someone could use it, but the act of routing it somewhere requires a decision and work to execute it (and appropriate divestment infrastructure). PARAGRAPH #ZA6DWY [tags: fragment] Visitors perhaps do not witness the complete material streams, but they see – PARAGRAPH #HT6RNV [tags: placeholder] [No Singapūras pētījuma] Campbell-Johnston et al.’s (2020) argument that an item’s sequential (re)use is not a given. Rather, (re)use is underpinned by relational labour bound up in what Hobson (2020) calls social circularities. PARAGRAPH #3XQWKH [tags: placeholder] “As suggested by these researchers, joint efforts involving various types of actors, such as non-profit organisations and local communities, can help balance marketised care. Examples of this within circular consumption include repair cafés, clothes-swapping events, and community fridges for sharing leftover food in the neighbourhood. Community-based aspects of circular consumption have recently been highlighted (for a review, see Luukkonen et al., 2024), and the role of local communities in adopting and appropriating circular consumption and care should be further examined. Frontrunner consumers may have a significant role to play in establishing these communities and crafting policies that are built from the bottom-up and aligned with their everyday lives.” (Mesiranta et al. 2025: 26) THESIS #4V8VH7 Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop SECTION #M9WQLY CONCLUSION PARAGRAPH #XN95VQ Brīvbode is best understood not as the site of a single practice but as a nexus where several practices are held in working relation. Throughout the thesis I have argued, following Schatzki (2002, 2017) and Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012), that what happens in Brīvbode is not the performance of a stabilised practice of "freecycling" but the situated coordination of household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, craft, sorting, sociality, sufficiency, volunteering, and resale at a single small site. Freecycling, as I have used the term, names the bundle rather than a settled practice entity. This framing lets the analysis follow what actually happens — the partial overlap, exchange, and friction between recognisable practices — without forcing them into a coherence they do not have. It also makes Brīvbode legible as one of Hobson's (2016) generative spaces: a setting whose generativity comes precisely from the proximity and recombinability of multiple practices, not from any one of them having been redesigned. PARAGRAPH #JDP2GL The site sustains two simultaneous circulations: of things, and of the elements of practice that travel with them. Chapter 4 followed the obvious circulation — a garment leaves one wardrobe and is enrolled in another — and the less obvious one alongside it. Competencies acquired in dressing or craft are recruited into volunteer sorting; the meaning of thrift migrates from domestic darning into modes of divestment (Shove et al. 2012: 75; Gregson 2007); leftovers from one practice become resources for another. The non-monetary, physically permanent character of the site is what makes this dual circulation possible. Materials, meanings, and competencies are unpacked and recombined at the threshold, and the swapshop's distinctiveness lies less in any single transaction it enables than in the proximity at which it stages them. PARAGRAPH #CW6S7T The bundle holds together through heterogeneous, partly incompatible meanings, of which sustainability is only one, and often a quiet one. Brīvbode recruits and retains practitioners through meanings as varied as access and dignity, aesthetic autonomy, novelty and style experimentation, craft sourcing, decluttering, sociality, care for things, and the relief of routing surplus somewhere "right." These meanings do not need to align. Some participants articulate explicit environmental motivations; many do not, locating their participation instead in generational habits of frugality, in care for specific people, or in the pleasures of finding and giving. Following Smith and Jehlička (2013), I have read this as quiet sustainability: beneficial environmental outcomes that emerge from ordinary practices not represented as environmental by their practitioners. The site's circular character is thus an emergent property of coordinated practices rather than a shared moral project, and this is part of why it works. PARAGRAPH #XGA4RY Removing price does not remove work — it redistributes and transforms it. Chapter 5 argued that the absence of a monetary regime does not produce a frictionless flow of goods. It shifts the labour of valuation, sorting, curation, mediation, and disposal onto volunteers and participants, and onto the relational, ethical registers through which they take it on. Wheeler and Glucksmann's (2015) consumption work names the structure of these tasks; the recent literature on care and circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), together with Bankovska's (2020) reading of care as not always joyful, names the orientation. Brīvbode shows what consumption work looks like when neither the price signal nor the formal employment relation is available to organise it: it becomes simultaneously practical labour and ethical attention, and the boundary between them is precisely what allows it to remain largely invisible — to participants, to the public, and to circular economy policy. PARAGRAPH #W7N9C9 This labour is gendered, unevenly distributed, and continuous with domestic consumption work. The fieldwork confirms what feminist scholarship on shopping and recycling has long established (Miller 1998; Wheeler and Glucksmann 2015): the work of circulation is consistently absorbed by women, both inside the swapshop and along the extended divestment networks that route household surplus to it. Several of the most embedded participants act as logistics nodes for neighbours, colleagues, and family — sorting, deciding, transporting on others' behalf. The competencies this requires are transmitted, often deliberately, to daughters. Sufficiency-oriented, time-rich lives are the structural condition that makes Brīvbode possible at all, and circular economy policies that imagine more such initiatives without recognising that condition will quietly depend on its invisibility (Hobson et al. 2021). PARAGRAPH #46L5V4 Brīvbode is generative because it makes the contradictions of circular consumption practically workable, not because it resolves them. The swapshop is at once a route for divestment, a source of acquisition, a curatorial workplace, a meeting point, a craft supply, a threshold between use and waste, and at times a low-friction overflow channel for the very overconsumption it aspires to address. The tensions between these — exchange vs. charity, reuse vs. dumping, care vs. extraction, quiet sustainability vs. articulated environmentalism — are not eliminated. They are negotiated, situationally and relationally, by people with the time, skill, and disposition to do so. The contribution of this thesis is to show how, in a site that operates without price and without formal labour, ordinary circulation becomes both possible and demanding — and to argue that recognising the work of holding it together is a precondition for any policy that hopes to sustain such sites or scale what they do. PARAGRAPH #YJHRWR Limitations and openings. The interview corpus skews female, reflecting the gendered organisation of the practice but limiting what can be said about men's careers in the swapshop. The fieldwork was concentrated in one site at one moment in a rapidly changing Latvian reuse landscape; the comparative question of whether explicitly articulated sustainability makes practices more durable than quiet ones (§4.7) remains open. So does the question of how the kind of community-based care Brīvbode performs could be supported without being absorbed into formal waste infrastructure that would reorganise the very labour that makes it work. ### 17. Assistant Read both. Here's the breakdown. ## Introductions **The big conceptual fork.** Ieva's intro frames freecycling as *a* practice constituted by materials, meanings, and competencies (Shove et al.). MIKAEL's intro reframes it as a **bundle/nexus** of multiple practices (Schatzki, Nicolini) — household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, craft, sociality, volunteering, sufficiency, sorting, resale — coordinated at one site. This is in #XKELL5, #SNLDAM, #BTDD45, and reflects in MIKAEL's RQ1 ("How is freecycling — as a bundle of practices coordinated at Brīvbode — organised…"). This fork propagates everywhere: into MIKAEL's Chapter 2 (#2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices), Chapter 4 framing ("Keep It Moving: the Circulation of Practices"), Chapter 5 opener ("the bundle of freecycling coordinates several practices at once"), and Conclusion. It's the conceptual spine of MIKAEL's version. **What's basically identical / safe to lift:** - The Latvian context section — nearly word-for-word in both. MIKAEL adds one nice paragraph (#7LMSFU, oddly tagged placeholder) about "a patchwork of routes rather than a single circular system" — worth pulling into your draft as it cleans up the parallel `needs_revision`/placeholder paragraphs in your section (#YXMJTH, #CAFCR8, #J7U4SR, #8P4BJ8, #25T35D, #N275XP, #X2SDNW). - A note on terms — virtually identical, both are clean. - The structure-of-the-thesis paragraph — identical. **What's worth lifting from MIKAEL even without adopting bundle framing:** - The opening sentence cluster (#J4M2WK): "the moral burden of managing what arrives and what leaves has shifted increasingly onto households themselves" is sharper than your #ET5CGT and sets up the consumption work argument earlier. - #ADQD9U: a tight one-paragraph description of what Brīvbode actually is (location, twice a week, year-round, what people do, what volunteers do). Your draft doesn't have this kind of compressed scene-setter; it would replace your fragmentary #ULMUVH well. **What you'd have to refuse from MIKAEL's intro if you don't adopt bundle framing:** - #XKELL5, #SNLDAM, #BTDD45 — the three paragraphs that introduce nexus/bundle/site ontology, Schatzki, "elements of practice travel alongside the things." These are MIKAEL's signature analytical move. - The reformulated RQ1. ## Conclusions **Ieva's conclusion (#S9GXZE)** is roughly twice as long as MIKAEL's and clearly mid-draft: ~10 fragment/placeholder/needs_revision tags, several paragraphs that say overlapping things ("Circular consumption requires substantial labor; that labor is unevenly distributed…" appears in three different formulations), and an untranslated Latvian quote. There are good lines in there but the structure isn't pulled together yet. **MIKAEL's conclusion (#M9WQLY)** is seven polished paragraphs with a clean arc: 1. #XN95VQ — Brīvbode as nexus/bundle (Schatzki + Hobson's generative spaces) — **bundle-dependent** 2. #JDP2GL — two simultaneous circulations: things + elements of practice — **bundle-dependent** 3. #CW6S7T — heterogeneous meanings + quiet sustainability — **portable** 4. #XGA4RY — removing price redistributes work; consumption work + care — **portable**, pairs perfectly with the imported Ch 5 5. #W7N9C9 — labour gendered, continuous with domestic — **portable** 6. #46L5V4 — Brīvbode is generative because it makes contradictions workable, not because it resolves them — **portable** (echoes your own "this tension does not resolve" in #Q355SL) 7. #YJHRWR — limitations and openings — **portable** So: 5 of 7 paragraphs are directly liftable. The first two need rewriting if you keep your single-practice framing. ## Recommendation **Don't adopt MIKAEL's bundle framing wholesale.** It's a real conceptual commitment that propagates into Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5, and your existing thesis is internally consistent around the materials/meanings/competencies framing. Adopting bundles now, this close to deadline, means rewriting more than just the intro and conclusion. **Do lift these specific things:** *From the intro:* - Replace your #ET5CGT opening with MIKAEL's #J4M2WK (the moral-burden-on-households sentence is genuinely better) - Replace your fragmentary #ULMUVH with MIKAEL's clean #ADQD9U - Lift MIKAEL's #7LMSFU "patchwork of routes" paragraph into your Latvian context section to absorb the work currently sitting in your `needs_revision`-tagged paragraphs *From the conclusion:* - Lift #CW6S7T, #XGA4RY, #W7N9C9, #46L5V4, #YJHRWR more or less verbatim — they don't depend on bundle framing - For the opening of your conclusion, write a 1–2 paragraph version that uses your materials/meanings/competencies framing instead of MIKAEL's nexus paragraph, then your existing #Q355SL "this tension does not resolve" line is actually a great pivot into MIKAEL's #46L5V4 Want me to draft (a) the rewritten conclusion opener that bridges your Ch 4 framing into the lifted MIKAEL paragraphs, or (b) a clean merged Latvian context section?