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

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

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.

While alternative, they simultaneously overlap with some of the meanings present in capitalist consumption –... Brīvbode is at once an answer to a household problem and an arena where people work out possibly alternative relations to things.

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

The chapter is organised by the trajectory of things through the bundle. §4.1 begins with the household practices that generate incoming flow. §4.2 follows objects across the threshold into the swapshop, where giving, sorting, assessing, taking, chatting, refusing, storing, and discarding are compressed into proximity. §4.3 turns to the competencies of reading the room — the practical know-how through which volunteers and participants navigate a space whose categories are not formally defined. §4.4 examines the boundary-work that holds the site within a meaning of exchange rather than charity, resale, or waste disposal. §4.5 takes up the meanings of letting go that the non-monetary regime makes available, and §4.6 traces how taking is folded into plural practices of access, dignity, style experimentation, craft, and sociality. §4.7 considers the variable place of explicit sustainability framings in participants’ accounts, drawing on Smith and Jehlička’s (2013) concept of quiet sustainability. Across the chapter, I argue that Brīvbode’s circularity is sustained not by a single shared practice but by the situated coordination of partially compatible practices that meet at the site, exchange elements, and move on. In Shove et al.’s (2012: 95–101) terms, this is a bundle rather than a complex: dense enough to matter, but not settled into a single new practice entity.

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

Ethnographic participation enabled me to note finer details about the initiative.

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.

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

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

MA Thesis

MA Thesis

Tallinn 2026

[Brīvbode focusing on domestic flows]

Akule, D., Milbreta, U. and Brizga, J. (2023) Collection and use of post-consumption textiles in Latvia. Riga: Green Liberty.

The chapter is organised by the trajectory of things through the bundle. §4.1 begins with the household practices that generate incoming flow. §4.2 follows objects across the threshold into the swapshop, where giving, sorting, assessing, taking, chatting, refusing, storing, and discarding are compressed into proximity. §4.3 turns to the competencies of reading the room — the practical know-how through which volunteers and participants navigate a space whose categories are not formally defined. §4.4 examines the boundary-work that holds the site within a meaning of exchange rather than charity, resale, or waste disposal. §4.5 takes up the meanings of letting go that the non-monetary regime makes available, and §4.6 traces how taking is folded into plural practices of access, dignity, style experimentation, craft, and sociality. §4.7 considers the variable place of explicit sustainability framings in participants’ accounts, drawing on Smith and Jehlička’s (2013) concept of quiet sustainability. Across the chapter, I argue that Brīvbode’s circularity is sustained not by a single shared practice but by the situated coordination of partially compatible practices that meet at the site, exchange elements, and move on. In Shove et al.’s (2012: 95–101) terms, this is a bundle rather than a complex: dense enough to matter, but not settled into a single new practice entity.

A paper / thesis that has been written for a study programme which has English as the language of tuition should have a Summary in Estonian which should not be a verbatim translation of the summary of the thesis, but a brief summary of the whole thesis, covering the aim(s) and results of the thesis, the introduction, the basis of theory and methodology and a small-scale model of the summary. The summary in Estonian must contain the thesis title in standard Estonian. The summary must appear at the end of the paper / thesis.

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

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

Most interviews were conducted in Latvian (one partly in Russian); they were recorded and transcribed verbatim and quotes have been lightly edited for readability where needed. Quotes used in the thesis have been translated to English by me.

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.

A paper / thesis that has been written for a study programme which has English as the language of tuition should have a Summary in Estonian which should not be a verbatim translation of the summary of the thesis, but a brief summary of the whole thesis, covering the aim(s) and results of the thesis, the introduction, the basis of theory and methodology and a small-scale model of the summary. The summary in Estonian must contain the thesis title in standard Estonian. The summary must appear at the end of the paper / thesis.

Most interviews were conducted in Latvian (one partly in Russian); they were recorded and transcribed verbatim and quotes have been lightly edited for readability where needed. Quotes used in the thesis have been translated to English by me.

TALLINN UNIVERSITY

Ieva Lange 05.05.2026.

Akule, D., Milbreta, U. and Brizga, J. (2023) Collection and use of post-consumption textiles in Latvia. Riga: Green Liberty.

Diary

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

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.

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

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

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.

A paper / thesis that has been written for a study programme which has English as the language of tuition should have a Summary in Estonian which should not be a verbatim translation of the summary of the thesis, but a brief summary of the whole thesis, covering the aim(s) and results of the thesis, the introduction, the basis of theory and methodology and a small-scale model of the summary. The summary in Estonian must contain the thesis title in standard Estonian. The summary must appear at the end of the paper / thesis.

TALLINN UNIVERSITY

MA Thesis

Sigaard, A.S. (2026) Want not, waste not: a practice-theoretical study of textile disposal in everyday life. PhD thesis. Oslo: Oslo Metropolitan University.

Following Warde's (2005) argument that consumption is best understood as a moment within practices rather than a practice in itself, the focus in this thesis is on circulation of household goods – the ongoing movement of things through domestic life through acquisition, storage, care, and divestment – with Brīvbode as a site where several of these practice moments converge and become visible and acknowledged within a specific non-monetary mode of exchange. Brīvbode is, in Nicolini's (2017: 28) terms, a nexus: "a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together."

Supervisors: Maarja Kaaristo, PhD and Joonas Plaan, PhD

MA Thesis

TALLINN UNIVERSITY

A paper / thesis that has been written for a study programme which has English as the language of tuition should have a Summary in Estonian which should not be a verbatim translation of the summary of the thesis, but a brief summary of the whole thesis, covering the aim(s) and results of the thesis, the introduction, the basis of theory and methodology and a small-scale model of the summary. The summary in Estonian must contain the thesis title in standard Estonian. The summary must appear at the end of the paper / thesis.

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