# Assistant conversation WW3U3N - Canonical URL: - Resource IRI: - Type: assistant conversation - Mode: quick ## Transcript ### 1. User let's read the current thesis draft with mikael tag ### 2. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "document_kind": "thesis", "query": "mikael" } ``` #### Tool call: `list_documents` ```json {} ``` ### 3. Tool result: search_text Approximate matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Score: 0.23 Related paragraph #NWDYEF: Ieva Lange 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #LYTS7L Research Methodology: Participating in Practice #3CQF69 Setting the scene: A day in Brīvbode Score: 0.215 Related paragraph #73EVX3: Viesturs, who volunteers on Fridays, stands near the sorting table, watching the room with practiced attention. He wears a small glittery brooch in the shape of a cat and a hat with long synthetic fur. By the end of the afternoon, he will have exchanged both – such playful accessories circulate frequently here, he explains, and swapping them is a small form of entertainment during his shift. During the day, some friends drop by to greet him. He comments casually on the items people bring and jokes with a regular visitor: “Look, Marija, this box will be useful for your fine jewelry.” 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work #ULSUAX Conclusion Score: 0.202 Related paragraph #2G2WSX: PIEVIENOT 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Score: 0.196 Related paragraph #37H5JF: MA Thesis 5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Score: 0.23 Related paragraph #CE9BXP: Ieva Lange 6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #3X7JKL The circulation of things and things that sustain it #M45HLW Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home Score: 0.227 Related paragraph #QPZXSP: In absence of a specific receiver, 7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #YNEV47 Research methodology: In The Field To Freecycle #L5LL6E Setting the scene: A day in Brīvbode Score: 0.215 Related paragraph #MGWMQ5: Viesturs, who volunteers on Fridays, stands near the sorting table, watching the room with practiced attention. He wears a small glittery brooch in the shape of a cat and a hat with long synthetic fur. By the end of the afternoon, he will have exchanged both – such playful accessories circulate frequently here, he explains, and swapping them is a small form of entertainment during his shift. During the day, some friends drop by to greet him. He comments casually on the items people bring and jokes with a regular visitor: “Look, Marija, this box will be useful for your fine jewelry.” 8. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Score: 0.202 Related paragraph #86KGGB: PIEVIENOT 9. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #3X7JKL The circulation of things and things that sustain it #V753D5 Non-monetary exchange and attachment: competencies of letting go Score: 0.2 Related paragraph #JV33M5: the practice of divestment requires competencies that include emotional regulation and the capacity to detach from objects. Māra is developing these competencies deliberately. 10. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Score: 0.196 Related paragraph #G77WEU: MA Thesis ### 4. Tool result: list_documents - #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] - 2026 | Ieva Lange - #FYG32U Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] - 2026 | Ieva Lange Journal articles (91) - #QUD55H 'Saving' the city: Collective low-budget organising and urban practice - 2015 | Birke Otto, Hans Vollmer, Heike Derwanz, Paula Bialski | ephemera: theory & politics in organization | 20 pp. - #K52UPR A Critical Review of the Role of Repair Cafés in a Sustainable Circular Transition - 2021 | Mette Alberg Mosgaard, Rikke Marie Moalem | Sustainability | 26 pp. | doi:10.3390/su132212351 - #4EFC4F After Practice? Material Semiotic Approaches to Consumption and Economy [cited] - 2020 | David M. Evans | Cultural Sociology | 17 pp. | doi:10.1177/1749975520923521 - #9D34UM After taste: Culture, consumption and theories of practice - 2014 | Alan Warde | Journal of Consumer Culture | 25 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540514547828 - #5Y2AD9 An order of distinction (or, how to tell a collection from a hoard) - 2018 | Katie Kilroy-Marac | Journal of Material Culture | 19 pp. | doi:10.1177/1359183517729428 - #FQRNAE Austerity and everyday life: Perspectives on practices of consumption and thrift - 2019 | Alison Hulme | Journal of Consumer Culture | 7 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540519872079 - #9MNC8T Austerity Ireland, the New Thrift Culture and Sustainable Consumption - 2017 | Fiona Murphy | Journal of Business Anthropology | 17 pp. | doi:10.22439/jba.v6i2.5410 - #59QUM6 Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle [cited] - 2017 | Sally Eden | Journal of Consumer Culture | 21 pp. | doi:10.1177/1469540515586871 - #X8QHRR Calculating the Environmental Impact Reduction Due to Extended Lifespan of Clothing Through Clothing Swaps - 2025 | Agnė Jučienė, Inga Gurauskienė, Jolita Kruopienė | Sustainability | 22 pp. | doi:10.3390/su17104411 - #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 ### 5. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `get_document` ```json { "id": "4V8VH7" } ``` ### 6. Tool result: get_document THESIS #4V8VH7 Title: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia Outline: - 1 #ZF9EYF Introduction - 1.1 #LAR465 Latvian context and research - 1.2 #MUKRGA A note on terms - 1.3 #FVXBEK The structure of the thesis - 2 #L759F3 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 #FTE3UX SUMMARY - 8 #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES - 9 #TY2EB4 KOKKUVÕTE ### 7. Assistant Got the MIKAEL draft outline (#4V8VH7). It has the full thesis structure: Intro → Practice Theory & Consumption Work → Methodology → "Keep It Moving" (circulation chapter) → "Hold It Together" (consumption work as care) → Conclusion + Summary + Sources + Estonian summary. Where do you want to start? I can: - **Read it end-to-end** (expand the whole document — it'll be long but gives me the full picture) - **Start from the top** with Introduction (#ZF9EYF) - **Jump to a specific chapter** — e.g. the two empirical chapters #9XAKTW or #82G2QE, which are usually where the action is - **Compare MIKAEL vs the other [draft]** (#FYG32U) section by section if Mikael's revisions are what you want to focus on Just say the word. ### 8. User let's try reading in full! ### 9. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `read` ```json { "blocks": [ "4V8VH7" ], "expand": true } ``` ### 10. Tool result: read THESIS #4V8VH7 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia PARAGRAPH #L4TFF2 TALLINN UNIVERSITY PARAGRAPH #AAQERW SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES PARAGRAPH #NWDYEF Ieva Lange PARAGRAPH #6X2J6G Freecycling practice in a swapshop in Riga, Latvia PARAGRAPH #37H5JF MA Thesis PARAGRAPH #2YBP54 Supervisors: Maarja Kaaristo, PhD and Joonas Plaan, PhD PARAGRAPH #65NNWE Tallinn 2026 PARAGRAPH #VYZNQX I hereby confirm that I am the sole author of the thesis submitted. All the works and conceptual viewpoints by other authors that I have used, as well as data deriving from sources have been appropriately attributed. PARAGRAPH #YZNJZX Ieva Lange05.05.2026. PARAGRAPH #4GQDNX TABLE OF CONTENTS SECTION #ZF9EYF Introduction PARAGRAPH #J4M2WK We live in a context of overproduction where managing the flow of things in households becomes both a practical and a moral problem. In the case of textiles in particular, large quantities of clothing circulate through markets at increasing speed while average use time continues to decline. Circular economy policies increasingly position reuse and extended product lifetimes as solutions, yet the success of it depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive and socially uneven (Hobson et al. 2021). PARAGRAPH #ADQD9U This thesis is an ethnographic study of freecycling – the circulation of things within a non-monetary context – in Brīvbode, a volunteer-run swapshop1 in Riga. It 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 #XKELL5 Consumption and divestment practices are changing, shaped by new infrastructure and policy developments – Latvia introduced mandatory textile collection in 2023, and new secondhand platforms are expanding the routes available for sequential flows of household goods. 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, at a particular moment in the development of circular consumption practices in Latvia. Freecycling, as viewed in this thesis, is a practice that contains elements that are widely shared and common but are placed and enacted in a new context of non-monetary exchange in a non-domestic site. Thus I argue that Brīvbode offers to practitioners somehow familiar, yet new ways of relating to objects and people (Holmes, 2018). PARAGRAPH #SNLDAM The thesis draws on two main analytical frameworks. The first is practice theory, following Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012) and other authors studying sustainable consumption practices. Freecycling is analysed as a practice-entity constituted by materials, meanings, and competencies. The second theoretical framework is Wheeler and Glucksmann's (2015) concept of consumption work that brings attention to the range of tasks required of consumers before or after the moment of exchange, on which consumption itself depends, especially within contexts of circular economy initiatives. It is extended here to include the volunteer labour of the freeshop and the divestment networks through which household surplus reaches it. 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 #BTDD45 Hobson (2016) calls for research attention to ‘generative spaces’ where alternative configurations of the circular economy emerge — Repair Cafés, community-based reuse initiatives, and similar sites that mainstream CE policy tends to overlook. Hobson et al. (2021) extend the argument by calling for research that moves ‘beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household’ to examine the consumption work performed in such sites. Brīvbode is such a space: a semi-public site where the ordinarily private labour of divestment and acquisition becomes visible and socially acknowledged, and where volunteer labour — sorting, curating, maintaining quality standards, and managing social dynamics — sustains the infrastructure through which things continue to circulate. PARAGRAPH #UBJLE3 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 #PYHGNL The thesis is guided by two research questions: PARAGRAPH #NSNSQ3 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 #3TTCZA What work does freecycling in Brīvbode require from participants, and how is that work currently distributed? PARAGRAPH #577FMZ [tags: placeholder, needs_revision, fragment] The bulk of things circulating in Brīvbode are textiles – mostly clothing, but also home textile. Textiles have been identified as a priority sector in the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2020), and EU Textile Strategy (2022-ongoing) states that textiles should be durable, repairable, reusable, and reuse should be part of the desired system outcome. [..] [Statistics on Baltics as the destination in the circular economies of other countries…] 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, needs_revision, 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. [Different modes – institutional, informal initiatives – that are also based on different types of work?] [Andele Mandele and Vinted – growing second hand sector.] Access to infrastructure not distributed evenly (Akule et al. 2013). 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 #JNSARN [tags: placeholder, needs_revision, fragment] [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 #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%). PARAGRAPH #HZ8D53 [tags: placeholder, needs_revision, fragment] [Brīvbode focusing on domestic flows] PARAGRAPH #N6UNLT [tags: placeholder, needs_revision, fragment] References to other research in Latvia. Sufficiency lifestyles research. Circular textiles in Latvia… Andris Saulītis on barter shop. 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. SECTION #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work PARAGRAPH #QQFE46 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 #Q2WXHP Theories of Practice PARAGRAPH #H7MB3H The central theoretical grounding for this thesis is practice theory – or rather theories of practice – a heterogeneous cluster of approaches in humanities and social sciences in which practice serves as the primary unit of analysis for understanding human life and sociality. Shifting away from individual motivations and attitudes, behaviours and choices (ABC) based models for change, for example, practice theory rather examines how those doings are organized socially. It enables looking at the interconnectedness of the social and material realms with an emphasis on the role of objects, infrastructures and technology in practice enactment and maintenance. Evolved in a lineage from Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1984) in social sciences, in the past decades theories of practice have been influential and applied across various domains in social sciences and humanities, constituting what has been called a practice turn (reference). PARAGRAPH #A2ACVP While varied definitions of social practice exist, Warde suggests a minimal definition: “An organized, and recognizable, socially shared bundle of activities that involves the integration of a complex array of components: material, embodied, ideational and affective. Practices are sets of ‘doings and sayings’; they involve both practical activity and its representations" (Warde, 2005: 134). PARAGRAPH #B4MLVB Different frameworks have been articulated to account for the elements constituting practices. PARAGRAPH #ZA3SED Practice-as-performance - “doings and sayings”, embodied actions. PARAGRAPH #G5LFQA Practice-as-entity - materials, meanings, and competencies. PARAGRAPH #ZALK38 Practice-as-bundle (practice-as-system) PARAGRAPH #JCD8P5 Practices as entities can be distinguished from practices as performances: the specific, recurrent enactments through which practices are reproduced or transformed. Transformation and change comes through recombination of the elements of practice (Shove et al. 2012) – a complex process that is constantly evolving and difficult to predict. PARAGRAPH #KSLB7G A particularly influential contribution, especially in anthropological approaches to practice, is the work of Elisabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar and Matt Watson (2012) in which the authors offer a deliberately compact three-component framework for analysing practices: practice as entity. Shove and colleagues define a practice element frame consisting of meanings, materials, and competencies. “Meanings” refer to the ideas, aspirations, shared understandings and related values that give practice its purpose and make it intelligible for practitioners and guide how practices are performed. “Materials” refer to objects involved and used in practice, necessary technologies and infrastructure through which practices are enacted. It also refers to bodies and physicality. “Competencies” are the skills (across cognitive and physical realms) and practical knowledge necessary for participation in a practice, including understanding how to use objects, follow rules, and navigate social norms. PARAGRAPH #8MU8D5 The authors acknowledge that the model sacrifices some nuance to analytical clarity, yet argue that it is analytically productive, especially for studying how practices change and develop when their elements are reconfigured. It allows looking at practices as entities with their own histories and trajectories – recruiting or losing practitioners, appearing and disappearing. PARAGRAPH #RG72B3 This threefold structure of elements of practice has been used widely across disciplines as it offers a clear conceptual approach for empirical research. PARAGRAPH #QPWYY6 [tags: needs_revision] 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 #WULWDF Retheorizing Practices PARAGRAPH #N4RD83 Practice theory, as developed by Elisabeth Shove, has been applied a lot to analyze stable, dominant, and largely unreflected practices that are taken for granted in everyday domestic routines (Shove 2003), particularly the inconspicuous consumption of energy and resources in affluent Western societies that drives resource use beyond planetary boundaries. Shove has even argued that “investigations into the beliefs and actions of self-confessed environmentalists represent something of a distraction. What counts is the big, and in some cases, global swing of ordinary, routinized and taken-for-granted practice…” (Shove, 2003: 9). PARAGRAPH #3RASYG Yet as Welch and Warde (2015) note, this strategic move away from environmentalists’ motivations has come at a cost, leading to a neglect of the cultural dimensions of sustainable consumption (Spaargaren 2013). Other authors have argued for a greater attention to non-hegemonic practices that serve as alternatives to mass consumption (e.g. Speck and Hasselkuss 2015). Practice theories are useful here too, as a tool for understanding how more sustainable alternatives might become normalised or integrated into existing consumption routines. PARAGRAPH #QTER48 Brīvbode sits at an interesting angle in this debate, because what happens there is better described as a site where several ordinary practices overlap than as a single, fully stabilised routine practice in Shove's sense. The practices that converge in the shop – household divestment, secondhand acquisition, repair, sequential use of goods, sorting, sociality – are not unusual in Riga or Latvia. What is less common is their organisation in close proximity within a permanent, non-monetary exchange site, and the way the site holds them in working relation rather than collapsing them into one shared routine. Such configurations are also becoming more prevalent, as similar spaces and infrastructures appear elsewhere in Latvia. PARAGRAPH #6SSXMN Recent work in second-generation practice theory has begun to reintroduce questions of ethics, culture, and reflexivity into analyses of consumption (Askholm, 2024; Welch et al., 2020). Earlier approaches tended to focus on routine and inconspicuous practices, often sidelining the role of evaluative judgement and cultural meaning. This study engages with this emerging direction by examining how practices of freecycling involve not only routine forms of circulation, but also moments of reflection, valuation, and ethical consideration. SECTION #HQ4PZX Consumption as a Moment of Practices PARAGRAPH #X4S4S5 Practice theories have been widely applied in studies of sustainability and consumption. Whereas previously widespread theories of consumption in the 1980s and 1990s often treated it as a matter of individual choice and identity-making (reference to illustrate these approaches), theories of practice enabled attending to consumption patterns that emerge from the practices in which people are engaged, rather than mainly from their preferences or intentions. This decentring of the individual marked a significant departure from both the rational-choice models of consumer behaviour research and the identity-focused approaches of consumer culture theory (reference). PARAGRAPH #C6LN2K Warde’s (2005) paper “Consumption and theories of practice” is widely regarded as the first programmatic application of practice theory to consumption studies (Welch & Warde 2015). Its central contribution was to reconceptualise consumption as "not itself a practice but rather a moment in almost every practice" (Warde 2005: 137). Warde conceptualizes consumption not as a separate domain of social life organised around the acquisition of goods, but as an integral component of social practices through which people organize their daily lives. People consume in the course of doing other things: e.g. maintaining a household, raising children, managing seasonal change, responding to gifts received, keeping warm, eating, moving around. As Warde (2005: 146) puts it, from this perspective “the concept of ‘the consumer’ ... evaporates. Instead the key focal points become the organization of the practice and the moments of consumption enjoined.” PARAGRAPH #437SCH There is also a particular affinity between consumption and sustainability studies. Welch and Warde (2015) identify three reasons for it. Firstly, much of the environmental impact of consumption stems from routine practices – such as showering or doing laundry – that involve significant, yet often unnoticed, use of energy and resources (Shove, 2003). For such inconspicuous, resource intensive practices analysis of consumption as symbolic display and presentation of self that was more prevalent in consumption studies before is less relevant than attention to the material and social arrangements that sustain them. Secondly, because goods and services are primarily used for the accomplishment of social practices rather than for consumption per se. Thirdly, practice theory can provide a way out of discussions of the “value–action” gap – the persistent discrepancy between reportedly pro-environmental values which by contrast are not reflected in a person’s behaviour – by redirecting focus on the ways resource intensive practices capture and retain their practitioners. PARAGRAPH #N7QTYJ This thesis aligns with practice theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption that attend to the full cycle of goods through domestic life – considering not only the goods and materials people acquire, but also divestment and disposal (Ehgartner and Holmes, 2022). For example, Evans (2020) responds to this by proposing an expanded definition of consumption as a process involving multiple moments beyond acquisition. Following Warde (2005), he identifies appropriation – the use, personalisation, and incorporation of goods into everyday life – and appreciation – the personal and symbolic frameworks through which goods are evaluated and enjoyed. To these he adds three further moments: devaluation, the loss of economic or symbolic value; divestment, the loss of personal meaning and the unravelling of attachments; and disposal, the physical act of getting rid of things (Evans 2020: 345). Taken together, these six moments constitute consumption as a full cycle rather than a single event. Evans notes that a case could be made for simplifying this further, though – replacing the three acquisition related moments with a single concept of attachment, and the three divestment related moments with detachment ¬ a formulation that captures the emotional and relational dimensions of both acquiring and letting go (Evans, 2020: 347). PARAGRAPH #VLCJ6H This expanded definition of consumption to include detachment (divestment, disposal) is at the basis of this thesis. Brīvbode can thus be understood as a consumption site in both directions: people come to divest goods that have reached the end of their household life, and they come to acquire goods that may be entering a new phase of their biography. The swapshop is a node in the ordinary circulation of goods through domestic life, distinguished by its non-monetary character and physical permanence. SECTION #23NMLX Consumption Work PARAGRAPH #WCS3TZ If practice theory explains how the circulation of goods is socially organised, consumption work names what that circulation costs. Practice theory’s focus on competencies – the skills and know-how through which practices are enacted – tends to emphasize how things are done rather than the effort and resources required to do them. Labor-centric views (e.g. through the concepts of consumption work or care work) instead highlight the laborious aspects of these practices, including the work of acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods and can address this gap directly. This is important in order to examine how circular consumption creates responsibilities and in what ways new forms of consumption work are distributed through populations. PARAGRAPH #ZBGB9J Wheeler and Glucksmann (2015) contend that secondhand markets involve consumption work – sorting, cleaning, repairing. “Consumption work”, for them, refers to the range of tasks required of consumers, before or after they consume, on which consumption itself is predicated – the work that must be done before or after the moment of exchange for consumption to be possible at all. Their framework encompasses technical dimensions – the allocation of tasks and skills to different people; modal dimensions – interdependencies of work across different social and economic arrangements; and processual dimensions – the connections of labour across the full span of a consumption process (Wheeler & Gluckmann, 2015: 35-36). In circular economy contexts, Hobson et al. (2021) argue, this work intensifies: responsible divestment requires more effort than simply throwing things away, and the additional demands fall disproportionately on those who are already doing most of the household management work. PARAGRAPH #Q26XE6 In a recent study of household reuse practices, Beswick-Parsons, Evans and Jackson (2025) identify specific forms of consumption work involved in everyday circular consumption – decanting, stock management, recirculating – and argue that reuse practices are more prevalent and more varied than existing policy commentary assumes. Their analysis provides empirical precedent for examining consumption work and for attending to the range of tasks that participation in reuse practices requires. They conclude that future transitions to reuse might depend less on establishing new practices, driven by narratives of green consumerism, but rather greater attention should be paid to wider changes, including the transformation of supply chains to align with and facilitate the range of ‘reuse work’ currently observed within everyday domestic spaces. PARAGRAPH #92SD6X [“Recent research at the intersection of practice theory and circular consumption has begun to foreground the labour involved in sustaining material circulation. Drawing on a practice-theoretical approach, Réka Tölg shows that circular consumption – particularly in the context of clothing – relies on the ongoing enactment of care in everyday practices. This involves not only acquiring and using garments, but also maintaining, repairing, and eventually parting with them in ways that enable their continued circulation. Such practices require the development of skills, awareness, and a sense of responsibility, and are often shaped by socio-material arrangements in both household and retail contexts. At the same time, Tölg highlights that these practices are not straightforward to accomplish, but are characterised by tensions, dilemmas, and constraints within systems still largely organised around linear consumption. In this sense, circular consumption can be understood not as a simple behavioural shift, but as an ongoing accomplishment that entails effort, coordination, and engagement – what has been conceptualised elsewhere as “consumption work” (Hobson et al., 2021).”] PARAGRAPH #2RA8WL The thesis also attends to the gendered distribution of this work. Ethnographic research has demonstrated that consumption is often organised around care for others, and that women often function as moral agents in household consumption, regulating what goes in and out of households (Miller, 1998, Reno, 2016). Shopping and consumption practices can be seen as acts of care, where people choose items with loved ones in mind, reflecting their role in family and social networks. PARAGRAPH #HWS5KX [Second hand source that I should check] (Lindsay et al. 2024) Lindsay et al. (2024) and Organo et al. (2013) find that women consistently spend more time on sustainable household practices than men, and that “sustainability labour” tends to be more absorbed into existing patterns of gendered domestic work rather than redistributed.] PARAGRAPH #AXVP4C Consumption work and practice theory in this thesis are complementary frameworks. Following the argument developed above in section 2.2., consumption work describes what practices demand from their carriers rather than what individuals choose to do. The labour is in the practice; the questions of what kind of labour and who bears it are questions about the social organisation of practice and whose bodies and time it recruits. SECTION #2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices PARAGRAPH #FZHH6H “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” PARAGRAPH #MR6SKV ​​For example, textile disposal emerges from the intersection of multiple practices, such as cleaning, organizing, shopping, and caring, even when disposal appears as the main activity. PARAGRAPH #3JUPW7 Shove conceptualizes material entities as one of the core elements of practice, alongside meanings and competencies (Shove et al., 2012; Shove et al., 2007). Acknowledging the different roles that material entities can play, three categories of materiality are proposed: resources (consumables used up in practices), devices (objects directly mobilized during practices), and infrastructure (supporting systems not directly engaged) (Shove, 2016). PARAGRAPH #WQZYJP [tags: placeholder] Reading Brīvbode through Schatzki’s site ontology and Hobson’s complementary notion of generative spaces (2016) brings these framings into productive alignment. Where Schatzki names the constitutive interplay of practices and material arrangements through which a site exists, Hobson identifies the political stakes of attending to such sites in the context of circular economy debates: mainstream CE discourse has, she argues, foregrounded industrial closed-loop systems and consumer “acceptance” of practices designed by others, while obscuring “spaces where disparate forms of the CE may emerge and/or be fostered” (Hobson 2016). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generative capacity rests precisely on the multiplicity I have been describing: it does not perform a single bounded practice of freecycling but holds in working relation a configuration of divestment, acquisition, repair, sewing, sufficiency, sociality and care. Its participants are, in Hobson’s terms, designer-consumer-user-repairer citizens, and the swapshop is the kind of site that makes such hybrid roles practicable. SECTION #ULSUAX Conclusion PARAGRAPH #7RYKMT This thesis brings together practice-theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption and consumption work for a study of non-domestic site of goods circulation within a context of non-monetary exchange. Brīvbode is a site where the ordinarily private and dispersed practices of domestic material life become visible. The continued existence of the swapshop – sustained through regular volunteer labour, participant labour, and a relatively stable social and material infrastructure – can be read as evidence of the demand that household goods circulation generates: a demand for routes of divestment that, while taking some degree of effort, are socially acknowledged. PARAGRAPH #2G2WSX PIEVIENOT PARAGRAPH #MHZQUS “Pinning down the actual practice and its scale, identifying overlaps with other practices or deciding which actions belong to which practice registers as a tricky task, further complicated by the fact that practices change over time.” (Sedlačko, 2017: 53) PARAGRAPH #CE4SN6 consumption as a middle class sustainability “issue”? PARAGRAPH #A3Q9XS A central conclusion is that textile disposal has become normalized. – “Sustainability transitions in textiles therefore require systemic reconfiguration of what is considered ‘normal’ in household practices.” PARAGRAPH #LZ9SHB “this dissertation conceptualizes disposal as a material, cultural, and social practice central to consumption, rather than a peripheral or undesirable act. PARAGRAPH #D3N7FX Disposal is treated not simply as the act of discarding but as a meaningful practice that enables and intersects with the reproduction of broader everyday activities. PARAGRAPH #ER4VSA In sociology, the study of consumption has evolved through three major phases: an early focus on economistic models prior to the 1980s; the ‘cultural turn’ of the early 1980s, which emphasized meaning-making, identity, and symbolic value; and, more recently, a ‘practice turn’ that reorients attention toward the routines, materialities, and shared norms of everyday life (Warde, 2014, 2015). PARAGRAPH #YK565D in clothing consumption research consumption of clothing is viewed as a habitual and socially embedded activity rather than a constant, deliberate process of choice and identity construction (Chamberlin & Callmer, 2021; Miller & Woodward, 2012; van der Laan & Velthuis, 2016). PARAGRAPH #FT8AED “In their classical taxonomy for describing consumer disposition behavior, Jacoby et al. (1977) illustrated that disposal may involve keeping, donating, selling, recycling, or throwing away, and even within each category, multiple practices exist. Disposal is thus not inherently destructive or wasteful and cannot be reduced to simply ‘throwing something away’, but is an active social practice embedded in ethical, cultural, and material contexts (Hetherington, 2004). This perspective recognizes disposal as an active, meaning-making practice. As Gregson et al. (2007b) argue, divestment is not simply a negative or absent moment in consumer life, but a practice that enables other practices. To sustain certain routines and identities, other objects must be removed. In this sense, disposal is not the final step in a linear production-consumption-waste chain but a recursive moment that helps reorder consumption itself (Gregson et al., 2007a; Hetherington, 2004). Following Douglas (2002), disposal can be seen as part of the ‘ordering work’ of everyday life, where waste becomes threatening not by its material properties but by its symbolic disruptions of social and domestic order (Gregson et al., 2007a; Heidenstrøm & Hebrok, 2021).” PARAGRAPH #5TXWXW “What we discard reflects who we are but also helps constitute who we become. In this way, waste is both expressive and constitutive of identity (Lucy, 2023).” PARAGRAPH #D3J7AD Maldini et al. (2019), for instance, found that garments are often retained long after they stop being worn, while new items are added without replacing old ones, highlighting the entanglement with disposal and accumulation. Furthermore, as with disposal in general, textile disposal is not merely a matter of getting rid of unwanted things, nor is it a straightforward or linear process. PARAGRAPH #M53GUY “This theoretical approach shifts the analytical focus away from individual behavior to practices allowing textile waste to be understood not as the outcome of isolated decisions but as a meaningful and situated activity embedded in everyday domestic routines.” PARAGRAPH #W5NCU9 “Social phenomena are understood as emerging from, and being embedded within, interconnected networks of practices and the materials that sustain them (Schatzki, 2019).” PARAGRAPH #8Z9KL4 “Dressing is viewed as a dynamic, lifelong everyday practice comprised of three interdependent elements: materials (e.g., clothing, wardrobes, washing machines), meanings (e.g., symbolic notions such as cleanliness or fashion), and competencies (e.g., dressing, laundering, repairing skills) (Maguire & Fahy, 2022; Skjold, 2016).” PARAGRAPH #U87FBB “Textile disposal is conceptualized as a social practice embedded within everyday routines and shaped by normative expectations, identity work, and material needs.” SECTION #LYTS7L Research Methodology: Participating in Practice PARAGRAPH #YPRCFU This chapter describes the methodological approach taken in this thesis and its grounding in fieldwork. It begins with the site itself, describing Brīvbode as a physical and social setting, and an account of a day in Brīvbode that sets the scene for the analysis to follow. The chapter then situates ethnography as a method, particularly within practice-theoretical framework, explaining why participant observation in a specific site is well suited to studying how practices work and are reproduced and contested through everyday performance. PARAGRAPH #NUPTUM Fieldwork gives access to practices as they are performed – the sorting, the finds, the exchanges and hesitations; interviews give access to how participants make sense of those performances – the meanings they find in their doing, the competencies they develop; together they allow claims about practices as entities. The chapter describes the fieldwork with participant observation carried out in Brīvbode, the interviews conducted with volunteers and visitors and the analytical process through which the empirical material was interpreted. SECTION #ZXRYYU The site PARAGRAPH #SU483V Brīvbode is located in the Lastādija creative quarter in Riga, Latvia, adjacent to the Central Market and the tower of the Academy of Sciences – the more central part of a neighbourhood formerly known as Moscow forstadt. The premises are situated on the ground floor of a two-storey wooden building facing Purvīša Street. PARAGRAPH #E5GNG5 Lastādija quarter is run by Free Riga, a platform for creative and social initiatives for temporary use of vacant properties and territories in Riga, active since 2013. The quarter consists of several wooden buildings, a yard, and a former workshop building which was first acquired for use by Free Riga in 2015, offering space to various NGOs and events. Over the following years the quarter expanded gradually; the properties were bought by Linstow Baltic, an international real estate company, which reached an agreement with Free Riga for continued temporary use of the area – an arrangement that has now lasted nearly a decade. This model of temporary use is one of the main pre-requisites for running a site like Brīvbode, as it stands outside the formal economy. Both currently active Brīvbode venues in Riga are located in buildings managed by Free Riga, and the swapshops can use the spaces and sustain themselves by covering utility costs only. PARAGRAPH #KLJF7Z Lastādija quarter has developed an uncommercial, DIY spirit that both shapes and is shaped by the character of the initiatives operating within it. Lastādija offers affordable residencies and workshop spaces to organisations, artisans, and individuals with creative and social initiatives. In exchange, residents contribute a number of volunteer hours to the quarter – collective work in the yard, various renovation tasks, event organization etc. The residents, workers, and regular visitors of the quarter also form one segment of Brīvbode's clientele, and the swapshop is open during quarter public events, however, many visitors come from a wider public who would not attend such events and are drawn instead by the practical offer of circulation of goods. PARAGRAPH #3JYBMV While formally linked to Free Riga, Brīvbode has for more than seven years operated as an autonomous informal structure. Brīvbode in Lastādija is open twice per week, every Thursday and Friday from noon to seven in the evening. Additionally, it operates on the first Sunday of the month to attract visitors who might not be able to attend on working days. On those Sundays Brīvbode also hosts Repair Cafe, an initiative where people bring broken household items – electronics, small appliances or clothing – and repair them with the help of volunteers. In recent years, Brīvbode has extended its activities beyond the primary location by participating with stands at various public events, including the Song and Dance Festival fair, Riga City Festival, Positivus, conversation festival Lampa, among others – promoting the practice of sustainable and circular consumption among wider public. PARAGRAPH #WRPU8M For most of the years of its operation, Brīvbode has been managed by Rasa, a woman in her thirties with a background in the cultural sector and a wide network of contacts in Riga's creative communities – she is the driving force of Brīvbode. A stable team of volunteers cover the shifts: every opening day has a day manager in charge of the shift and helpers who assist on a more flexible basis. Rasa manages Thursdays, and Viesturs – a resident of the quarter – covers Fridays, fulfilling his volunteer hour obligation in this way. PARAGRAPH #W3NTEM For the first five years, Brīvbode in Lastādija operated mainly in two public rooms of the venue. The entry room still serves as the main point of circulation, with a central sorting table, large racks holding dozens of hangers, and open boxes and shelves containing different categories of stuff: kitchen items and dishes, house appliances, books, accessories and miscellaneous items, but most of all – clothing. Next to the entry room is a dedicated room for children’s items – clothing, shoes, outdoor wear, toys, and books, as well as occasional larger items such as kickbikes, car seats, and strollers. Together, the two rooms form a compact space of around 30 square metres, organised to accommodate both the intake and redistribution of goods. A storage room holds miscellaneous items and functions as a buffer to manage overflow, seasonality, and the selective circulation of items, enabling the ongoing operation of the freeshop. PARAGRAPH #DF8KCF In spring 2024, Brīvbode expanded into two additional rooms, almost doubling its size. The new spaces include a room for books, textiles and women’s clothing, centred around a large round table used for gatherings occasionally, and another room with clothing and footwear for both men and women, along with a fitting room and a newly installed DIY heating system. This allowed for more visitors, more events, and, consequently, a greater volume and diversity of items in circulation. PARAGRAPH #8VT667 The range of goods available at the swapshop is wide, including cosmetics, jewellery, craft supplies and household items such as dishes, cutlery, pots, pans, and lamps, as well as occasional electronics, and magazines, the majority, however, is clothing. Many items move quickly, with turnover often visible in real time as objects are brought in, sorted, and taken by other visitors. PARAGRAPH #C7XA3C The specific concept of Brīvbode – and the meaning attached to freecycling in this format – has been borrowed and brought to Riga from Berlin. Rasa volunteered there at an organisation running a swapshop in Neukölln which she experienced primarily as a meeting point for neighbours: PARAGRAPH #DGSRZK "I noticed the local neighbours, the regulars who were actually the ones who maintained the liveliness and the friendly, familiar (čomisko – lit. buddy-like, I.L.) atmosphere. In a supermarket you won't have that kind of familiar atmosphere – someone comes in once a month or so, you don't know them at all, the relations are cold, but there it was like a library where people also come in simply to talk. Because I saw that it can be like that in Berlin, I hoped it would happen here too." (Interview in March 2024) PARAGRAPH #NWMRXB Brīvbode is not the only initiative of its kind in Riga or in Latvia. Several swapping initiatives operate in other Latvian towns – Alūksne, Liepāja, Preiļi – independently, in different institutional contexts, but some under the same name – contributing to “brīvbode” becoming a new, common term. In Alūksne and Preiļi brīvbode initiatives operate on an event basis rather than as permanent venues, whereas (Pār)maiņu punkts in Liepāja operates in a smaller venue and is run by NGO Radi Vidi Pats. SECTION #3CQF69 Setting the scene: A day in Brīvbode PARAGRAPH #6R53SB The night before going to Brīvbode, I remind my children to set aside things they no longer need. It is never an easy task – they would rather keep them all. Even though I aspire to be cautious about things coming into our household, stuff keeps accumulating and more so – it is actually myself who brings the majority of these things in. While feeling an urge to get rid of things, I simultaneously keep wondering what more should I get in order to inhabit our place well. PARAGRAPH #K25HLD In the morning, before arriving to Brīvbode, I go through the box of items I have set aside since my last visit and spend half hour sorting through the little storage room in my apartment – a space that has, over the years, become a repository for things I would rather not think about. Children’s clothes kept after they no longer fit, always at risk of new moth damage; a backpack brought as a souvenir by my mother that no one has ever used; a pregnancy seatbelt adapter that did not quite fit. Somehow getting rid of things also involves decisions about the future. There is the skirt I got secondhand online – it did not fit but is made of silk. Is it time to give it away or should I hold on to it for an unspecified creative project? For now, it sits together with other things acquired or given with good intentions and quietly set aside. Getting rid of them feels necessary in order to begin again and regain a sense of control over my environment. But are these trousers washed and good enough to pass on to someone? Would anyone need a strong plastic bag? Should I risk taking away some toys while the children are not looking? PARAGRAPH #M76A77 I bring what I can carry on my bike, treating the visit as an opportunity for divestment I don’t want to waste. The first hours after opening at noon are especially busy in Brīvbode. A dozen people queue outside, waiting for the doors to open. Once inside, the sorting table quickly fills with incoming items, and volunteers and visitors constantly move through the space. Many of the visitors, at least at this hour of the day, are women, most of them older. Although soon I notice my mother’s souvenir backpack on a man’s shoulders, already on its way somewhere else. Nearby, a woman methodically works her way along the shelves of household items, selecting a grater, a small glass bowl, and several beer glasses, placing them into another bag that I recently brought. It can feel unusual to see someone unknowingly take something that used to be yours. PARAGRAPH #73EVX3 Viesturs, who volunteers on Fridays, stands near the sorting table, watching the room with practiced attention. He wears a small glittery brooch in the shape of a cat and a hat with long synthetic fur. By the end of the afternoon, he will have exchanged both – such playful accessories circulate frequently here, he explains, and swapping them is a small form of entertainment during his shift. During the day, some friends drop by to greet him. He comments casually on the items people bring and jokes with a regular visitor: “Look, Marija, this box will be useful for your fine jewelry.” PARAGRAPH #Q7AP33 My task is to sort through a box of clothes, checking for holes and stains, separating what can be placed on the racks from what should be set aside for textile containers. The task is not difficult, but it requires attention: a missed stain becomes someone else’s disappointment, or perhaps reflects badly on Brīvbode itself. I set aside a top and a shirt for my son. A couple of women watch me sorting and use the opportunity to see what’s in the box without doing the digging work themselves. Viesturs encourages keeping only the best garments: “People can go to Humana for ugly clothes.” PARAGRAPH #V2UPDX Later in the afternoon, after the initial rush has subsided, a man enters carrying a woman’s jacket. He is a bus driver; due to construction at the main coach station, buses now stop on Purvīša Street. A passenger had left the jacket behind some time ago, and after remaining in lost and found without being claimed, he has brought it here. Looking around, he asks whether he might take a stuffed toy bear for his grandchild in exchange, pointing to one he has found, waiting for confirmation. Before leaving, he surveys the room with an expression that is neither quite sceptical nor entirely approving and asks what the point of a place like this actually is. It is a reasonable question that I will attempt to answer with some nuance. SECTION #U3GSXB Ethnography of Practice PARAGRAPH #9GET95 Ethnographic participation enabled me to note finer details about the initiative. PARAGRAPH #MPKYG2 Rather than offering a fixed methodological recipe, practice theories, as Nicolini (2017: 26) puts it, should be conceived as “a theoretical orientation towards the study of the social, where the methodological element remains central”. Various strands of practice theory share an approach that social life is best understood by focusing on what people do – through embodied routines, material arrangements, and practical knowledge – instead of emphasising attitudes, intentions or individual decisions. PARAGRAPH #ZPTLJ7 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. PARAGRAPH #LCB3EY Michal Sedlačko (2017) writes about the friction between adhering to the ontology consistent with theories of practice while conducting ethnographic research. He offers four main principles: PARAGRAPH #YF9GE2 focus on what people actually do (and what materials they converse with) – attention to actual doing, attention to interactions and sequences (as opposed to single actions or statements), attention to matter in these interactions; PARAGRAPH #A4BLKP focus on everydayness – attention to sites and situatedness of practice, attention to the aspects of social reality taken for granted by the practitioners, problematising the accounts used by the practitioners to make sense of the situation; PARAGRAPH #XXJ4G2 focus on assembling, structuring and ordering – action to the ongoing achievement of assembling (stabilising, structuring and ordering), attention to the multiplicities, resistances, conflicts, breakdowns and ruptures emerging and being overcome through assembling, attention to the historical and situational productivity of such assemblages, PARAGRAPH #JZ9NG5 and focus on reflexivity. PARAGRAPH #AL93KK Following Warde's (2005) argument that consumption is best understood as a moment within practices rather than a practice in itself, the focus in this thesis is on circulation of household goods – the ongoing movement of things through domestic life through acquisition, storage, care, and divestment – with Brīvbode as a site where several of these practice moments converge and become visible and acknowledged within a specific non-monetary mode of exchange. Brīvbode is, in Nicolini's (2017: 28) terms, a nexus: "a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together." SECTION #VMQSHJ Participant observation PARAGRAPH #D75H6P 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. PARAGRAPH #ZYK94K Even though the principles are similar, each Brīvbode location has its specifics, and over the months of fieldwork – usually my weekly shifts in Lastādija – I renewed my competence in managing the flow of materials, evaluating and sorting donations, tidying, moving objects, witnessing and mediating occasional tensions in the shop. I took fieldnotes during and after visits, and occasionally photographed the space and its contents. As handling material objects is a kind of activity that eases conversation (Appelgren and Bohlin, 2015; Holmes, 2018), sorting things alongside someone or commenting together on an object easily opens exchanges, and I used these opportunities for informal chatting with fellow volunteers and visitors. PARAGRAPH #KNK29P Consequently, I also paid more attention to public discussions e.g. among friends, family and on social media when people shared their habits, practices, as well as uncertainties and frustrations regarding divestment and secondhand acquisition, and I have occasionally used them as secondary sources. PARAGRAPH #SF4RE9 The most of the fieldwork was done in the first half of 2024, from February to June. Repeated visits throughout 2025, several interviews in 2025 and additional two interviews were conducted and added to the corpus in the beginning of 2026. PARAGRAPH #YD6JGF Diary PARAGRAPH #9U6CXK Throughout the fieldwork period I kept a field diary for field notes during my visits to Brīvbode, as well as documenting and describing the circulation of goods in my own household – what arrived, what left, by what routes. I noted the spatial and temporal contexts for these practices, as well as the related meanings, uncertainties and frustrations. PARAGRAPH #28NTAL The diary gave me space to express and make visible the mundane consumption, divestment work and care work around household objects – reviewing, evaluating and sorting children’s clothes, the early morning moments of browsing second hand portals as an enactment of care for others, the frustration with clutter and the pull of something on Brīvbode shelves, as well as thoughts about aspiring to be a good circular consumer. I treated these reflections as data, and keeping a diary allowed me to reflect on the circulation patterns in my household and to be cautious about my interpretations of what I observed in the field. PARAGRAPH #94JJL7 Overall, I have been and am sympathetic to the Brīvbode initiative and to the people who sustain it. This sympathy is productive – it gives me access, a certain ease of rapport, and insider understanding, while it also carries some risks. I have tried to address this by carefully attending to friction, tension, and contradiction in my data: the tensions around divestment of things from Brīvbode, the gap between Brīvbode's ideal social function and the quieter, less communal reality of many visits. PARAGRAPH #ADFSXK Before starting fieldwork I asked organisers of Brīvbode what questions they would find useful to have studied in more detail. One suggestion was to map the participant networks that extend beyond the direct visitors – the neighbours, colleagues and family members who are get to be involved in exchange through embedded participants without visiting Brīvbode themselves. This became one of the topics I pursued in interviews and is reflected in the empirical chapters. SECTION #GU86TB Interviews PARAGRAPH #ZZDQRR Interviews are good for… Types of interviews. PARAGRAPH #MMZ9WT Semi-structured interviews allow researchers to follow participant accounts flexibly while maintaining a thematic consistency across the fieldwork data (reference). PARAGRAPH #AMAN67 During my fieldwork, I conducted 15 interviews with Brīvbode visitors and volunteers. Interviews were semi-structured, combining a pre-established question guide with a flexible and open-ended approach. Ten longer interviews between 60 and 90 minutes were conducted, and five shorter conversations between 20 and 45 minutes in length, part conducted on-site without prior arrangement. My first interview was with Rasa – the founder of Brīvbode and a key person in the field with a true talent for connecting with visitors. Being familiar with many of their stories, she introduced me to some of the visitors, while others I approached during my volunteering hours. Participants included both long-term visitors who had witnessed changes in the venue and could reflect on their practice over the years, as well as novices who shared a fresh impression of their introduction to the practice and the site. PARAGRAPH #T6CT7G Most research participants and the majority of practitioners in Brīvbode are women which partly reflects the gendered participation in the practice and consequently the division of consumption work. PARAGRAPH #X3TLEX Men do visit Brīvbode, and there are known regular visitors, however my attempts to recruit for interviews were not always successful. What I observed, though, was that often men and women have different practice careers in Brīvbode and men appear as sellers of used books, electronics, collectors of CD’s, DVD’s and vinyls. So it must be acknowledged as a limitation. PARAGRAPH #RBWPQ8 Attempts to interview regular male visitors – one was not used in the corpus because the interview was not usable due to… –, another because the initially recruited participant pulled out his participation. Two of the interviewees were men – one volunteer, and one a partner of a regular visitor who himself is not a direct swapshop user – he was chosen to draw on the theme of domestic consumption work and the division of this labour within households. PARAGRAPH #NA4Y5J Some of the interviews in summer 2024 were conducted on site, in the yard of the swapshop. On several occasions, when the weather allowed it, I set up a table outdoors and invited visitors to sit for a conversation right after their visits. Following the principle that things are constitutive of practices, I used it as an opportunity to ask about their acquisitions and divestments during the visit, as well as their favourite and memorable objects acquired in Brīvbode as prompts to uncover material-practice relations (e.g. Mesiranta et al. 2025). This also corresponds to how Appadurai (1986) speaks of “methodological fetishism” with regards to returning our attention to the things themselves. PARAGRAPH #PVGJ2B I also interviewed volunteers for longer conversations without interruption outside their working hours – some in Brīvbode, others in cafes. Later two of the interviews were conducted in visitors’ homes, thus offering an opportunity to observe household material arrangements, micro-infrastructures of storage and divestment, and talk about the circulation histories of specific objects in their domestic environment. PARAGRAPH #D2HJZP The interview guide was organized around themes: participants' practices of acquisition and divestment, their relationship to the objects they brought and took, and the social and material dimensions of their participation in Brīvbode. While the guide included some questions on attitudes and motivations, most were designed to elicit accounts of what people actually do – how they choose what to bring, what routes objects take through their households, who does the work of sorting and transporting, and what the process of letting go feels like. Following the principles of practice-theoretical methods, the questions sought to access the practical, embodied, and often taken-for-granted dimensions of household goods circulation: the routines, competencies, and emotional labor involved in managing the flow of things. Where questions touched on values and motivations, these were treated not as explanations for behavior but as part of the meanings participants attach to their practices – an element among materials, competencies, and social arrangements in shaping how circulation is organized and reproduced. PARAGRAPH #8CUGQ2 Including various divestment routes available to them and on what occasions and how Brīvbode was chosen over other options. PARAGRAPH #4V3P2S How things were chosen before attending Brīvbode, the methods for collecting it at home –– (temporal, infrastructure), as well as why particular things were selected over others. PARAGRAPH #CXJKMP Notions of ownership and value and how their perception on how the unregulated non-monetary transaction influences their – also questions probing for moments of friction and confusion – on whether there is hesitation, feelings of doing it right or wrong way. PARAGRAPH #MB4SXE 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. SECTION #BRBBF9 Data analysis PARAGRAPH #L2ASJR All interviews were transcribed and coded thematically on QCAmap, a web based service for qualitative content analysis. Qualitative content analysis is a systematic method for interpreting data through iterative coding, allowing patterns and themes to emerge from the material, while remaining open to revision. PARAGRAPH #KFBA4N Both interview transcripts and fieldnotes were coded. Open coding generated descriptive codes close to the data and themes were allowed to emerge from the data, while the process was also informed throughout by practice-theoretical concepts – particularly the elements of meanings, competencies and materials. Particular attention was paid to moments of friction and tension. QCAmap allowed the coded segments to be organised and reviewed across the dataset. The themes that emerged from this process are reported across the analysis chapters. SECTION #TGAMBJ Research ethics PARAGRAPH #F59QGU Participants in this thesis are identified by pseudonym. Where details could make individuals identifiable to people who know them, I have adjusted or omitted information, though some of the participants – particularly those in organisational roles – are more difficult to fully anonymise. PARAGRAPH #2MLF5Y Before interviews, I informed the participants about my fieldwork and the purpose of the study. I asked for verbal consent prior to recording interviews and it was given in all cases. PARAGRAPH #DY5DNR My role as a volunteer in Brīvbode at times gave me a degree of association with the initiative that shaped how some visitors related to me. Several regular visitors who usually take larger quantities of items were reluctant about the idea of being interviewed; I respected this without pressing and interpreted this reluctance itself as data suggesting an awareness of how sequential acquisition practices might appear when observed and narrated. Those most embedded in the practice were not necessarily the most willing to talk about it. SECTION #9XAKTW Keep It Moving: the Circulation of Practices PARAGRAPH #PL9BXR This chapter examines Brīvbode as a site where multiple practices are brought into working relation through the circulation of things. Following Warde’s (2005: 137) argument that consumption is “not itself a practice but… a moment in almost every practice”, I do not treat taking or giving in Brīvbode as a single practice. Instead, I ask what practices these moments become part of: household divestment, wardrobe management, dressing, craft, repair, volunteering, sorting, social visiting, resale, waste management and sufficiency work. Drawing on Shove, Pantzar and Watson’s account of practices as composed of materials, meanings and competences (2012: 14, 23), I also attend to how these elements travel and recombine. Shove et al. argue that, in order to understand how practices spread and endure, “we need to think about how materials, meanings and forms of competence circulate and persist” (2012: 57). Brīvbode is therefore a site of circulation in two senses: things move through it, but so do the meanings, competences and norms that connect otherwise separate practices. PARAGRAPH #SJE87E Following the trajectory of things moving through Brīvbode, I begin with household practices that generate incoming flow. I then turn to the swapshop as an active material site where practices of giving, sorting, assessing, taking, chatting, refusing, storing and discarding are compressed into proximity. The chapter then examines the competencies and normative meanings through which this circulation is maintained, especially the boundary-work required to distinguish exchange from charity, waste disposal and resale. Finally, I consider how acquisition in Brīvbode is folded into plural practices of dignity, experimentation, craft, sociality, sufficiency and 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. In Shove et al.’s terms, Brīvbode is closer to a bundle of co-located and mutually shaping practices than to a fully integrated practice complex, since the relations between practices are dense enough to matter but not so settled that they form one new practice entity (2012: 95–101). SECTION #2JEZWG Varieties of Divestment PARAGRAPH #5XUPCJ The things entering Brīvbode are not simply donations. They are the material outcomes of other practices: clearing wardrobes, managing small homes, dealing with inherited belongings, correcting failed purchases, and working on one’s attachment to things. This follows Warde’s (2005) point that consumption is located within practices rather than standing outside them, and Gregson’s (2007) argument that ridding and divestment are active parts of living with things. Once objects arrive in Brīvbode, the outcomes of these household practices become resources for other practices: acquisition, craft, repair, resale, or waste management. PARAGRAPH #CLU5VP Noting how meanings migrate across practices, Shove et al. (2012: 75) mention how thrift, for example, is no longer expressed primarily through darning socks at home – now a rather rare practice – but has moved, as Gregson (2007) shows, into methods and styles of disposal and divestment. Divesting responsibly has become one of the ways people sustain and recreate identity in relation to their things. PARAGRAPH #TYTN9E [tags: needs_revision] 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. PARAGRAPH #WEBXCF Divestment in Brīvbode is distributed across time unevenly and concentrated around rhythms of domestic material arrangements and particular life events. People typically bring things in batches – no longer wanted items are set aside and accumulate at home until, e.g. a bag is full and is then divested to Brīvbode. PARAGRAPH #AB93FC Moving home, renovation, seasonal clearing, and sorting through a deceased relative’s belongings generate larger pulses of divestment. Participants described sorting through an entire previous owner’s life when buying a flat, routing things to Brīvbode and to friends when downsizing, helping relatives to divest after moving home. PARAGRAPH #7Y7J2Z The size of the home is a very constitutive material element for divestment as smaller living spaces generate a more immediate need to move things out in order to fulfill, for example, the ideal of an uncluttered home – this requires both strong competency for managing household material streams and established divestment routes for what must leave. Brīvbode functions as one such route. PARAGRAPH #CWZ4L2 The ideal of a decluttered home functions both as cultural script and as embodied relief. Gundega puts on tidying consultant TV shows when she sorts at home, though the volume of advice tends to produce anxiety rather than clarity – no one person can remember it all. Viesturs is more pragmatic about decluttering methods: "I sense there are all sorts of methods and things, but it all seems like a luxury problem to me. Although maybe we should promote something like that – users of those methods would definitely supply us with better quality content." PARAGRAPH #V83RLN The act of bringing things to Brīvbode performs moral work that throwing away does not – it can relieve guilt of having acquired unnecessarily, maintain the identity of a responsible consumer, and transfer some of the responsibility for what happens next to the swapshop. Gregson (2007) and Gregson, Metcalfe and Crewe (2007) argue that divestment is not simply an ending but an active practice of moving things along and reordering domestic life. In Brīvbode, divesting well and finding a route that feels appropriate to the object's remaining value has similar normative dimensions: there are right and wrong ways to let things go, and Brīvbode offers one of the right ways. PARAGRAPH #PQV5PN Participants who divest in Brīvbode mentioned the non-transparency of the textile container system in comparison to the freeshop. Both routes offer removal and a presumed social good, but participants expressed particular satisfaction for witnessing circulation in Brīvbode – moments when they saw someone taking the items they brought. Although giving and taking are decoupled and mediated by the swapshop, participants can sometimes observe the circulation during their visits, a characteristic noted by many with a kind of quiet pleasure. The divestment is completed by seeing or knowing an item was taken, and this visibility closes the divestment cycle affectively. The opportunity for other visitors to access the materials is valued, while the textile collection management system is deemed too distanced to imagine who benefits. PARAGRAPH #7ZXWJU [tags: needs_revision] In the absence of a specific receiver, and while negotiating the appropriate value and quality standards for circulated items, givers construct a figure of a receiver. This imagined future user becomes one of the meanings that travels with objects into Brīvbode and shapes divestment decisions from the giving side. Aiga describes her hope that a homeless person from the neighbourhoods of Ķengarags or Purvciems, someone in genuine need, would use what she brings. This imagery expands what counts as worth passing on: objects that might be marginal by taste standards become appropriate if genuine need is the criterion, and the threshold for what counts as good enough shifts accordingly. PARAGRAPH #YNY54V The threshold of acceptability in Brīvbode is negotiated situationally, and this uncertainty can become a source of tension. Aiga described how she continues wearing clothing that is slightly pilled and normally uses dry food items past their expiry date – her own standards of what remains usable are linked to the meaning of genuine need but she cannot know in advance whether the items she brings to Brīvbode will be acknowledged as suitable. After receiving comments once about the quality of something she brought to Brīvbode, she prefers to not linger and leave her things quickly. The imagined receiver who accepts everything gives way to the real social encounter where standards are negotiated by someone else. PARAGRAPH #MS53CN The supply arriving in Brīvbode is shaped by these contested meanings – participant competencies of evaluating items as appropriate and the rhythms of domestic life. As such it is often unpredictable. PARAGRAPH #796PVP In reality, Brīvbode also functions as a divestment route for items that more regulated reuse channels would not accommodate: unfinished repair projects and textile fragments can sometimes be found, photographs and used magazines, not entirely complete jigsaw puzzles. Sometimes volunteers would remark that they already look for signs of wear and tear in suspicion about reasons an item has been brought to Brīvbode. They are aware that the swapshop can become a route of last resort for objects that are genuinely difficult to route elsewhere. What counts as acceptable and what counts as waste is decided through social judgment rather than formal criteria. I sometimes brought things in my backpack but ended up not taking them out as on second thought they seemed too worn or not suited. PARAGRAPH #HN8W7V Fieldwork observations reveal different versions and scales of what counts as usable and worthy: I recall a collection of single-use sugar packages; a bundle of expired covid tests (I spent time unpacking the alcohol wipes and watched a woman take them); carefully washed plastic containers that were taken to the recycling bin after all (although the sour cream containers are useful in spring for growing plantings). A regular visitor brought coloured wire offcuts generated by her husband’s wireworking practice – she imagined someone who makes art or does craft work with children could be taking them, as they were never on the shelf anymore the next time she visited. Her husband generates surplus, she routes it to Brīvbode through her domestic management, an unknown hypothetical third person absorbs it into their own. The trajectory is sustained by an imagined right-owner who may not exist, and the volunteers did not have the heart to tell her the bags of small plastic pieces were not used that way. PARAGRAPH #5GWZER Yet the unpredictability of supply works both ways. The same giver who took extra effort to send Brīvbode a parcel with stained old plates, raising volunteer questions about the balance of energy invested in handling it, divested a bag full of colourful folk-style knitted mittens another time. Laid out on the table, the mittens attracted many visitors’ attention as objects of shared beauty. This uncertainty of supply is part of what keeps several practices animated around the site: divestment becomes hopeful, acquisition becomes exploratory, and meanings of “serendipity” or the magic of an unexpected “good catch” attach themselves to the flow of things. This is one small example of how meanings travel with and through materials, but are also transformed when they are “unpacked” in a new setting (Shove et al. 2012: 70–71). PARAGRAPH #4G43HR The same logic that makes divestment easy also can make Brīvbode available as a pressure valve. Fast fashion sometimes arrives with tags still attached; one participant brought clothing she had purchased online – after it did not fit she arranged a return, and was told by the company to donate it rather than send it back – the retailer in this case is routing their surplus to volunteers to manage. PARAGRAPH #9CFEH4 Divestment is normalised and sought after. As Brīvbode manager Rasa observed: "Often we're simply a place to dump it all and go buy new things." In this view, Brīvbode appears as evidence of the structural conditions it aspires to address rather than a solution to them. There is tension present in Brīvbode between the swapshop as an alternative caring system and as a low-threshold overflow channel, and this tension does not resolve easily. SECTION #PBFQ5E Sorting the Shelves PARAGRAPH #2PU5ZY On Thursdays and Fridays a queue often forms by Brīvbode before noon – sometimes more than ten people wait to be let in. The first two hours are the busiest. Rasa sometimes takes a breath before unlocking the door: "It begins." PARAGRAPH #X8RDCG After an item is divested to Brīvbode, it does not belong to the donor anymore, it belongs to the swapshop. This transfer of ownership is actively managed: takers are discouraged from taking things from the sorting table before they are processed, as their enthusiasm has caused discomfort to other visitors in the past. PARAGRAPH #SUZYLN However, sorting is done “on the spot” and in the same room, and things move fast. As Larsen (2023) observes, in thrift shops, practices are often characterized by a "reversal" of standard economic logic, where the goal is to move things along as quickly as possible rather than to maximize the profit per individual item. This can also be said about Brīvbode – there’s excitement about things moving quickly. PARAGRAPH #RQ8CCN Physical instead of virtual co-presence shapes the quality of encounters between people and objects. As Tan and Yeoh (2024), writing about freecycling markets in Singapore, observe, “relational-material exchanges play out better as an embodied co-presence with others/things” – objects can be handled, tried on and assessed, and an item of decent quality will eventually find a taker. PARAGRAPH #LHLZ8Y [tags: needs_revision] 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. PARAGRAPH #KMD7AJ [tags: needs_revision] The space in Brīvbode is organised and decorated to resemble a retail environment with a DIY aesthetic — with hangers and shelves, and garments sometimes arranged by colour in the manner of the formerly operating secondhand chain Degas. The aesthetic is not fixed, however, as curatorial disagreements exist over the best presentation and each shift can leave its own curatorial mark. Rasa describes the tension between celebrating volunteer initiative and an aesthetic that, in her view, would communicate more value through similarity to a retail environment: leaving more space between things, signalling that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. “The emptier the shelves, the more people find,” she notes. A different aesthetic, displaying abundance and decorating with plushies, appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements are not merely questions of taste; they are negotiations over which meanings should be foregrounded in the site — abundance or quality, treasure-hunt or curated shop, playfulness or respectability. In practice-theoretical terms, material arrangements do not only support practices from outside; they are among the elements through which meanings and competences are organised (Shove et al. 2012: 14, 23). Material and meaning elements are therefore not settled properties of a single practice but are actively arranged and contested through the performance of different tasks in the shop. PARAGRAPH #CL5CS8 The regularity of operation that the physical on-site format allows also fosters social contact among participants. Opening hours twice per week is both a way to manage the necessary volunteer labour and a social encounter catalyst – temporal tightening means that visitors are more likely to encounter each other. The volunteer in charge of the shift anchors the social experience, and the personal relationships accumulate over repeated visits. "On Thursdays everyone asks where Nadja is. And on Fridays everyone asks where Viesturs is." While Brīvbode is not a primary site for socialisation for most participants, regular visitors, especially those living in single person households, noted the meaningfulness of the social aspect of visiting, the casual contact with known “faces”, Brīvbode being a place to go and the visits giving a structure to the week. PARAGRAPH #WW8YUW Within the material realm, Brīvbode is also embedded in and dependent upon broader infrastructural arrangements in order to manage the overflow it cannot absorb. The swapshop passes leftover textiles – in some estimates up to 30 % of the received flow (Akule et al. 2023) – to textile collection containers. The shop would not be viable if it had to cover the costs of regular unsorted waste collection. Also, off-season clothing such as winter coats that take a lot of space are stored in collaboration with charity organisations that have access to larger storage premises. Brīvbode can sustain – in a pragmatic, improvised manner – because of this material entanglement instead of trying to resolve the full material cycle on its own. PARAGRAPH #2TPNCM The physical experience of overflow is a constant of volunteering, and bags often arrive faster than they can be processed. Often my task during shifts was to sort and put out children’s items. The boxes were already full, with piles forming, when I asked Rasa: 'Don't you feel like the things are just pouring down on you?' 'Yes, that's why I no longer have any tolerance for things. I realise I feel relief that these clothes are dirty, because there simply isn't any more space." PARAGRAPH #3USBHB During another shift, Rasa offered me a handmade black ceramic plate someone had brought that day. I was glad to take it, but before my departure confusion arose about where it had gone. It turned out, more stuff had piled up on top of it on the sorting table as visitors kept coming with their divestment. Rasa laughed: “This is how it is here.” As a material site, Brīvbode is an active flow that requires tending and occasionally swallows its own offerings. PARAGRAPH #PNCAWA [tags: needs_revision] 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 closure of the site did not immediately interrupt the flow because Brīvbode had already become part of people’s divestment routines: a known route, a remembered address, and an imagined place where surplus could still be sent onward. PARAGRAPH #UGWEVE The physical site matters because it makes practices that are often separated — giving, sorting, assessing, taking, chatting, refusing, storing and discarding — happen in proximity. Brīvbode’s generativity comes from this compression, but so do many of its frictions. SECTION #QP7HMF Reading the Room PARAGRAPH #TDQ4JL The material composition of Brīvbode reflects the gendered organisation of (clothing) consumption more broadly. The majority of items circulating through the freeshop are women’s and children’s clothing – a pattern that mirrors the more feminised character of household consumption management. As noted in the methodology chapter, men do participate in Brīvbode, but on a lesser scale and with different practice career tendencies – while men’s clothing is sought after, they also look for books to circulate in second hand markets, CD’s, electronics. PARAGRAPH #SY53PH If Brīvbode is a site where practices intersect, participation requires more than knowing the rule “bring and take.” It requires practical judgement about what kind of object this is, whose future practice it could enter, whether it should be displayed, repaired, removed, tolerated, or quietly redirected. Practice theory treats such know-how not as an individual attitude but as competence: practical knowledgeability acquired through participation and tied to specific material arrangements (Shove et al. 2012: 23; Nicolini 2017). These competencies are unevenly distributed and become visible especially where practices collide. PARAGRAPH #BCDC5C The gendered asymmetry extends to the competencies required to manage the space. Viesturs described his initial challenge of developing a workable system for sorting women’s clothing after he started volunteering: "Well, f*ck, look, where do I put it. Trying to systematize women’s clothing, it’s like a tree with many branches." The competence of sorting – especially women’s clothing as in this case – is not self-evident as the proliferation of categories resists simple organisation and has to be worked out through practice. PARAGRAPH #2U6CTU The standards applied to men’s clothing also operate differently. There is simply less of it, and the threshold for what is acceptable is lower – men’s clothing is assumed to be used for physical work and is assessed accordingly. One day two young women looking through the clothing boxes for film costumes picked up an undershirt and commented on how disgusting it was, while a man right next to them took it. Rasa later confirmed the shirt was not in a good condition, but she had put it out because, as she noted, everything gets taken from the men’s section. The norms of assessment reflect whose consumption practices the swapshop is organised around. PARAGRAPH #F9CK8T While there are explicit written rules governing exchange in Brīvbode, those are framed in general relational terms – “bring things that would bring joy to someone; bring things you would give to a friend” – and there are no formal categories of exclusion. Norms regarding acceptability are defined and enacted situationally and relationally, which can be both a strength and a source of friction about where the boundaries lie. PARAGRAPH #BZ6FJC Being in Brīvbode is characterized by constant sorting decisions, trying to maintain an acceptable level of presentation and quality of items. The work of maintaining quality and the work of maintaining relationships sometimes pull in different directions, and the balance between lenience and care is negotiated in every shift. At times I heard people felt uneasy about Viesturs openly commenting on things they had brought. PARAGRAPH #Y7K4KZ This is observable even in the circulation of food items, which, although not central, are also present in Brīvbode. As opposed to many community-based exchange initiatives where the circulation of food is governed strictly, e.g. accepting only unopened items and carefully monitoring expiration dates, in Brīvbode the circulation is shaped less by formal regulation and more by trust and familiarity among participants. Open packages may be accepted when brought by known visitors, suggesting that assessments of safety and acceptability are negotiated socially. PARAGRAPH #7CR75E A stronger boundary emerges in relation to certain categories of items, such as medicine. In one instance, a regular visitor brought various medications, explaining their uses to the day manager. While the items were initially placed on the table for taking, a while later another worker quietly removed them, remarking to me, “I don’t think I support this.” The removal was not communicated directly to the donor, suggesting a reluctance to enforce the norm explicitly. Instead of a formal refusal, workers might suggest that perhaps the giver has not noticed the defects, but items could be washed and brought back or simply delay decisions until the giver is no longer present. PARAGRAPH #CUBS5Q "Man kaut kā mazāka vēlme ņemt visu, ko es redzu, par spīti tam, ka tas it kā ir tas 'brīv'... es kaut kā vairāk cienu to visu, kas tur ir izlikts." [I somehow feel less desire to take everything I see, despite the fact that it's all "free" – I somehow have more respect for everything that's laid out there.] Madara explicitly contrasts her response to freeness with others' – she imagines the hoarder who grabs because it's free, and positions herself as someone for whom freeness activates restraint rather than acquisition. This is the moral economy of freeshopping from the perspective of someone still in the early stages of learning the practice's norms. "Kādam varbūt tas 'brīv' rada vēlmi, ka viss ir bez maksas, tagad ņemam, ņemam, ņemam. Man tas nospēlē kaut kā tieši otrādāk." [For some, maybe "free" creates the urge that everything is free, so now we take, take, take. For me it works the opposite way.] "Es to uztveru kā apmaiņu. To vārdu 'brīvu' kaut kā izslēdzu... Sākumā tas tā bišķiņ mulsināja, ka esmu kā apzagusies." [I see it as exchange. I somehow switch off the word "free"… At first it was a bit confusing, as if I had stolen something.] This is competency acquisition: Madara is learning how to understand and inhabit the value regime of Brīvbode, and she narrates the process explicitly. PARAGRAPH #76T3WR The competencies that sustain circulation in Brīvbode are largely social and evaluative rather than technical, and none of them require formal training — but each is acquired through repeated participation and is unevenly distributed across practitioners. In Shove et al.’s terms, competence includes “skill, know-how and technique” and is one of the elements that must be linked with materials and meanings for practices to be performed (2012: 14, 23). Material literacy — recognising wool from synthetic fibres, identifying well-made construction, spotting a hidden stain — is foundational, and volunteers develop it most acutely through handling what arrives. Rasa, in the recollection of one student researcher who spent time in the shop, has “the most trained eye for the quality of things” [visuztrenētākā acs uz mantu kvalitāti]; her own acquisition criteria turn on fibre type and durability, preferring what is “more nature-friendly, ecological, and long-lasting.” Visitors develop a more limited version of the same competency. Laura describes herself as a careful second-hand user who checks everything thoroughly, though she admits she has still occasionally taken home items that turned out to be broken on closer inspection. PARAGRAPH #EXTCGS On the acquisition side, competence also means knowing when to come and how to navigate the space. Agate has mapped the visitor typology and times her arrivals strategically; Marta describes starting in the first room and returning when something new has arrived. Equally important is the negative competency of not taking — knowing what one needs and what one already has. Zane keeps a list on her phone of items she is actively looking for, and her stylist consultations work as an investment in self-knowledge that guards against impulsive acquisition. Agate explicitly asks herself while browsing whether a given item could be combined with what she already owns. This is cognitive work — holding a mental model of one's wardrobe and household — and without it, acquisition becomes impulsive and the divestment work follows. The competencies of acquisition and divestment are therefore inseparable: each unconsidered acquisition becomes future divestment labour. PARAGRAPH #73DSQT On the divesting side, 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. SECTION #PZH45P "We are not a charity!" PARAGRAPH #QU37KZ Practices have normative meanings: understandings about what correct participation looks like, what a practice is for, and who belongs in it. Meanings, in Shove et al.’s sense, include the symbolic significance, ideas and aspirations that make participation intelligible (2012: 14, 23). In Brīvbode, however, normative work is not simply about defining one bounded practice of freecycling. Organisers work to hold the site within a meaning of exchange rather than charity, even as it remains useful to people who need free access, absorbs overflow from households, and sometimes becomes entangled with resale. 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: participants are expected to bring something, contribute in kind, or offer help at the shop, so that taking remains part of a shared exchange arrangement rather than the use of a service. This positioning work is felt as particularly necessary because Brīvbode is located near the Gaiziņš night shelter, where the boundary between exchange, need, and charity can become socially charged. PARAGRAPH #MS2WGV Brīvbode has to continuously distinguish itself from charity while also remaining useful to people who may need free access; distinguish itself from resale while sometimes tolerating resellers; distinguish non-monetary exchange from waste removal while depending on heavy takers to clear overflow. PARAGRAPH #KBESND As Rasa puts it: “Exchange is a very honest way of operating, it requires responsibility from both sides. When both wealthy and poor, old and young can participate, and everyone knows it's on the basis of exchange, that you are equal, nobody gets a discount, nobody is more special. To many people we simply say: “We are not a charity. It's not the case that you come and now demand that you need clean trousers. We are not a charity point, this is an exchange point. Do you actually have something with you for exchange, before you start setting the rules here?” Nadja is very good at negotiating this. “Go to the Red Cross, go to other places that are specifically a charitable institution! We are not a help institution.”” PARAGRAPH #T8P86W Widlok’s (2017) analysis of give boxes – small scale unattended exchange infrastructure in a German town – offers a frame for what the non-monetary arrangement achieves socially. Give boxes, he argues, separate the acts of giving and receiving – donors and recipients do not need to interact directly, and the intermediary space absorbs the social awkwardness of charity. Items move quickly, suggesting ongoing demand, while participants tend to frame their involvement in terms of giving even when they primarily take. PARAGRAPH #UFJ4GC Brīvbode operates on a similar logic: the physical space mediates between participants, making it possible to take without performing need. At the same time, Widlok notes that give boxes are not straightforwardly sharing practices – they tend to be understood within a moral register of charity or almsgiving rather than open-ended reciprocity, and tensions arise when participants extract items for resale rather than use. PARAGRAPH #7FPBUS The imperative to keep things flowing to avoid overflow creates a certain tolerance in case of suspicion for such practices that formally fall outside Brīvbode’s rules. Reselling is not allowed, yet resellers are a suspected presence in Brīvbode. Volunteers mentioned situations when other visitors in Brīvbode have told them they have recognized their divested items at the Āgenskalns flea market the following weekend, which Rasa acknowledges as straightforwardly unpleasant. Yet because it is not always possible to prove, there is also a working accommodation, and Rasa’s position is one of pragmatic acceptance: “At the same time it seems – if he'll find the next user for the thing anyway, the function is fulfilled. Better they make a little money and the thing finds its person, than some hoarder takes it and the things end up in a container." She laughs: "Well, what choice do I have but to believe… We support small businesses." PARAGRAPH #QKY57B This reveals a hierarchy of meanings operating within Brīvbode’s moral economy. The object’s arrival to a sequential user is weighed as more important than the forbidden monetary transaction that may or may not occur along the way. The ethos of non-monetary exchange can be subordinated to the deeper logic of circulation. Besides, if visitors come with something in return, further trajectory is difficult to control. PARAGRAPH #ERMRTL Viesturs frames this ecologically: "Well, I could see them now as forest sanitarians." Without moral approval, the resellers, the hoarders and heavy-takers are reframed as functional elements as they clear out the accumulation of materials that would otherwise clog the space. Viesturs response to this is tactical curatorial competency: if a person he suspects is present at the shop, he often doesn’t put new items out on the shelves until they leave. This is his practical judgement and competency to “read the room” enacted situationally. SECTION #7Z8WUY Values of Letting Go PARAGRAPH #GL6QPX The intensity of circulation of items in Brīvbode and its non-monetary context raise a question about the relationship between price and attachment. Evans’s (2020) framework suggests that attachment is produced through the acquisition-side moments of consumption – appropriation and appreciation, processes that are normally anchored by monetary investment. Assima et al. (2023) describe "financial myopia" – the difficulty of detaching from items one has spent significant money on, even when they are no longer used. This results in "neglected possessions" accumulating in wardrobes as disposal is deferred to avoid the feeling of wasting a significant investment. PARAGRAPH #Q9UXGA The anchor of monetary investment is absent from acquisition in Brīvbode, and some participants articulate the shift in their own relationship to objects directly. Rasa describes how price normally operates as a binding force which Brīvbode alleviates: “You no longer have that heaviness around a thing – I bought it for €40, how can I now throw it out or give it away, not wear it. Now it's simply: if it doesn't suit, bring it back. Try it – it works, or it doesn't. It's much more free." She is pragmatic about this beyond Brīvbode too: “No matter where the garment comes from, there is that percentage of things I take or buy or acquire for myself that I always know won't get worn regardless of whether I've paid money for them or not. So the safest thing to do is to invest as little as possible, so that afterwards there are fewer regrets." This is a recalibration of what kinds of commitment acquisition is. PARAGRAPH #PYZ6UH Fieldwork observations capture this in the dynamic of circulation. A woman arrives and leaves in different shoes than she came in: “I left mine here instead. Today with these trousers, the high heel doesn't suit. Hopefully no fungus..." Another laughs as she leaves her jacket in Brīvbode on a sunny day because she feels too hot: “I left home with clothes on but will be coming back in socks only. I don't need anything.” A third also swaps her jacket on the spot for one she prefers. The meaning of novelty comes across in these cases. PARAGRAPH #34Z7TB Another aspect to the quality of attachment is the possibility of a return after trial and seeing whether attachment will form. It can be difficult to assess in the moment of acquisition whether an item will settle in person’s life. Bringing something back if it does not further loosens the relationship between taking and keeping, allowing a lower stakes and a more experimental participation. This trial opportunity was appreciated by participants whose physical attributes and body shapes are not always catered to in retail: "Because for a small person it's quite hard to find trousers... But here there's the opportunity to try them for some time and see." PARAGRAPH #VXG4LU However, if acquisition carries less commitment, the same conditions that make divestment easier may make acquisition more frequent and less deliberate. My own divestment to Brīvbode often consists of things bought secondhand online as a preferred route of acquisition, but choosing not to invest effort in reselling when they don’t work out. The non-monetary regime does not automatically produce more careful consumption; its relationship to sufficiency depends on the meanings participants bring to it. PARAGRAPH #5NWUSK Elīna describes feeling a sense of responsibility toward everything she acquires – whether bought secondhand, taken from a swap event, or found in Brīvbode. Once something has come to her, she feels obligated to find it a good next home rather than simply discard it: "If this has come to me, then this material... energy and work and transport went into producing it, and I can't just throw it away. I feel I have a duty to figure out how to pass it on to hands where it will be useful." She adds, however, that this sense of responsibility sometimes feels like too heavy a burden to carry. PARAGRAPH #7397K7 Managing the impulse to take because it is free. Marta describes this explicitly – learning to replace "free" with "exchange" in her mental vocabulary, developing the decision rule that if she is not sure she does not need it. This is deliberate self-regulation work, and it is not trivial. The non-monetary arrangement removes one natural brake on acquisition – financial cost – and participants who want to avoid accumulating must supply that brake themselves through conscious effort. PARAGRAPH #9XUDV9 [tags: placeholder] "Man bija ļoti daudz dažādu veidu... pēdējos pāris gadus es kaut kā esmu no tā atkāvusies, ka es tā vairs nedaru. Es tiešām ļoti izvērtēju, vai man tā lieta tiešām ir nepieciešama." [I used to have so many different kinds of things… in the last couple of years I've somehow weaned myself off it; I no longer do that. I really do evaluate whether the thing is genuinely necessary for me.] Madara describes a conscious shift away from impulse acquiring in secondhand contexts – she recognizes her own past behavior as a problem and has worked to change it. This is deliberate practice modification. Madara: "Es tiešām cenšos nebūt tā tante ar trīs maisiem, kas staigā katru dienu tur no vienas točkas uz otru. To es cenšos nepieļaut un cenšos arī sadraudzēties maksimāli ar tām lietām, kas man ir." [I really try not to be that auntie with three bags who walks every day from one spot to another. I try to avoid that, and try to make peace as much as I can with the things I already have.] Making peace with what you have – sufficiency as an active practice of relationship with objects rather than deprivation. This is a positive formulation of sufficiency that does not rely on environmental discourse. PARAGRAPH #QCXR6D [tags: placeholder] Elīna R. "S1: Bet kā tu nonāci pie tās sajūtas, pie tās atziņas – man jau pietiek? S2: Man vienkārši skapī vairs nav vietas. (smejas) Nu, arī, teiksim, tagad ir ziema, un ir džemperu laiks, un es saprotu, ka es tāpat neuzvelku visus savus džemperus. Nu, tātad man viņu ir acīmredzami par daudz. Un man arī patīk novalkāt lietas. Tur ir kaut kāds tāds, nu, man vismaz, īpašs tā kā kaifs, ka es ar šo lietu esmu tik daudz lietas darījusi kopā, ka viņa ir tik novalkāta, ka viņu, iespējams, pat vairs nevar salabot." [Interviewer: But how did you arrive at that feeling, that realisation – I already have enough? Elīna: There's simply no more space in my wardrobe. (laughs) Well – say it's winter now, sweater season, and I realise I don't wear all my sweaters anyway. So I obviously have too many of them. And I also like wearing things out. There's a kind of – well, for me at least, a special pleasure when I've gone through so much with a thing that it's worn down to the point where maybe it can't even be repaired anymore.] PARAGRAPH #Z2Y4K8 [tags: placeholder] "Es esmu krājēja. Jā, es esmu krājēja." [I'm a hoarder. Yes, I'm a hoarder.] Aiga recognised hoarding tendencies in herself. She links it to scarcity experience – not having had much as a student, learning to keep things because things were hard to come by. The accumulation habit is understood as a survival response to past material insecurity, but she is actively working to change. The turning point was a month-long solo trip through Europe after her employment ended: "Es aizbraucu, un tad ar to arī sākās, ka tagad, nu, tagad tas ir izdarīts, tagad ir jādomā kaut kas par lietām, kas ir par daudz." [I went away [on the trip], and that's when it started – that now, well, it's been done, and now I have to think something about the things that are too many.] Travel – where you carry only what fits in a bag – reframed her relationship to possessions and worked as a biographical rupture that catalyzed practice change. PARAGRAPH #AB5XLD [tags: placeholder] "Es labāk šobrīd lēnā garā atbrīvojos... man nav vienkārši žēl paņemt somu un aizbraukt." [I'd rather let go of things slowly now… I just don't want it to be hard to pick up a bag and leave.] The war anxiety dimension: she is releasing things partly because she wants to be able to leave quickly if necessary. The geopolitical context of Latvia – proximity to Russia, uncertainty since 2022 – appears explicitly in her divestment motivation. PARAGRAPH #LG8X4N [tags: placeholder] "Pieķeršanās jautājums tiek risināts. Viņš ir procesā." [The question of attachment is being worked on. It's in process.] "Brīvbode palīdz, tā teikt, šim procesam attīstīties." [Brīvbode helps, so to speak, this process to develop.] "Šobrīd jau ir uz robežas, tāpēc es saku, ka ir jāatvadās jau no tā, kas jau ir atrasts." [I'm already at the edge now, that's why I say one has to start saying goodbye even to what one has already found.] Māra is explicitly working on her attachment to things – she names it as a problem and frames it as ongoing work. Brīvbode as a tool for developing the capacity to let go. This is the freeshop as infrastructure for a personal practice of detachment. It is a positive framing of the same phenomenon that Rasa describes as generating excess – from Māra's perspective, having a route makes it easier to release. PARAGRAPH #8VF9D7 The generativity of Brīvbode is not limited to material circulation. By lowering the stakes of acquisition and providing a trusted route for return, the site also reshapes participants’ competencies of attachment, detachment and restraint. SECTION #W2WRDC Taking Things, Seriously PARAGRAPH #5L3QYB Taking things in Brīvbode is sustained by a variety of meanings that do not need to be shared or mutually coherent across practitioners. This matters because meanings are not merely explanations given after the fact but one of the elements through which practices recruit and retain carriers (Shove et al. 2012: 14, 23). The heterogeneity of meanings allows Brīvbode to connect with a wide and socially diverse public. The following section examines the main meaning clusters and how they operate in the swapshop’s nexus of practices. PARAGRAPH #54GE84 For Marija, the primary meaning is access and dignity as Brīvbode enables a form of self-presentation beyond her regular means: "I dressed like an absolute princess. You can’t even find things like that in a shop." She takes pleasure in the secret source as other people in her networks cannot tell the difference between her clothing originating from Brīvbode or retail. This also has a competence dimension: knowing where to look, when to come, having access to a source others do not use. PARAGRAPH #NMQ6KB Anna frames her participation with a desire for aesthetic autonomy: “I've always really disliked it when I'm wearing something and someone else is wearing exactly the same." Instead of sustainability or thrift, this meaning is based on distinctiveness. Anna also has a sewing competency that works as an extension of the same desire – making her own clothing is the ultimate guarantee of uniqueness: the competency of sewing is sustained by the meaning. Additionally Brīvbode also enables Anna's daily performance of festivity: wearing a glitter dress as everyday wear is possible because Brīvbode provides a low-stakes supply resource. PARAGRAPH #N2JHPC Elīna describes a similar dynamic at a lower threshold of commitment: “You can try out different styles for free. I took a bomber jacket I would never have bought myself." The jacket became one of her most-worn items. Brīvbode enabled a style experiment that she would not have risked financially. Similarly, a practitioner who was exploring cross-dressing also described: "What gives me joy is that I can create different characters from those clothes. For example, yesterday I went to my first cross-dresser date with this beautiful purple wig. I also got these court shoes... And that somehow challenged me to put them to use." PARAGRAPH #D4H3PB Madara’s participation is organised around her craftsperson's gaze – a competency that allows her to notice objects as made of particular components and materials. "When I see an item, I see it not just as a finished garment, but also, for example, as a material – fabric, beads, zippers." This competency distinguishes her participation from others and allows her to find value also in objects that other people might not find useful at all: "I found an old, cut mosquito net, which I use as a base for embroidery." Something that appeared to be waste turned out to be a useful resource to her. This is a heightened version of the right-owner logic – the object finds not just a user but a user who recognizes a value in it that is largely invisible to others. Also Madara’s rugmaking practice originated in having accumulated too many secondhand clothes – material surplus became the origin of a new practice. PARAGRAPH #VGRDGV The craftsperson's gaze has a negative counterpart, however, when it is decoupled from valuing items as a shared resource: some visitors treat the shop as a source of free raw materials, cutting off buttons or zippers from garments, and leaving the damaged items behind – extracting the value themselves while diminishing it for everyone else. PARAGRAPH #86WW2X [tags: needs_revision] Alongside the meanings of novelty, originality, and access runs a meaning of class-related stigma, and its presence significantly shapes who is recruited into acquiring at Brīvbode and on what terms. 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 taking from Brīvbode as a normalised exchange for people of all walks of life. While actively and regularly using Brīvbode and praising the things she has managed to acquire as high quality and aesthetically pleasing, 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 – stigma differentiates which of Brīvbode's practices a participant is willing to enact openly and which remain claimed only in private. PARAGRAPH #ZEVQDB For some potential practitioners this association with lower class status is a barrier to entry, while others manage it strategically. Several participants mentioned withholding information about the origin of items, especially when passing things acquired in Brīvbode to other people as gifts. As volunteer Anna noted, grandmothers say: “I don't tell my daughter where I got that jacket, because she wouldn't take it.” PARAGRAPH #Z4WUR2 A related strong negative meaning for second hand acquisition holds that these items carry the energy of previous – often deceased – owners. Several participants mentioned this trope but adjusted it to their practice. Viesturs, half-laughing, keeps the spiritual language but reframes it institutionally: "Others say that things have some kind of energy, or the aura of previous owners... We're able to transform that. In a way, Brīvbode is also like a kind of purgatory for things." With this adjusted meaning Brīvbode can function as a threshold space in the object biographies where the weight of previous owners can be released. PARAGRAPH #MD2XMJ [tags: needs_revision] This stigma of second hand acquisition is, however, also generationally uneven and appears to be dissolving, similar to patterns reported elsewhere (Gurova, 2024). Changing meanings are shifting the practice’s recruitability. Madara notes how a broader normalization of secondhand acquisition in recent years has produced a shift within her own family, who previously held strong norms against it. Luīze, a highschooler preparing for graduation, uses the English word "thrift shops" to talk about her consumption practices, frames her participation in explicit environmental terms, and reports that her classmates are actively seeking secondhand options for graduation dresses. She attributes the negative meaning her parents hold towards second hand acquisition to “Soviet mentality”. SECTION #GTJY22 Quiet, Sustainability PARAGRAPH #T6FW9N In our conversation, Viesturs also positions Brīvbode against charity but from a different angle than Rasa: “Our goal is not to do good for people, I think. Our goal is to do good for the planet… Charity is always related to the meaning of poverty. I think that we need to emphasize the fun factor, the joy factor – swapping, changing clothes. That it's cool, fun, that it's joyful.” He is not only describing the meanings that sustain his own participation, but also making a claim about which meanings should be foregrounded to recruit and retain more practitioners. This is a practical example of what Shove et al. (2012) describe as the circulation and reconfiguration of meanings: environmental purpose, anti-charity positioning, playfulness and style experimentation are alternative meanings that can be linked to the same material site. This orientation is present in Brīvbode and practically expressed through organising photo shoots and parties, encouraging playfulness with clothing. PARAGRAPH #LUDRGT [tags: needs_revision] 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 explicit meaning-work. Rather than showing that one practice has stabilised, his answer shows how a bundle of tasks can become ordinary through repeated participation: the philosophical meanings recede behind the practical work of keeping the site going. PARAGRAPH #M9983A Rasa answers similarly when I enquire about the environmental and sustainability aspects of Brīvbode: “Everything else is so intense… It has remained somehow, in a way, a little secondary.” While the sustainability framing remains present – and is foregrounded e.g. when writing project funding applications or designing info materials – it does not need to be actively held by every practitioner in every performance. For both Viesturs and Rasa philosophical meaning-making has receded. This is what Smith and Jehlička (2013: 155) describe as quiet sustainability: practices that produce beneficial environmental or social outcomes but are not represented by practitioners as directly environmental or sustainability-oriented. PARAGRAPH #CX2SM8 Sustainability as a meaning is present for practitioners, and e.g. Luīze is at the other end of the spectrum for whom it is expressed as primary rather than peripheral. She explicitly framed her participation in terms of ecological responsibility and the wider politics of avoiding fast fashion and microtrends. PARAGRAPH #78HBEQ Līva discussed how the environmental meaning is present for her, but in tension with her actual acquisition practices. She identifies textile consumption as probably one of her most environmentally problematic behaviors, yet was open that knowing it does not resolve it. She estimates she buys an item of clothing every month and frames this as more than she used to in adolescence. The meanings she uses to evaluate her consumption patterns are in tension with the meanings that sustain the acquisition, and neither cancels the other one out. Researching household textile disposal, Sigaard (2026) concludes that even while sustainable consumption is ideally endorsed, disposal is very normalized because it is strongly embedded in identity work, relational considerations and in facilitating other practices. PARAGRAPH #P6X2DJ Also, as I argue, most participants come to Brīvbode for practical and social reasons instead of self-professed environmental conviction. This resonates with Smith and Jehlička’s (2013) concept of quiet sustainability, developed through their research on Czech urban gardeners: sustainable practices that can be widespread and effective but are not articulated in terms of sustainability by their practitioners. Smith and Jehlička 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. PARAGRAPH #FLSHWG Some participants do find meanings for their participation in explicit sustainability terms, though, and this difference should not be overlooked. The thesis holds both the quiet and the articulated dimensions without collapsing them into a single category, treating the variation between them as empirically interesting. In practice-theoretical terms, what practitioners say about why they do what they do is only one element of practice, but it is still an element: meanings help organise participation together with materials and competences (Shove et al. 2012: 14, 23). The point is therefore not to dismiss stated motivations, but to avoid treating them as the sole explanation for circulation. PARAGRAPH #SY28Z3 [tags: needs_revision, fragment] (Lifestyles of Enough) “Finally, the meanings attached to sufficiency-oriented consumption practices go way beyond altruistic motives like environmental concern. As a study by Kropfeld et al. (2018) showed, environmentally concerned consumers (with more altruistic motives) have a higher environmental impact than voluntary simplifiers (with more self-related motives). Personal or egocentric motives, therefore, can lead to sufficiency-oriented behavior, as the example for sharing services from this review showed. This is in line with Sandberg’s (2021) findings on sufficiency practices related to miscellaneous consumption, as she connects a reduction of consumption of various products (incl. clothing) to anti-consumption lifestyles such as voluntary simplicity or frugality. PARAGRAPH #8B2Y8N Several participants in this study trace their orientations toward thrift and reuse to generational experience of the scarcity of the early post-Soviet period, or to upbringings in which resources were used carefully as a matter of practical necessity rather than environmental commitment. PARAGRAPH #VFPYU2 The “activists” are part of the visitors, yet a large part do not frame their participation in Brīvbode primarily in environmental terms: they come because they have things to give away, because they sometimes find things they need. Their practices have sustainable dimensions that they do not necessarily name or claim. PARAGRAPH #V445EY This framing does not require flattening the diversity of participant orientations. Some visitors do articulate explicit sustainability motivations – concerns about fast fashion, about waste, about the environmental costs of overconsumption. The thesis holds both the quiet and the articulated dimensions without forcing them into a single category, and treats the tension between them as empirically interesting rather than theoretically problematic. One question that remains open is whether explicit articulation makes sustainable practices more effective at retaining practitioners – more resistant to disruption when material or social conditions change. This is beyond the scope of the present study but worth noting as a direction for future research. PARAGRAPH #FV3V4W Māra: "Mammai to lietu nebija daudz, un tās lietas tika visas, nu, ļoti labi uzturētas. Bet tad, kad jau parādījās tie humāno preču veikali, tad savukārt bija otrā drusku galējība." [My mother didn't have many things, and those things were all, well, very well looked after. But then, once the second-hand goods shops (humāno preču veikali, lit. "humanitarian goods shops") appeared, the other extreme came.] PARAGRAPH #ZCZQHX [tags: placeholder] Because Brīvbode coordinates multiple practices, sustainability does not need to be the shared meaning that recruits everyone. SECTION #A3X9XX Conclusion PARAGRAPH #5U4GTQ [tags: placeholder] Brīvbode’s significance lies not in resolving the contradictions of circular consumption, but in making them practically workable. It is at once a route for domestic divestment, a source of acquisition, a sorting and curatorial workplace, a social meeting point, a space of style experimentation, a source of craft materials, a threshold between use and waste, and sometimes a pressure valve for overconsumption. These practices intersect without becoming one coherent moral project. The site holds them together just enough for things to keep moving. PARAGRAPH #4V448P [tags: needs_revision] Sustainability can be an outcome without being a requirement or a conscious orientation for all practitioners. Because Brīvbode coordinates multiple practices, it can recruit and retain participants through meanings that have little to do with environmental concern: access, novelty, social contact, decluttering, craft materials, care for things, or the relief of getting objects moving again. This is why quiet sustainability is useful here: beneficial environmental outcomes can emerge from ordinary practices that practitioners do not necessarily frame as environmental (Smith and Jehlička 2013: 155). The circulation enabled by the site can therefore have sustainable dimensions, but these emerge from the situated coordination of practices rather than from a single shared sustainability motivation. 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 Brīvbode running. Where the previous chapter examined freecycling as a practice – its venues, materials, meanings, and competencies, and the moral economy through which they cohere – this chapter turns to what that practice costs and to the people who pay it: in time, skill, and effort, and in the relational and ethical attention that the tasks of circulation demand. That labour is largely unpaid, unevenly distributed, and absorbed into existing practices of household management. PARAGRAPH #EF5DET The chapter is organized by two complementary registers. Consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann 2015) names the tasks the practice demands – acquiring, sorting, maintaining, divesting, transporting – and tracks how they are distributed across technical, modal, and processual dimensions of the division of labour. Care work, in the feminist tradition and its recent applications to circular consumption (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), names the relational and ethical orientation through which participants take this labour on, often without recognising it as work at all. PARAGRAPH #S6HFAC Bankovska’s (2020) ethnography of the Latvian organic food movement bridges the two: drawing on Graeber (2018: 156), she observes that care is not always a joyful act but often involves unanticipated effort, obligation, hesitation, and disgust. The boundaries between consumption work, care work, and volunteer work are difficult to maintain in practice, and that is precisely what allows the labour that sustains Brīvbode to remain invisible to participants and to circular economy policy alike. SECTION #N8D3HT Time to Give, 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. SECTION #M9WQLY CONCLUSION PARAGRAPH #JE7FK2 This thesis is an ethnographic study of a swapshop to investigate how these spaces foster alternative consumption practices that possibly sustain alternative logics of value and ownership. This thesis is a contribution to the studies of circular consumption using ethnographic methods with practice theory approach. PARAGRAPH #U2PZ9C 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 #FE5BCM 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 #GUXEZX [tags: placeholder, needs_revision, fragment] 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. PARAGRAPH #JM9L6Y [tags: placeholder, needs_revision, fragment] improvised solution that does not presuppose a lot of resources… except sufficiency lifestyle? PARAGRAPH #NNZ5SG [tags: placeholder, needs_revision, fragment] 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 #PEFVAC [tags: placeholder, needs_revision, fragment] Results, relevance, contribution PARAGRAPH #HMDEDU 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 #9DTFUU [tags: needs_revision, fragment] 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? SECTION #FTE3UX SUMMARY PARAGRAPH #T3DVBQ Summary: the most important results and conclusions; analysis of whether the objective was achieved; where appropriate, proposals for further development and future research in the field. SECTION #9GJAHS LIST OF SOURCES PARAGRAPH #JTWV2Q Akule, D., Milbreta, U. and Brizga, J. (2023) Collection and use of post-consumption textiles in Latvia. Riga: Green Liberty. PARAGRAPH #APK3TR Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PARAGRAPH #CPTV8C Appelgren, S. and Bohlin, A. (2015) ‘Growing in motion: the circulation of used things on second-hand markets’, Culture Unbound, 7, pp. 143–168. PARAGRAPH #7R3RKE Askholm, A.S.M. (2024) ‘If I don’t do it, it feels wrong: embodying environmental ethical reflexivity through cultivation and enactment of practices’, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 20(1), 2350204. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2024.2350204 PARAGRAPH #K8KXN3 Assima, C., Herbert, M. and Robert, I. (2023) ‘Use it or lose it?: exploring the grey area of dormant possessions and the role of rituals in value dynamics of household objects’, Journal of Marketing Management, 39(13–14), pp. 1220–1254. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2023.2209863 PARAGRAPH #HYBUYH Beswick-Parsons, R., Evans, D.M. and Jackson, P. (2025) ‘Reuse practices and household consumption work’, Social & Cultural Geography, 27(2), pp. 195–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2025.2549709 PARAGRAPH #DHF6T6 Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PARAGRAPH #4RABAB Camacho-Otero, J., Pettersen, I.N. and Boks, C. (2020) ‘Consumer engagement in the circular economy: exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective’, Sustainable Development, 28(1), pp. 279–293. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.2002 PARAGRAPH #JNBSSG Eden, S. (2017) ‘Blurring the boundaries: prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 17(2), pp. 265–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540515586871 PARAGRAPH #S3YTB3 Ehgartner, U. and Holmes, H. (2022) ‘Changing understandings of waste reduction and avoidance in moralities of thrift: a comparison of Mass Observers’ narratives three decades apart’, Geoforum, 137, pp. 105–114. PARAGRAPH #WVDJ99 Evans, D. (2020) ‘After practice? Material semiotic approaches to consumption and economy’, Cultural Sociology, 14(4), pp. 340–356. PARAGRAPH #BR7XTP Evans, D., McMeekin, A. and Warde, A. (2012) ‘Sustainable consumption, behaviour change policies and theories of practice’. In: Warde, A. and Southerton, D. (eds.) The habits of consumption. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, pp. 113–129. PARAGRAPH #TJVD8Y Hobson, K., Holmes, H., Welch, D., Wheeler, K. and Wieser, H. (2021) ‘Consumption work in the circular economy: a research agenda’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 321, 128969. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128969 PARAGRAPH #C8L8YQ Hobson, K. (2020) ‘“Small stories of closing loops”: social circularity and the everyday circular economy’, Climatic Change, 163(1), pp. 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02480-z PARAGRAPH #NYQXWE Holmes, H. (2018) ‘New spaces, ordinary practices: circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning’, Geoforum, 88, pp. 138–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.11.022 PARAGRAPH #9M9D7K Horton, K. (2020) 'Just use what you have: Ethical fashion discourse and the feminisation of responsibility', in Parkins, I. and Dever, M. (eds.) Fashion: New feminist essays. Routledge, pp. 109–123. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003010418 PARAGRAPH #RKYQW8 Isenhour, C. and Berry, B. (2020) ‘“Still good life”: on the value of reuse and distributive labor in “depleted” rural Maine’, Economic Anthropology, 7, pp. 293–308. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12176 PARAGRAPH #9V3STH Giddens, A. (1984) The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press. PARAGRAPH #L2X3H2 Gregson, N. (2007) Living with things: ridding, accommodation, dwelling. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing. PARAGRAPH #DWW2K4 Gregson, N., Metcalfe, A. and Crewe, L. (2007) ‘Moving things along: the conduits and practices of divestment in consumption’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(2), pp. 187–200. PARAGRAPH #VCM9ZD Gurova, O. (2024) ‘Practice theory approach to Gen Z’s sustainable clothing consumption in Finland’, Young Consumers, 25(3), pp. 289–307. https://doi.org/10.1108/YC-06-2023-1765 PARAGRAPH #GHHDFX Larsen, F. (2023) ‘Selling thrift: work practices in an American thrift store’, Journal of Business Anthropology, 12(1), pp. 37–55. https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v12i1.6914 PARAGRAPH #3HCC78 Mesiranta, N., Mattila, M., Koskinen, O. and Närvänen, E. (2025) ‘Circular consumption practices as matters of care’, Journal of Business Ethics, 200, pp. 13–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05888-5 PARAGRAPH #BZQJQS Miller, D. (1998) A theory of shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press. PARAGRAPH #L2ZHSM Miller, D. (2008) The comfort of things. Cambridge: Polity Press. PARAGRAPH #T3EV8P Nicolini, D. (2017) ‘Practice theory as a package of theory, method and vocabulary: affordances and limitations’. In: Jonas, M., Littig, B. and Wroblewski, A. (eds.) Methodological reflections on practice-oriented theories. Cham: Springer, pp. 19–34. PARAGRAPH #6JMQ9V Počinkova, L., Henninger, C.E., Le Normand, A. and Blazquez Cano, M. (2023) ‘Exploring the role of community-based enterprises in consumers’ voluntary clothing disposition via UK swapping events using theory of social practice’, Social Enterprise Journal, 22(6). https://doi.org/10.1108/SEJ-02-2023-0017 PARAGRAPH #7VSKWC Reno, J.O. (2016) Waste away: working and living with a North American landfill. Oakland: University of California Press. PARAGRAPH #KBACMG Sedlačko, M. (2017) ‘Conducting ethnography with a sensibility for practice’. In: Jonas, M., Littig, B. and Wroblewski, A. (eds.) Methodological reflections on practice-oriented theories. Cham: Springer, pp. 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52897-7_4 PARAGRAPH #RU2ER4 Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M. (2012) The dynamics of social practice: everyday life and how it changes. London: Sage. PARAGRAPH #SA7WPJ Shove, E. and Walker, G. (2010) ‘Governing transitions in the sustainability of everyday life’, Research Policy, 39(4), pp. 471–476. PARAGRAPH #3CALAB Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, cleanliness and convenience: the social organization of normality. Oxford: Berg. PARAGRAPH #FGQUM8 Sigaard, A.S. (2026) Want not, waste not: a practice-theoretical study of textile disposal in everyday life. PhD thesis. Oslo: Oslo Metropolitan University. PARAGRAPH #VVF79Z Smith, J. and Jehlička, P. (2013) ‘Quiet sustainability: fertile lessons from Europe’s productive gardeners’, Journal of Rural Studies, 32, pp. 148–157. PARAGRAPH #EPX45B Spaargaren, G. (2013) ‘The cultural dimension of sustainable consumption practices’. In: Cohen, M.J., Brown, H.S. and Vergragt, P.J. (eds.) Innovations in sustainable consumption. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, pp. 229–251. PARAGRAPH #V7Z8Y2 Speck, M. and Hasselkuss, M. (2015) ‘Sufficiency in social practice: searching potentials for sufficient behavior in a consumerist culture’, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 11, pp. 14–32. PARAGRAPH #6SDD7L Tan, Q.H. and Yeoh, B.S.A. (2024) ‘Freecycling markets as sustainable materialist movements? Closing reuse circularity loops in Singapore’, Worldwide Waste, 7(1), pp. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3197/whpww.63857928646673 PARAGRAPH #C84FMM Tölg, R. and Fuentes, C. (2025) ‘Care and circularity: how the enactment of care enables and shapes the circular consumption of clothing’, Consumption and Society, 4(2), pp. 213–231. https://doi.org/10.1332/27528499Y2024D000000032 PARAGRAPH #74NCY4 Warde, A. (2005) ‘Consumption and theories of practice’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 5(2), pp. 131–153. PARAGRAPH #UVK7TJ Warde, A. and Southerton, D. (eds.) (2012) The habits of consumption. Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. PARAGRAPH #KJPCEP Watson, D., Hvass, K.K., Moora, H., Martin, K., Nausėdė, V., Gurauskiene, I. and Akule, D. (2020) Post-consumer textile circularity in the Baltic countries: current status and recommendations for the future. TemaNord 2020:526. Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers. https://doi.org/10.6027/temanord2020-526 PARAGRAPH #UBR9SS Welch, D., Halkier, B. and Keller, M. (2020) ‘Introduction to the special issue: renewing theories of practice and reappraising the cultural’, Cultural Sociology, 14(4), pp. 325–339. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975520954146 PARAGRAPH #AVZ5K4 Welch, D. and Warde, A. (2015) ‘Theories of practice and sustainable consumption’. In: Reisch, L. and Thøgersen, J. (eds.) Handbook of research on sustainable consumption. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 84–100. PARAGRAPH #2HA496 Wheeler, K. and Glucksmann, M. (2015) Household recycling and consumption work: social and moral economies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. PARAGRAPH #2DH4UU Widlok, T. (2017) Anthropology and the economy of sharing. London: Routledge. SECTION #TY2EB4 KOKKUVÕTE PARAGRAPH #EMMZ55 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. ### 11. Assistant Done — I've read the whole MIKAEL draft. Here's a structured impression to help you triage what's left. ## What's in good shape - **The two empirical chapters** (#9XAKTW *Keep It Moving* and #82G2QE *Hold It Together*) are working hard and they work as a pair. The split — Chapter 4 on the practice-as-entity / circulation / meanings, Chapter 5 on the labour and care — is conceptually clean and the chapter titles are excellent. - **The "Day in Brīvbode" vignette** (#3CQF69) is genuinely lovely. It earns its place. - **Chapter 5's analytic spine** — Wheeler & Glucksmann's technical/modal/processual triad mapped onto sufficiency, valuation, informality, and gendered networks — is one of the most original moves in the thesis. The Bankovska + Graeber "care not-work" thread (#S6HFAC, #Y344XY) is a strong synthesizing device. - **The "quiet sustainability" argument** is well set up across #GTJY22 and reaches a satisfying claim in #4V448P: that the site coordinates multiple practices, so sustainability can be an outcome without being the recruiting meaning. - **Native ethnographic texture** — humpalas, brīvbode/bodīte, prasta, the Latvian transcript snippets — is doing real work, not decoration. - **References list** is mostly in place and matches what's cited. ## What still needs work (in priority order) **1. The Theory chapter conclusion #ULSUAX is the biggest structural hole.** It currently devolves into a string of orphan quotes (#A3Q9XS through #U87FBB) that read like raw notes from another source. This needs to be written as a proper bridge to the empirical chapters — probably a page that pulls together: practice-as-entity + Warde's "consumption as moment" + Evans's expanded cycle + consumption work + care, and ends pointing at the two research questions. **2. The thesis Conclusion #M9WQLY is mostly placeholder.** Five of its eight paragraphs are tagged fragments. This is the other big writing job. The good news: most of the substantive conclusion-work is already done in the chapter conclusions (#A3X9XX, #75D5UH) — you can synthesize from there. **3. The Introduction has a few placeholder gaps** in the Latvian context section (#577FMZ, #7LMSFU, #JNSARN, #HZ8D53, #N6UNLT). These are factual/statistical inserts rather than argumentative — relatively contained tasks. **4. "Sites of Interacting Practices" #2MV3XY is thin.** The Schatzki paragraph (#FZHH6H) is in quotation marks and reads like it was pasted in; #WQZYJP is tagged placeholder. This subsection could either be tightened into something shorter and integrated, or expanded with a clear argument about how Schatzki's site ontology and Hobson's generative spaces help frame Brīvbode. **5. Some Latvian-quote paragraphs in §4.5 (Values of Letting Go)** — #9XUDV9, #QCXR6D, #Z2Y4K8, #AB5XLD, #LG8X4N — read like undigested transcript blocks with analytic notes appended. The material in them is gold (Madara's "auntie with three bags," Aiga's hoarding+travel rupture, Māra on attachment-as-process) but it needs to be cooked into prose, not served raw. **6. Smaller drafting items:** - #ZZDQRR "Interviews are good for…" — placeholder fragment in methodology - #2G2WSX "PIEVIENOT" — literal note-to-self - #92SD6X — block-quoted Tölg paragraph in square brackets, needs paraphrase or removal - #HWS5KX — flagged "second hand source that I should check" - The Summary #FTE3UX and Kokkuvõte #TY2EB4 are template stubs (those happen at the very end) ## Suggested order of attack 1. **Empirical chapter polish** — fix the tagged paragraphs in the chapters you've already drafted (especially #7ZXWJU, #LHLZ8Y, #KMD7AJ, #86WW2X, #MD2XMJ, #LUDRGT, #4V448P, the Latvian-quote blocks in 4.5). Quick wins, you're working with text you already have. 2. **Theory chapter conclusion** #ULSUAX — needed to make the framework feel finished. 3. **Thesis conclusion** #M9WQLY — the synthesis job. 4. **Introduction gaps** — factual inserts. 5. **Summaries** — last. Want to start somewhere specific? The Theory conclusion is probably the highest-leverage rewrite, and I can help you draft from the existing material in §2.1–§2.5. ### 12. User it'd be interesting to see your go at an introduction and kind of an overview of the theory ### 13. Assistant Below are two draft passages — a tightened **Introduction** and a synthesis that could serve as the **Theory chapter conclusion** (#ULSUAX, your biggest structural gap). I've tried to stay close to your voice and your existing arguments rather than introducing new claims, mostly consolidating what's already in the draft and removing the placeholder seams. --- ## Introduction — draft We live in a context of overproduction. Goods move through households at increasing speed, the average lifespan of a garment continues to fall, and the moral burden of managing what arrives — and what leaves — has shifted increasingly onto households themselves. Circular economy policy responds by positioning reuse, repair, and life-extension as solutions, but the success of these measures depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive, infrastructurally uneven, and unevenly distributed across populations (Hobson et al., 2021). This thesis is an ethnographic study of one site where these everyday practices are concentrated and made visible: Brīvbode, a volunteer-run swapshop in Riga, Latvia. Brīvbode operates without monetary exchange, in a permanent physical location, twice a week, year-round. People bring things they no longer want and take things they do; volunteers sort, curate, and maintain the space; objects circulate, accumulate, and overflow. The thesis examines how this circulation is organised and sustained as a social practice, and what work it requires from its participants. I use the term *freecycling* to describe what is done in Brīvbode, while acknowledging that no Latvian word currently captures the practice and that each available English term — swapshop, freeshop, freecycle — fits only partially. *Freecycling* is preferred here because it foregrounds circularity rather than the symmetry implied by swapping or the one-directionality implied by donation (the term and its limits are discussed further in §1.2). The Latvian context makes this a productive moment to study such a site. Second-hand goods have a long and ambivalent history in Latvia: the colloquial *humpalas*, derived from *humānā palīdzība* ("humanitarian aid"), recalls the post-socialist period when used clothing arrived as assistance from abroad, framing reuse as charity rather than circulation. In the past fifteen years the landscape has diversified — charity shops, online divestment groups, neighbourhood swaps, library-of-things initiatives, mandatory textile collection introduced in 2023 — and the meanings attached to second-hand have begun to shift. Brīvbode sits within this changing terrain as a particular configuration: a physical site, sustained by volunteer labour, in which divestment and acquisition meet in the same room without monetary mediation. It offers participants familiar yet new ways of relating to objects and to one another (Holmes, 2018). The thesis draws on two analytical frameworks. The first is practice theory, particularly the formulation developed by Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012), which analyses practices as bundles of materials, meanings, and competencies. I treat freecycling as a practice that is recognisable but emergent, situated within and partly constituted by adjacent practices — household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, sociality, sufficiency. 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 it 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 allow me to ask both what freecycling is as a recognisable social form and what it costs in labour, skill, and care to sustain. Hobson (2016) calls for research attention to "generative spaces" where alternative configurations of the circular economy emerge — sites that mainstream CE policy tends to overlook. Brīvbode is such a space: a semi-public location where the ordinarily private labour of divestment and acquisition becomes visible and socially acknowledged. The thesis is guided by two research questions: 1. 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? 2. What work does freecycling in Brīvbode require from participants, and how is that work currently distributed? The study is based on participant observation conducted between February 2024 and early 2026, alongside fifteen semi-structured interviews with visitors, volunteers, and organisers. My own role as a volunteer shaped the fieldwork and is reflected throughout the analysis. The thesis proceeds as follows. Chapter 2 develops the theoretical framework, situating the study within debates on practice theory, sustainable consumption, and consumption work. Chapter 3 describes the methodology and the fieldwork site. Chapter 4, *Keep It Moving*, examines Brīvbode as a site of freecycling: the materials flowing through it, the plural meanings and competencies that sustain giving and taking, and the moral economy through which non-monetary exchange is held in place. Chapter 5, *Hold It Together*, turns to the labour that sustains those flows, attending in particular to the gendered, ethically motivated, and largely unpaid work absorbed by participants and volunteers. The Conclusion draws the empirical findings together and reflects on what Brīvbode reveals about the conditions under which circular consumption practices can be sustained in everyday life. --- ## Theory chapter — synthesis / conclusion draft (This could replace the orphan-quote dump at #ULSUAX. It explicitly does the work of pulling the chapter together and pointing forward into the empirical chapters.) This chapter has assembled the conceptual tools through which the thesis examines freecycling in Brīvbode. They cluster around three commitments. First, following Warde (2005) and Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012), consumption is not itself a practice but a moment within practices, and the elements that organise a practice — materials, meanings, and competencies — should be understood as travelling, recombining, and circulating across sites and carriers. This places freecycling at an analytic angle. Rather than a single bounded practice with stable elements, Brīvbode is a site at which several recognisable practices — household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, sociality, sufficiency, sorting, volunteering — are brought into working relation. Following Shove et al.'s distinction between bundles and complexes (2012: 95–101), I treat freecycling in Brīvbode as a bundle dense enough to coordinate but not so settled that it has integrated into a single practice entity. This framing licenses the analysis in Chapter 4, which follows how meanings and competencies move through the site rather than requiring freecycling to behave as a unified routine in Shove's earlier (2003) sense of inconspicuous, taken-for-granted consumption. Recent second-generation work in practice theory (Welch et al., 2020; Askholm, 2024) has begun to reintroduce questions of ethics, reflexivity and cultural meaning that the strategic move toward routine had bracketed; the present study sits within that broader reopening. Second, following Evans (2020), consumption is best understood as a full cycle. To Warde's appropriation and appreciation, Evans adds devaluation, divestment, and disposal — or, more economically, attachment and detachment. This expansion is essential for studying a site that operates equally as a route for letting go and a route for acquiring. It also legitimates the analytic attention I pay to the meanings, competencies, and forms of labour involved in detachment, which earlier practice-theoretical work on sustainable consumption tended to underweight (Ehgartner and Holmes, 2022). Brīvbode is a consumption site in both directions: a node in the ordinary circulation of goods through domestic life, distinguished by its non-monetary character and its physical permanence. Third, while practice theory describes how circulation is socially organised, it has tended to underplay the labour that sustains it. Wheeler and Glucksmann's (2015) framework of consumption work names this labour directly — sorting, cleaning, repairing, transporting, deciding — and offers a vocabulary for analysing how it is distributed: technically, across people and skills; modally, across paid and unpaid, formal and informal arrangements; and processually, across the full span of a consumption process. Hobson et al. (2021) argue that under circular economy conditions this work intensifies and that the additional demands fall disproportionately on those already absorbed into household management work — most often women. Recent work at the intersection of practice theory and circular consumption has begun to reframe such labour as care (Mesiranta et al., 2025; Tölg and Fuentes, 2025), and Bankovska's (2020) ethnography of Latvian organic provisioning bridges the two registers by showing that care is not always a joyful act but often involves obligation, hesitation, and effort that cannot easily be put down. These three commitments — an account of practices as bundles of travelling materials, meanings, and competencies; an expanded conception of consumption that includes detachment; and a labour-and-care register for what circulation costs — are complementary rather than competing. Practice theory describes the social form. Consumption work describes its costs. Care names the orientation through which those costs are taken on. The two empirical chapters use them together. Chapter 4 follows the materials, meanings and competencies through which freecycling is sustained as a recognisable form. Chapter 5 turns to the labour and care that hold the site together. What Brīvbode makes available, I argue, is a setting in which the conditions of circular consumption become visible precisely because the price-mediated devices that ordinarily disguise this work are absent. What remains is the practice itself, and the people doing the work to keep it moving. --- A few notes on what I did: - **In the Introduction**, I folded the Latvian-context placeholder material (#577FMZ, parts of #7LMSFU) into a single tighter paragraph that does the work without needing the statistical inserts. The detailed numbers and the wider list of initiatives can live in §1.1 *Latvian context and research*, which is where they belong; the introduction just needs to gesture at the changing terrain. - **In the theory synthesis**, I kept your three-part architecture (practice → expanded consumption → consumption work + care), explicitly named the bundle/complex distinction so it pays off in Chapter 4, and used the Bankovska bridge you've already set up in Chapter 5 so the theoretical apparatus arrives pre-loaded for the empirical work. - **Things I did *not* try to do**: write the Schatzki / generative-spaces material (#2MV3XY) — that subsection deserves its own pass, and I think it's worth deciding whether it survives as a standalone section or gets folded into §2.2. Take what's useful, discard what isn't, and shout if you'd like another pass at any specific piece. ### 14. User thanks! one thing we're doing is rewriting and rethinking some stuff that talks about "a practice" or "the practice" associated with brivbode, to accept that brivbode is a site of overlapping practices, where elements also can travel between practices and practices meet each other, analogous to how the things themselves move through divestment and so on and get incorporated into successor practices in the swap shop ... so that's one thing i'd want to shake out in the intro and theory. maybe freecycling is still a useful term for the "bundle" of practices that cluster around the brivbode? ### 15. Assistant Good move — and it's actually already implicit in your Chapter 4 opening (#PL9BXR, #SJE87E), so this is about making the introduction and theory chapter *deliver what those empirical chapters are already cashing in on*. And yes, I think *freecycling* survives — but as the name for the bundle, not a name for one practice. The analogy you're suggesting (elements travel between practices the way things do) is genuinely productive and it gives the thesis a unified analytic figure. Here are revised drafts foregrounding that. --- ## Introduction — revised paragraphs (I'm leaving the opening paragraph and the Latvian-context paragraph as before; what changes are the framing paragraphs about what Brīvbode is and how the thesis approaches it.) > This thesis is an ethnographic study of one site where these everyday practices are concentrated and made visible: Brīvbode, a volunteer-run swapshop in Riga, Latvia. Brīvbode operates without monetary exchange, in a permanent physical location, twice a week, year-round. People bring things they no longer want and take things they do; volunteers sort, curate, and maintain the space; objects circulate, accumulate, and overflow. The thesis examines how this circulation is organised and sustained, and what work it requires from its participants. > > Following Warde (2005), I do not treat taking or giving in Brīvbode as a single practice. Brīvbode is better understood as a *site* where multiple recognisable practices — household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, craft, sociality, volunteering, sufficiency, sorting, resale — are brought into working relation. *Freecycling*, as I use the term in this thesis, names this bundle: the coordinated configuration of practices that has come to cluster around the swapshop and that the site holds in working relation. It is a useful name precisely because it captures the circular character of what happens there without claiming that a single shared routine has stabilised. Freecycling is in this sense a recognisable and emergent form, not a settled practice entity. > > This framing turns out to matter analytically. Brīvbode is a site of circulation in two senses. The first is the obvious one: things move through it. A garment leaves one household, passes across the sorting table, and is enrolled in someone else's practice — perhaps as a work shirt, perhaps as a costume, perhaps as raw material for a rug. The second sense is less obvious but, I argue, just as important: *the elements of practice travel alongside the things*. Meanings, competencies, and norms migrate between practices at the same site. The competency of recognising wool from synthetic, learned through years of careful dressing, is recruited into volunteer sorting. The meaning of *thrift*, which Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012: 75) note has migrated from domestic darning into modes of divestment, becomes attached to the very act of bringing a bag to Brīvbode. A "useless" leftover from one practice — wire offcuts from a hobby workshop, expired covid-test alcohol wipes, a bundle of folk-style mittens — becomes a resource for another. The site is the threshold at which this re-enrolment happens. > > The thesis draws on two analytical frameworks. The first is practice theory, particularly Shove, Pantzar and Watson's (2012) formulation of practices as bundles of materials, meanings, and competencies that travel and recombine. I use this framework to follow how recognisable practices meet, exchange elements, and are coordinated at a particular site, drawing on Shove et al.'s distinction between bundles and complexes (2012: 95–101) and on Schatzki's (2002) site ontology to articulate Brīvbode as a *nexus* (Nicolini 2017: 28) where several practices converge. The second framework is Wheeler and Glucksmann's (2015) *consumption work* — the labour required of consumers before or after the moment of exchange, on which consumption itself depends. In the circular economy this work intensifies, and falls disproportionately on those already managing households (Hobson et al., 2021). I extend the concept here to include the volunteer labour of the swapshop and the extended divestment networks through which household surplus reaches it. Together, these frameworks let me ask both what freecycling is as a recognisable configuration and what it costs in labour, skill, and care to sustain. And the research questions follow naturally — I'd very lightly adjust the first to sit with the new framing: > 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? > 2. What work does this configuration require from participants, and how is that work currently distributed? --- ## Theory chapter — revised conclusion / synthesis > This chapter has assembled the conceptual tools through which the thesis examines freecycling in Brīvbode. They cluster around three commitments. > > First, following Warde (2005) and Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012), consumption is not itself a practice but a moment within practices, and the elements that organise a practice — materials, meanings, and competencies — should be understood as *travelling, recombining, and circulating* across sites and carriers. This commitment is more than a methodological aside; it shapes how I treat Brīvbode. Rather than a single bounded practice with stable elements, Brīvbode is a site at which several recognisable practices — household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, craft, sociality, sufficiency, sorting, volunteering, resale — are brought into working relation. Following Shove et al.'s distinction between bundles and complexes (2012: 95–101), I treat *freecycling* not as a discrete practice entity but as the name for this bundle: a configuration dense enough to coordinate and to be recognised, but not so settled that it has integrated into a single shared routine. Schatzki's (2002) site ontology supports this reading by treating sites as constitutive milieux where social life unfolds through the interaction of multiple practices rather than as backdrops for one. In Nicolini's (2017: 28) terms, Brīvbode is a *nexus* — "a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together." > > The site has a particular generative quality. Brīvbode is a site of circulation in two registers at once. Things move through it: a garment is detached from one practice and becomes available to be enrolled in another. But the *elements of practice travel alongside the things*. Competencies acquired in one practice — recognising fibre quality, judging a hidden stain, mapping a wardrobe — are recruited into others. Meanings migrate: thrift moves out of darning at home and into modes of divestment (Shove et al. 2012: 75; Gregson 2007); sustainability attaches itself to acts of bringing and taking that practitioners describe in entirely different terms. Materials cross practice boundaries when an offcut becomes raw material, when a previous owner's garment becomes a costume, when an expired alcohol wipe becomes a useful object again. Shove et al.'s observation that meanings can be "unpacked" in new settings (2012: 70–71) describes a mechanism that, at Brīvbode, the site makes routine. This is what I take Hobson (2016) to mean by *generative spaces*: not just venues where alternative configurations of the circular economy emerge, but sites whose generativity comes precisely from holding multiple practices close enough that their elements can be recombined. > > Second, following Evans (2020), consumption is best understood as a full cycle that includes appropriation and appreciation but also devaluation, divestment, and disposal — or, more economically, attachment and detachment. This expansion is essential for studying a site that operates equally as a route for letting go and a route for acquiring, and that depends on the willingness of carriers to disengage things from one practice so that they can be enrolled in another. It also licenses the analytic attention I pay to the meanings, competencies, and forms of labour involved in detachment, which earlier practice-theoretical work on sustainable consumption tended to underweight (Ehgartner and Holmes 2022). > > Third, while practice theory describes how circulation is socially organised, it tends to underplay the labour that sustains it. Wheeler and Glucksmann's (2015) *consumption work* names this labour directly — the tasks of sorting, cleaning, assessing, repairing, transporting, deciding — and offers a vocabulary for analysing how it is distributed: technically, across people and skills; modally, across paid and unpaid arrangements; processually, across the full span of a consumption process. Hobson et al. (2021) argue that this work intensifies under circular economy conditions, and that responsibility falls disproportionately on those already absorbed into household management work — most often women. Recent work at the intersection of practice theory and circular consumption has begun to reframe such labour as *care* (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), and Bankovska's (2020) ethnography of Latvian organic provisioning bridges the two registers by showing, after Graeber (2018), that care is not always joyful but often involves obligation, hesitation, and effort that cannot easily be put down. > > These commitments — an account of practices as bundles whose elements travel and recombine; an expanded conception of consumption that includes detachment; and a labour-and-care register for what circulation costs — are complementary rather than competing. Practice theory, in this configuration, describes the social form: how recognisable practices meet at a site and exchange elements. Consumption work describes the costs of holding that meeting in place. Care names the orientation through which those costs are taken on. The two empirical chapters use them together. Chapter 4, *Keep It Moving*, follows the materials, meanings, and competencies through which the bundle of freecycling is sustained as a recognisable form. Chapter 5, *Hold It Together*, turns to the labour and care that keep the site working. Brīvbode, I argue, is a setting in which the conditions of circular consumption become unusually visible — because the price-mediated devices that ordinarily disguise this work are absent, and because the proximity of practices makes their meeting points legible. What remains is the bundle itself, and the people doing the work to keep its elements moving. --- **A few small downstream consequences if you adopt this framing:** - The Schatzki / generative-spaces section #2MV3XY becomes more central to the argument, not less. It's where you do the conceptual work of saying "here's what 'site' means and here's why it matters." Worth strengthening rather than absorbing into §2.2. - Some places in Chapter 4 say "the practice of freecycling" in a singular voice — e.g. #ADQD9U, parts of #SNLDAM in the current intro, your earlier #LHLZ8Y phrasing about "a practice of freecycling." A find-and-tighten pass would catch these. The Ch.4 opening (#PL9BXR) is already doing the right thing and can stay. - The phrase "freecycling as the bundle that clusters at Brīvbode" (or some compact version of it) is worth using once explicitly somewhere visible — probably in the Introduction as I've drafted, and once early in Chapter 4 — so the reader knows you're making the move deliberately. ### 16. User it'd be super helpful if you could look through what we have on schatzki and draft an actually coherent well cited presentation of his site ontology for the 2.5 section ### 17. Assistant tool calls #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 15, "query": "Schatzki site ontology practices" } ``` #### Tool call: `search_text` ```json { "limit": 15, "query": "site of the social material arrangements" } ``` ### 18. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 55 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #HF9VX7 Timespace and the Organization of Social Life #LCAY65 Timespace and Society Matching excerpt #D6VVUN: As I have been writing, practices are carried on amid arrangements of objects. Promenading, betting, talking and watching races are carried out amid the arrangements of objects that form viewing stands, concessions, the trackside holding area, the interior paddock, and the passageways, staircases and doorways that permit movement between these. Practices, moreover, are tied to other practices and also bound up with other bundles of practices and arrangements more or less tightly or loosely. The practice-arrangement bundle at Keeneland on race day, for example, is bound up with (1) the bundles of the Keeneland corporation and of the taxi services that bring people to the track and (2) the bundles at Keeneland during annual horse sales or at other race tracks during their meets. The sum-total of linked practice-arrangement bundles at any moment forms a gigantic, intricate and constantly metamorphosing web that forms the overall site of social existence (see Schatzki 2002). This immense plenum also defines the total objective temporal and spatial spread of social life. Elsewhere (Schatzki 2002, 2003) I have argued that social phenomena can be understood as segments or configurations of this plenum of practices and arrangements. This claim entails that any social phenomenon consists either in a practice-arrangement bundle or in features of such bundles (racial prejudice, for example, consists in features of many bundles). What I want to argue in the remainder of this chapter is that interwoven timespaces form an infrastructure that pervades the practice-arrangement plenum, linking actions and tying practices together into the bundles that make up the site of the social. Stated in more familiar terms: timespace is crucial to the constitution of social phenomena. I will essay to make this claim plausible by sketching how timespaces underlie the coordination of action, the aggregation of practices and, in this sense, the integration of individual lives. 2. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work #2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices Matching paragraph #FZHH6H: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work #2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices Matching paragraph #WQZYJP: Reading Brīvbode through Schatzki’s site ontology and Hobson’s complementary notion of generative spaces (2016) brings these framings into productive alignment. Where Schatzki names the constitutive interplay of practices and material arrangements through which a site exists, Hobson identifies the political stakes of attending to such sites in the context of circular economy debates: mainstream CE discourse has, she argues, foregrounded industrial closed-loop systems and consumer “acceptance” of practices designed by others, while obscuring “spaces where disparate forms of the CE may emerge and/or be fostered” (Hobson 2016). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generative capacity rests precisely on the multiplicity I have been describing: it does not perform a single bounded practice of freecycling but holds in working relation a configuration of divestment, acquisition, repair, sewing, sufficiency, sociality and care. Its participants are, in Hobson’s terms, designer-consumer-user-repairer citizens, and the swapshop is the kind of site that makes such hybrid roles practicable. 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work #ULSUAX Conclusion Matching paragraph #2G2WSX: First, following Warde (2005) and Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012), consumption is not itself a practice but a moment within practices, and the elements that organise a practice — materials, meanings, and competencies — should be understood as travelling, recombining, and circulating across sites and carriers. This commitment is more than a methodological aside; it shapes how I treat Brīvbode. Rather than a single bounded practice with stable elements, Brīvbode is a site at which several recognisable practices — household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, craft, sociality, sufficiency, sorting, volunteering, resale — are brought into working relation. Following Shove et al.‘s distinction between bundles and complexes (2012: 95–101), I treat freecycling not as a discrete practice entity but as the name for this bundle: a configuration dense enough to coordinate and to be recognised, but not so settled that it has integrated into a single shared routine. Schatzki’s (2002) site ontology supports this reading by treating sites as constitutive milieux where social life unfolds through the interaction of multiple practices rather than as backdrops for one. In Nicolini’s (2017: 28) terms, Brīvbode is a nexus — “a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together.” 5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #ZF9EYF Introduction Matching paragraph #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. 6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Matching paragraph #XMLDYN: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 7. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Matching paragraph #4364QB: Schatzki’s site ontology 8. Source: Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption (#KWZ2A4), Alan Warde, Daniel Welch, p. 8 Context: #STMANK Theories of Practice and Sustainable Consumption #6U6DVD 5.1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEORIES OF PRACTICE #UQZN9F 5.4 AGENCY, CHANGE AND CONVERGENCE Matching excerpt #ET8H3W: Central to the further development of theories of practice for sustainable consumption has been the work of Schatzki (especially 1996, 2002). Schatzki has rigorously elaborated a social ontology of practice, in critical dialogue with the practice theories of Bourdieu, Foucault and Giddens, by way of the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. This ontology establishes a 'strong' version of practice theory in which both social order and individuality result from practices. It asserts that there is no macro level beyond the realm of social practices, which are 'not merely "sites" of interaction but are, instead, ordering and orchestrating entities in their own right' (Shove and Walker 2010, p. 471). 9. Source: Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices (#N5VYH8), Aricia F.M. Castelo, Martina Schäfer, Minelle E. Silva, p. 2 Context: #PXPU7G Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices #ZPYNHS 2. Social practice theory: 'zooming in and out' as the lens of social analysis Matching excerpt #6XGH9P: The method suggests that a multiplicity of relations be considered surrounding social practices. We follow Schatzki's (1996, 2002) ontology that establishes a 'strong' version of practice theory in which both social order and individuality result from practices. In this sense, more important than making the distinction between micro- and macro-approaches to investigate social practices is to understand that 'large' or 'small' phenomena are made of the same components, of connected practices and arrangements (Schatzki, 2011). The analysis needs to consider that activities never occur in isolation and that practices are always immersed in a thick texture of interconnections (Nicolini, 2012). However, Nicolini did not operationalise his ideas systematically for empirical analysis, which is the main contribution of this paper. 10. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 24 Context: #LSJS5V I. Introduction #R9MPHV 1.2 Problematizing Consumption #779H37 1.2.2 Consumption in relation to production #ARAQ4Q 1. Introduction Matching excerpt #Y9F68Q: In this view, practices become the site for studying consumption and its entanglement with production. As Schatzki (2005, 468) puts it: “Practices are the site, but not the spatial site, of activities.” Based on this line of thought, Warde (2005) and Schatzki (2005) highlight the organization of practices as the focal point for analysis. This allows framing of both consumption and production as taking place within the site of practices. Thus, a practice-based approach suggests that a focus on practices allows a view of consumption and its entanglement with production as deeply embedded in the practices of everyday life. 11. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 25 Context: #LSJS5V I. Introduction #EQ63TF 1.3 Research Objective and Approach Matching excerpt #K24C7V: To this end, my approach to study consumption conceptually and empirically is through the lens of practices (Schatzki 1996; 2001; Reckwitz 2002; Warde, 2005; Halkier, Katz-Gerro, Martens, 2011). This is, to a great extent, inspired by Bourdieu's (1977) argument that social phenomena cannot be adequately understood outside the practices in which they are interwoven. Thus, this thesis treats practices as the 'sites' (Schatzki 2005) in which consumption as a social phenomenon takes place. Specifically, I seek to study consumption and the dynamics resulting from its entanglement with productive aspects on a relatively confined site, namely that of practices. 12. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 48 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #ASYK8A 2.2 A Practice-theoretical Approach to Consumption #QQPH4C 2.2.1 Motivation #NWZ596 2. Theoretical perspectives Matching excerpt #P7UT27: First, studying consumption implies recognizing relationships to production. Consumption holds an analytical category, but shall not be treated singularly and in isolation of production. Most prominently, this is indicated in literatures of prosumption, which highlight the need for paying attention to the spectrum of consumption and production (e.g., Ritzer 2010). As Campbell's (2005) craft consumption highlights, consumption still takes place but is embedded within productive activities. This resonates broadly with Marx' (1971) work suggesting that dialectical relations of consumption and production can be found not only on levels of theoretical abstraction but also on the level of actual processes. While co-creation literature frames such processes in terms of actions of and interactions between firms and consumers, a practice-theoretical perspective introduces the idea of framing such processes as practices. Thus, it shifts emphasis away from the individual subject, or role, but rather suggests viewing production and consumption as being entangled with practices. This speaks to Warde's (2005) practice moments of consumption as embedded within practices, but also recognizes relations to productive aspects of practices. In the context of consumption and production, this means appreciating the dyadic linkages between consumption and production as previous literature has suggested (e.g., Arnould 2007; Arnould and Thompson 2007; Ritzer, Dean, and Jurgenson 2012; Warde 1992)—but without the necessity of collapsing consumption and production into one category (Firat and Venkatesh 1995). The idea introduced by Schatzki (2005) of regarding practices as 'sites' translates here into practices becoming the site for studying consumption and its entanglement with productive aspects. As an implication, production and consumption must be defined in the light of the site in which they take place—the practices. In other words, consumption and production are not defined as universal categories, but must be understood in terms of the practice in which they take place. Marx recognized the many forms production can take, referring to different sectors of production. However, his reasoning on the entanglement of consumption with production was on a highly abstract level. Regarding practices as the site for consumption and production means paying attention to the relatively immediate forms of consumption and production taking place within this site. 13. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 74 Context: #WAAS8U 3. Method #A8WAPN 3.2 Research Approach and Empirical Material Matching excerpt #ZNF4Z8: A practice-theoretical approach is essentially an ontology that comes with a number of epistemological implications. Practice theory declares practices as the research object: practices are the objects on which to conduct research. More precisely, then, this translates into scrutiny of the organization of a practice (section 2.2.2). Like most theories, or theoretical perspectives, a practice-theoretical approach offers a certain simplification of social phenomena, while at the same time complicating it. By foregrounding certain elements, it deemphasizes other elements. The ontological nature of the subject as a carrier of practice in a practice theoretical perspective implies focusing on what is going on (in terms of doings—meanings—objects) rather than on the characteristics of the subject, or carrier, per se. The carriers cannot be excluded from the analysis, but they are not overly deterministic. A practice-theoretical way of knowing implies a focus on practices. However, practices are abstract entities. Epistemologically, then, attention has to be paid to their performances. Consumption (and production, too, for that matter) is an etic label sculpted over emic doings performed by carriers on the site of practices. Practices are the shells that organize the sets of activities within them and constitute the experiences for those engaged with the performance of practices. 14. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 197 Context: #5CGWLY HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND 'GENERAL UNDERSTANDINGS'? #4DNBXU The category of general understandings Matching excerpt #VXBA6L: Nicolini plausibly suggests general understandings constitute 'external understandings' of the overall project in which the practice is engaged (2012: 167). How should we think about that externality? Where , external to the focal practice, does the general understanding lie, or rather, come from? The external here hints at a supra-practice level which threatens to undo the 'high order ontological sameness' of Schatzki's flat ontology of the social (2011: 4). Thus Caldwell (2012) suggests that the notion of 'general understandings' potentially leads Schatzki back to the position from which his work aims to escape: 'the "social" conceived as "general understandings" may presuppose an object of enquiry that goes beyond the practices in which it is carried or enacted' (2012: 291). However, Caldwell evinces a widely held misunderstanding that Schatzki's general position amounts to a kind of 'Il n'y a rien en dehors du pratique'. Caldwell assumes either that general understandings presuppose a distinct ontological level (perhaps implied by the relative coherence that complexes of general understandings may assume) or that they are carried in discursive formations exhibiting forms of organisation other than that of integrative practices and therefore debarred from Schatzki's ontology. To take the latter possibility first, as Schatzki makes clear in his contribution to this volume, discursive formations exhibiting their own forms of organisation are entirely compatible with his ontology. Schatzki shows that various forms of discursive organisation intersect with integrative practices in the form of sayings and texts incorporated into and carried by them. It is an empirical matter how more or less integrated those discursive formations are with specific configurations of practices. As for the former, no distinct ontological level is necessarily implied by the category of general understandings. The 'external' or 'beyond' in which general understandings subsist simply is configurational, whether found specifically in discourse 4 or in heterogeneous assemblages of practice and discourse. A number of ontologically compatible concepts of such assemblages are already common conceptual currency, such as Foucault's 'dispositif', Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) 'orders of worth' or Hajer's (1995) 'discourse coalitions'. 15. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 195 Context: #5CGWLY HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND 'GENERAL UNDERSTANDINGS'? #3GLKAJ Introduction Matching excerpt #YULEJL: Practice theory is increasingly prominent in social scientific analysis. Hence, its virtues and its defects are being subjected to greater scrutiny. As part of that exercise, we examine the conceptualisation of widespread cultural understandings in the social scientific use of practice theory. Schatzki's (1996; 2002) schema of practice components has proved generative, particularly as adapted by Warde (2005) and Shove et al. (2012). However, virtually no attention has been paid to Schatzki's (2002) concept of 'general understandings', which is one potentially relevant instrument to address this challenge. 1 In The site of the social , Schatzki (2002) introduces the category of general understandings into his schema of components of practice, an addition to his earlier tripartite model of 'practical understandings', 'rules' and 'teleoaffective structures' (1996). In this chapter, we seek to open up issues posed by general understandings as a category within a schema of generic practice components. The concept of general understandings promises to deal with broad cultural conceptions which transcend the boundaries between 'integrative practices' (Schatzki, 2002). Approximate matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work #2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices Score: 0.625 Related paragraph #FZHH6H: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 2. Source: The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (#6J5MKL), Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 50 Context: #YTXLA2 Part I #NM2CWR Practices and social orders #WE73JT Practice mind-ed orders Score: 0.585 Related excerpt #3YWBQF: Theodore R.Schatzki 3. Source: The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (#6J5MKL), Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 10 Context: #9RD3PC Contents #5XDRJ5 IntroductionPractice theory Score: 0.57 Related excerpt #DPV8TF: Theodore R. Schatzki 4. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Score: 0.905 Related paragraph #4364QB: Schatzki’s site ontology 5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Score: 0.625 Related paragraph #XMLDYN: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 6. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 50 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #ASYK8A 2.2 A Practice-theoretical Approach to Consumption #F8J2JD 2.2.2 Tenets of practice-theoretical ontology #KGFTXJ Unit of analysis #Z2FUGL 2. Theoretical perspectives Score: 0.659 Related excerpt #EDT6KV: (Schatzki 2005, 480) 7. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 57 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #ASYK8A 2.2 A Practice-theoretical Approach to Consumption #FKB7N6 2.2.3 Types of practices #3Y3QX4 Interpersonal practices Score: 0.643 Related excerpt #A7UHUT: (Schatzki 2005, 472) 8. Source: Consumption and Practice (#QRRZP2), Benjamin Julien Hartmann, p. 66 Context: #F4KA5L 2. Theoretical perspectives #7FDH2N 2.3 Approaching Practice Moments #AFNUJ7 2.3.2 Productive moments #P4WSKH Embedding production within practices #3HP9XR 2. Theoretical perspectives Score: 0.58 Related excerpt #V5XPB4: (Schatzki 2005, 472, original emphasis in bold) 9. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 115 Context: #RYNGP9 IS SMALL THE ONLY BEAUTIFUL? #NYECJK Three theory method packages through which to study large-scale phenomena from a practice-based perspective #SFYGWW Large-scale phenomena as a fabric of interconnected practices: from metaphor to method Score: 0.668 Related excerpt #WF6NML: (Schatzki, 2011: 8) 10. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 44 Context: #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE #JWCJBK Introduction #57NT24 Material-spatial qualities5 Score: 0.64 Related excerpt #BLBQBG: (Schatzki, 2010b: 130) 11. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 44 Context: #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE #JWCJBK Introduction #57NT24 Material-spatial qualities5 Score: 0.572 Related excerpt #748LL8: Schatzki's concept of 'material arrangements' (2002) provides a better representation of the spatial quality of material connections between practices. He writes: 12. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 138 Context: #GX3BZC SAYINGS, TEXTS AND DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS Score: 0.571 Related excerpt #X2XFFB: Theodore Schatzki 13. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 9 Context: #W7VGXU CONTENTS #WY4TAQ CONTRIBUTORS Score: 0.565 Related excerpt #CMXRHE: Theodore Schatzki is a dean and professor of philosophy and geography in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky, USA. Among his books are Social Practices (1996), The Site of the Social (2001) and The Timespace of Human Activity (2010). 14. Source: Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (#VKBZ23), Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 4 Context: #T3ERFF SOCIAL PRACTICES Score: 0.599 Related excerpt #TQUMQJ: THEODORE R. SCHATZKI 15. Source: Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (#VKBZ23), Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 5 Context: #T3ERFF SOCIAL PRACTICES Score: 0.564 Related excerpt #ZR4WHZ: Schatzki, Theodore R. ### 19. Tool result: search_text Exact matches 1. Source: The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (#3LSRBZ), Tim Ingold, p. 197 Context: #6PPCBM Part II #76LAV7 Dwelling #KGP8HK How animals and people make themselves at home in the world #NGC27F THE SEARCH FOR ORIGINS Matching excerpt #DJ2LG4: a distance, prior to their assembly into a convex, self-supporting structure. For another thing, the ape makes its nest by bending the vegetation around its own body; whereas the human builds a hut, and then enters it (Groves and Sabater Pi 1985: 45). There is a sense, as Hediger remarks, in which apes build from the 'bottom up', seeking support for rest and sleeping, whereas humans build from the 'top down' seeking shelter from sun, rain or wind (1977: 184). Yet there are also remarkable similarities between ape and human living arrangements, in the overall number and layout of nests or huts and in the underlying social organisation, and on the grounds of these similarities, Groves and Sabater Pi feel justified in arguing that human campsites are but elaborations of a generalised ape pattern. All the critical differences – the functioning of the site as a home-base, the collection of material prior to construction, the technique of building from the outside – can be put down, they think, to one factor, namely the human ability 'to visualise objects in new configurations, and to bring these configurations into being on the basis of that mental picture' (1985: 45). 2. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 55 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #HF9VX7 Timespace and the Organization of Social Life #LCAY65 Timespace and Society Matching excerpt #D6VVUN: As I have been writing, practices are carried on amid arrangements of objects. Promenading, betting, talking and watching races are carried out amid the arrangements of objects that form viewing stands, concessions, the trackside holding area, the interior paddock, and the passageways, staircases and doorways that permit movement between these. Practices, moreover, are tied to other practices and also bound up with other bundles of practices and arrangements more or less tightly or loosely. The practice-arrangement bundle at Keeneland on race day, for example, is bound up with (1) the bundles of the Keeneland corporation and of the taxi services that bring people to the track and (2) the bundles at Keeneland during annual horse sales or at other race tracks during their meets. The sum-total of linked practice-arrangement bundles at any moment forms a gigantic, intricate and constantly metamorphosing web that forms the overall site of social existence (see Schatzki 2002). This immense plenum also defines the total objective temporal and spatial spread of social life. Elsewhere (Schatzki 2002, 2003) I have argued that social phenomena can be understood as segments or configurations of this plenum of practices and arrangements. This claim entails that any social phenomenon consists either in a practice-arrangement bundle or in features of such bundles (racial prejudice, for example, consists in features of many bundles). What I want to argue in the remainder of this chapter is that interwoven timespaces form an infrastructure that pervades the practice-arrangement plenum, linking actions and tying practices together into the bundles that make up the site of the social. Stated in more familiar terms: timespace is crucial to the constitution of social phenomena. I will essay to make this claim plausible by sketching how timespaces underlie the coordination of action, the aggregation of practices and, in this sense, the integration of individual lives. 3. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 58 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #HF9VX7 Timespace and the Organization of Social Life #7PUTEL The Aggregation of Practices (and Arrangements) Matching excerpt #CG5J8M: A second key feature of social life is the aggregation of practices. Coordination is already a form of aggregation since it is a joining of actions through which a result ensues (e.g. a meeting at the head of the stairs comes off, betting coexists with conviviality, horses are sold). By 'the aggregation of practices', however, I mean practices hanging together in the constitution of social phenomena. Recall my claim that a social phenomenon is either a bundle of practices and material arrangements or features of such bundles. This claim implies that a social phenomenon embraces interconnected practices (and arrangements). Consider the following examples of a social organization, a social event and a social phenomenon: 4. Source: Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture (Cultures of Consumption) (#3N7TTE), Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk, p. 60 Context: #LS8EXH List of Tables and Figures #HF9VX7 Timespace and the Organization of Social Life #7PUTEL The Aggregation of Practices (and Arrangements) Matching excerpt #YERV8H: These facts about materiality and spatiality, by the way, suggest that the designers and producers who make and lay out material arrangements have a special hand in configuring practices and their relations. These individuals enjoy the privilege of initiative – in constructing and laying out settings, they confront other people with faits accompli to which these others must accommodate themselves. Of course, the power of designers and producers in this regard is limited. How they build and arrange the world reflects existing practices and social matters. People, moreover, appropriate material arrangements in accord with the practices they already carry on. Still, the material spatialities that designers and producers set up form a background for the bundling of practices. 5. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work #2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices Matching paragraph #FZHH6H: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 6. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work #2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices Matching paragraph #WQZYJP: Reading Brīvbode through Schatzki’s site ontology and Hobson’s complementary notion of generative spaces (2016) brings these framings into productive alignment. Where Schatzki names the constitutive interplay of practices and material arrangements through which a site exists, Hobson identifies the political stakes of attending to such sites in the context of circular economy debates: mainstream CE discourse has, she argues, foregrounded industrial closed-loop systems and consumer “acceptance” of practices designed by others, while obscuring “spaces where disparate forms of the CE may emerge and/or be fostered” (Hobson 2016). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generative capacity rests precisely on the multiplicity I have been describing: it does not perform a single bounded practice of freecycling but holds in working relation a configuration of divestment, acquisition, repair, sewing, sufficiency, sociality and care. Its participants are, in Hobson’s terms, designer-consumer-user-repairer citizens, and the swapshop is the kind of site that makes such hybrid roles practicable. 7. Source: The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (#6J5MKL), Eike von Savigny, Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 54 Context: #YTXLA2 Part I #NM2CWR Practices and social orders #WE73JT Practice mind-ed orders #P6Y4XH Setting up the argument Matching excerpt #VVDLCY: Both Taylor and the Laclau/Mouffe team pinpoint key features of practices that are pertinent to their forming the context of social order. Laclau and Mouffe emphasize practice as activity. Moreover, in attributing the transformation of discourses to practice, they declare human activity causally responsible for social orders (as suggested by their references to 'social forces' that transform discourses). Taylor, meanwhile, highlights practices as site and not just as activity: Practices are contexts where actions are carried out. He suggests, further, that the meanings that are instantiated in the arrangements established within a given practice are drawn from the possibilities contained in the practice's semantic space. He thereby links the establishment of social order to abstract contexts. Taylor also, finally, anchors a practice's semantic space in the distinctions marked by the language used in it. For Taylor, as for many contemporary theorists, language is an essential constitutive dimension of social reality—and also of practices and social orders as a result. 8. Source: Social bases of material consumption: The relationship between social groups and possession of household appliances in Denmark (#ANC583), Mette Hove Jacobsen, p. 4 Context: #BJSR8J Social bases of material consumption: The relationship between social groups and possession of household appliances in Denmark #G4ZT62 Theoretical background #8ALMAM Social practices as arrays of human activities and the role of social groups Matching excerpt #WVPGWW: Empirical studies within the sociology of sustainable consumption often assume that practices and their social meaning are changed and reproduced through infrastructures and different constellations of material objects. When exploring the production and reproduction of conventionally shared understandings and common procedures, focus has, to a large extent, been on how infrastructures and systems of technologies co-evolve with understandings of appropriate conduct. In this sense, infrastructures and systems of materials get a background role in shaping the characteristics of a practice and in explaining the social processes that generate patterns of consumption 6 (see e.g. Shove et al., 2015). In this context, past experience is materially stored, and systems of material objects compose a knowledge depot that is prepared to travel between individuals (this has been theoretically conceptualised by Shove et al. (2012, 2015)). To Bourdieu, meanings and practical understandings are 'objectified' in relational differences in the ways in which people act and are embodied in humans as different constellations of dispositions. Consequently, the engagement in, and performance of, practices are in this perspective interpreted as properties of social groups as opposed to material arrangements. Furthermore, regularities in practices and common procedures are conceived as a consequence of embodied systems of dispositions that vary across social groups, not a consequence of systems of technologies and material arrangements. 9. Source: Social bases of material consumption: The relationship between social groups and possession of household appliances in Denmark (#ANC583), Mette Hove Jacobsen, p. 16 Context: #BJSR8J Social bases of material consumption: The relationship between social groups and possession of household appliances in Denmark #LHQMA3 Conclusion Matching excerpt #GLQM5K: Overall, the results of the article elucidate the social differentiation of material consumption and how social groups serve to reproduce different understandings of consumption practices – and vice versa. Thereby, the article emphasises the importance of social groups in practice theoretical approaches in general, and the sociology of sustainable consumption in particular. Researchers within this field have been particularly interested in studying the role of material arrangements and infrastructures in reproducing shared understandings and common procedures, but in order to fully understand the complexity of consumption patterns and the possibilities for sustainable development, researchers within the sociology of sustainable consumption should equally engage with and shed light on shared understandings and common procedures generated and reproduced by social groups. 10. Source: Sustainable Consumption and Practice Theories: Connecting Elements of Clothing Sharing (#EPZXEW), Marcia de Freitas Duarte, Minelle E. Silva, Márcia R. Cavalcante Costa, p. 6 Context: #LVDEMW 3. COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION AND PRACTICE THEORIES Matching excerpt #9LCWU9: Schatzki (2019) is one of the theorists who stands out in the discussion of practices as components of the social. Its approach is based on the assumption that all social phenomena are rooted in practical. A practice is defined as “an open and temporary set of actions and sayings, linked by practical understandings, rules, tele-affective structure and general understanding” (Schatzki, 2002, p. 8). The concept of material arrangements, which includes humans, artifacts, organisms and things of nature (Schatzki, 2005, 2012) is useful in recognizing a range of more extensive material relationships between which practices take place. Reckwitz (2002) provides more details, stating that a practice presupposes the interconnection of elements with each other: “forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249). As the social is the field of practices, they are, inevitably, imbricated in material arrangements that they corroborate to create, in which they are realized and through which they (practices) exist (Schatzki, 2005). Practices and arrangements are thus always linked in one or more ways, forming an inseparable amalgam (Schatzki, 2002, 2012), a set of practices results in a constellation of practices (Schatzki, 2019). 11. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Matching paragraph #XMLDYN: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 12. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Matching paragraph #TEEVBW: This thesis brings together practice-theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption and consumption work for a study of non-domestic site of goods circulation within a context of non-monetary exchange. Brīvbode is a site where the ordinarily private and dispersed practices of domestic material life become visible. The continued existence of the swapshop – sustained through regular volunteer labour, participant labour, and a relatively stable social and material infrastructure – can be read as evidence of the demand that household goods circulation generates: a demand for routes of divestment that, while taking some degree of effort, are socially acknowledged. 13. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 44 Context: #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE #JWCJBK Introduction #57NT24 Material-spatial qualities5 Matching excerpt #93CN43: Human coexistence is inherently tied, not just to practices, but also to material arrangements. Indeed, social life, as indicated, always transpires as part of a mesh of practices and arrangements: practices are carried on amid and determinative of, while also dependent on and altered by, material arrangements. I call the practice-arrangement nexuses, as inherently part of which human coexistence transpires, sites of the social. 14. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 145 Context: #GX3BZC SAYINGS, TEXTS AND DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS #PTPR3C Sayings and texts as connecting-and-threading-infrastructure Matching excerpt #VVZM45: Practices – organised manifolds of doings and saying – connect to material arrangements – composed of bodies, artefacts, living creatures and things of nature – to form practice-arrangement bundles (e.g. Schatzki, 2002). Such bundles, in turn, connect to other bundles to form wider constellations of practices and arrangements. Social life transpires within these bundles and constellations; all social phenomena consist of sectors, slices or aspects of bundles and constellations. Bundles and constellations, moreover, assume diverse shapes and sizes. When, for example, bundles connect, the resulting constellations are typically larger (in the sense of spatial extension) than the original bundles; repeated connections that are not matched by significant decouplings result in very large constellations such as those in which governments or economic systems consist. Interconnected constellations, finally, blanket the globe and extend under the earth and into space. Taken together, bundles and constellations form one gigantic nexus of practices and arrangements, what I dub the 'plenum of practice' (Schatzki, 2016d). 15. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 191 Context: #HWFWXX PLACING POWER IN PRACTICE THEORY #ARCLGB How is the conduct of conduct practised? Matching excerpt #T3GDY9: In their engagements with Latour, neither Nicolini nor Schatzki directly addresses power. Indeed, Schatzki quickly moves to reduce any sense that one site has determinative influence, given that 'the progression of social affairs is thoroughly contingent' (Schatzki, 2015b: 8). Accepting this, there is nevertheless the problem that some sites, some organisations and some people are clearly situated in systematically advantageous positions amidst the associations, arrangements and alignments comprising social life, such that they have distinctive capacity to act purposively in ways which shape action over distance and across locales of action. The challenge is to develop concepts and methods that can help grasp how arrangements and associations of practices and the heterogeneous flows they are bound with are produced through, and reproduce, systematic inequities in capacities to act, including to act in ways which shape others' capacities to act. Approximate matches 1. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [MIKAEL] (#4V8VH7), Ieva Lange Context: #L759F3 Practice Theory and Consumption Work #2MV3XY Sites of Interacting Practices Score: 0.6 Related paragraph #FZHH6H: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 2. Source: The Dynamics of Social Practice (#5AXAEJ), Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Mika Pantzar, p. 162 Context: #QRSCLP PROMOTING TRANSITIONS IN PRACTICE #WNL5BX PRACTICE THEORY AND CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY #8WHQQJ Configuring elements of practice Score: 0.541 Related excerpt #MNZ798: and materialized in the smallest detail of kitchen design through to the distance between home and school (Herten and Spreiregen, 1971). Not everything went to plan, but there is no doubt that the ambition was to bring new social arrangements into being by providing the moral and material infrastructure around which they might develop. 3. Source: Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia [draft] (#FYG32U), Ieva Lange Context: #W8HHQV Circulation, Practice, and Consumption Work: A Theoretical Framework #Q3A3ZZ Conclusion Score: 0.6 Related paragraph #XMLDYN: “The deep interdependence between practices and material arrangements is a central theme in Schatzki’s site ontology. According to Schatzki (2002), a social site is not merely a spatial backdrop for action, but a constitutive milieu where social life unfolds across three interrelated dimensions. First, the site refers to the basic location where something happens, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Second, it represents the broader thematic or systemic context in which specific practices are embedded. Third, the site encompasses a deeper, constitutive context that gives practices their social meaning. In social sites, actions are seldom shaped by a single practice alone but emerge from the complex interaction of multiple overlapping practices.” 4. Source: Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (#GABXSA), Daniel Miller, p. 2 Context: #AG4ZH7 ACKNOWLEDGING CONSUMPTION #43CSB6 ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY IN EUROPE #QX55EX ARCHITECTURE AND ORDER Score: 0.533 Related excerpt #HV25P4: Approaches to Social Space 5. Source: What future for collaborative consumption? A practice theoretical account (#LB72BP), Gert Spaargaren, Walter Fraanje, p. 2 Context: #AF6QDV What future for collaborative consumption? A practice theoretical account #NQ9PXZ 2. A practice theoretical account of social change #HT477P 2.2. Embeddedness Score: 0.548 Related excerpt #U2CAXE: When studying practices as entities, we analyse them as entities that are embedded in sets of other social practices and 'material arrangements' (Schatzki, 2011). Schatzki defines the latter as "interconnected human bodies, organisms, artifacts, and things" through and amidst which social life transpires (Schatzki, 2016, 2002, p. 38). 6. Source: Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices (#N5VYH8), Aricia F.M. Castelo, Martina Schäfer, Minelle E. Silva, p. 3 Context: #PXPU7G Food practices as part of daily routines: A conceptual framework for analysing networks of practices #F2UNMP 3. Dimensions and perspectives of a network of practice analysis #24D33Q 3.2. Defining the spatial dimension Score: 0.575 Related excerpt #3Q7BA4: Location is important as part of the definition of social practice events that manifest in more than one place and more than one time, which helps to refine the focus of contemporary spatial coordinates using practice theory (Schatzki, 2009, 2010). Awareness of specific characteristics of the practice can be achieved by comparing its variations in multiple spatial and temporal settings. Depending on the setting (materiality), it might be relevant for empirical purposes to look further and compare, for example, eating patterns in different localities (at home versus dining out), in rural versus urban areas, in different countries and so on (Holm et al., 2016; Southerton et al., 2012; Warde et al., 2007). Therefore, recognising that the performance of practices is context-dependent and that they are adjusted to particular situations has given location more importance as part of the description of eating practices. Getting the right people together, at the proper time for a particular type of meal is the practical skill of arranging a meal event (Laakso, 2017; Warde, 2016). The performance of eating practices occurs mainly in two spatial settings: inside and outside the household environment. Despite the fact that most eating practices are performed in private spaces inside the household context (Warde, 2016), spaces outside the home (e.g. workplaces, restaurants [including takeout] and other people's homes) have gained importance as ordinary places to eat as well (Sobal et al., 2012; Warde, 2016; Warde & Martens, 2000). They represent different types of events and dishes being consumed (Warde, 2016), which leads to different types of connections with additional practices (e.g. mobility). 7. Source: Consumption and Commodities (#N7FUYP), D. Miller, p. 15 Context: #GAMUE2 CONSUMPTION AND COMMODITIES #V39WRN Consumption and Kinship Score: 0.542 Related excerpt #CLAHDA: found that little has changed. The home remains a key arena through which the forms of sociability are defined according to dynamic but often intensely normative criteria. The European bourgeoisie were as obsessed with household thrift as the Colombian peasant (40, 49, 133). Norwegian working-class housewives use the decoration of their homes to produce a highly egalitarian and normative foundation for sociability (50, 51; see also 77). The placement of media technologies is studied as a construction of "the moral economy of the home" (118). The exchange between male labor and female aesthetic in appropriating state kitchens in London becomes the practice through which gender reestablishes itself as difference against an ideology of modernist homogenization (86). Similarly, recent work in France on homes and domestic rituals suggests that commodity status does not diminish the centrality of domestic routines to the establishment of a system of values that is objectified neither in persons nor in the taxonomies of material culture per se but, as Bourdieu argued for less commodified societies, in the practices that involve both (14, 73, 112; cf 53). 8. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 40 Context: #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE #JWCJBK Introduction #DQ889U (Inter)connections in complexes of practices Score: 0.573 Related excerpt #7W5JXN: ... there are various ways in which spatial arrangements constitute and underpin potentially important patterns of association. Some have to do with physical location of material elements. For example, practices requiring good supplies of running water converge around taps and drains. 9. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 44 Context: #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE #JWCJBK Introduction #57NT24 Material-spatial qualities5 Score: 0.572 Related excerpt #93CN43: Human coexistence is inherently tied, not just to practices, but also to material arrangements. Indeed, social life, as indicated, always transpires as part of a mesh of practices and arrangements: practices are carried on amid and determinative of, while also dependent on and altered by, material arrangements. I call the practice-arrangement nexuses, as inherently part of which human coexistence transpires, sites of the social. 10. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 44 Context: #U8ANZK QUALITIES OF CONNECTIVE TISSUE IN HOSPITAL LIFE #JWCJBK Introduction #57NT24 Material-spatial qualities5 Score: 0.572 Related excerpt #748LL8: Schatzki's concept of 'material arrangements' (2002) provides a better representation of the spatial quality of material connections between practices. He writes: 11. Source: The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations and Practitioners (#R49AUC), Allison Hui, Elizabeth Shove, Theodore Schatzki, p. 96 Context: #8UPZTD TECHNOLOGIES WITHIN AND BEYOND PRACTICES #7Y5ZUN Materials as elements of practice and beyond Score: 0.551 Related excerpt #RG82NH: the concept of material arrangements is not restricted to the materiality of practice performances. This allows Schatzki (2012: 4) to list a number of other ways in which 'practices effect, use, give meaning to and are inseparable from arrangements while... arrangements channel, prefigure, facilitate and are essential to practices' through relations of causality, prefiguration, intelligibility intentionality and constitution (Schatzki, 2010a; 2012). 12. Source: Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective (#UB9EAT), Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Juana Camacho-Otero, p. 7 Context: #7Q7UZ6 Consumer engagement in the circular economy: Exploring clothes swapping in emerging economies from a social practice perspective #XFXJRE 5 | FINDINGS #MK5XFA 5.3 | Performing clothes swapping Score: 0.539 Related excerpt #CCFBTL: A practice emerges, transforms, and perpetuates because its elements interact (Shove et al., 2012b). Based on the data collected and analysed, we identified three dual interactions between the elements that seemed to address the concerns about the activity. First, from material to meanings, we found that the place and the selection of clothes were done in order to counterbalance negative meanings. Organizers selected and furnished and decorated the places so they would evoke meanings of coolness and sophistication as opposed of poverty and low status. In a similar way, clothes from recognized brands were favoured by organizers as another way to avoid negative meanings. From meanings to materials, messages were posted in the event location conveying new meanings for clothes swapping and consumption related to community building and sustainable consumption. The second set connects skills and materials. By intervening the space creating fitting rooms, the organizers help participants to reduce the 13. Source: Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (#VKBZ23), Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 208 Context: #FBR3HC Practices and Sociality #EUFB9Q Social Order Within Practices Score: 0.577 Related excerpt #VNUMCM: An important aspect of social order is the different locations individuals occupy in the arrangement of lives. A person's location within a practice's social ordering is his location vis-à-vis others as established by his place in the tissue of coexistences opened in the practice – thus by commonalities and orchestrations in the intelligibility governing his and their behavior, how others are the objects of his conditions and he the object of theirs, the connections of his life with theirs through settings, and the particular chains of actions that link him with others. This phenomenon of differential locatedness in webs of coexistence is what in the domain of practices corresponds to the widespread and familiar notion of differential position in social structure. Although I will not discuss social structure in this chapter, I claim ex cathedra that differential position in "social structure" is grounded in differential locations in practice socialities. 14. Source: Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (#VKBZ23), Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 202 Context: #FBR3HC Practices and Sociality #XV84DW The Sociality Established in Practices Score: 0.537 Related excerpt #W2BVFC: A third general medium of sociality is settings of action and the spaces established there. Socialities in this medium divide into those embracing single settings (commonality) and those encompassing multiple ones (orchestration). The lives of participants in a practice often hang together by virtue of taking place within the same or different settings. 15. Source: Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (#VKBZ23), Theodore R. Schatzki, p. 203 Context: #FBR3HC Practices and Sociality #XV84DW The Sociality Established in Practices Score: 0.534 Related excerpt #UPQKHM: The second form of multiple-setting sociality is intersetting layouts and spatialities. An intersetting layout is a setup of different settings, together with the physical connections among them, that coordinates and facilitates the performance in those settings of different constituent actions of a given practice. An intersetting spatiality is the correlated field of intermeshing normative spatialities that is anchored in the different settings encompassed in an intersetting layout. Intersetting layouts and spatialities exist wherever objects that trigger, call out, or signal particular ways of acting are distributed in a nonindependent fashion among settings. An example is a layout of stop signs, crosswalks, traffic signals, and other traffic control equipment. When participants in an integrative practice act in settings that are embraced by an intersetting layout/spatiality established in the practice, their lives hang together via this structure. Intersetting structures of ### 20. Assistant I dug through the corpus and the existing #FZHH6H paragraph turns out to be a problem: that "three interrelated dimensions" framing (basic location / thematic / constitutive) doesn't actually appear in Schatzki — it reads like a plausible-sounding summary that doesn't survive contact with the primary text. Better to replace it outright. Below is a draft built from Schatzki's own formulations as they appear in the corpus (the *Practice Turn* chapter, the *Timespace* chapter in Shove/Trentmann/Wilk, the *Nexus of Practices* volume) plus the secondary readings already in your library. --- ## §2.5 Sites of Interacting Practices — draft The argument that what happens at Brīvbode is best understood as a bundle of coordinated practices rather than a single practice entity can be sharpened by returning to the ontological commitments developed in Theodore Schatzki's work. Schatzki's "site ontology" (1996, 2002) is the fullest account in the practice-theoretical literature of how the spatial and material organisation of a setting is implicated in the practices carried on within it, and it is the source from which the more compact bundle/complex vocabulary used by Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012) is downstream. Schatzki's central claim is that social life always transpires as part of a mesh of practices and material arrangements. Practices are "carried on amid and determinative of, while also dependent on and altered by, material arrangements" (Schatzki 2017: 44). A *practice* is an organised manifold of doings and sayings; a *material arrangement* is composed of "interconnected human bodies, organisms, artifacts, and things" (Schatzki 2002: 38) through and amid which practices unfold. The two are not separable: practices presuppose arrangements, and arrangements take their character from the practices that incorporate them. Schatzki calls these "practice-arrangement nexuses... sites of the social" (2017: 44). On this view, practices are "not merely 'sites' of interaction but... ordering and orchestrating entities in their own right" (Shove and Walker 2010: 471, characterising Schatzki). This is what is sometimes called Schatzki's "strong" version of practice theory, in which both social order and individuality result from practices, and there is no macro level beyond practice and arrangement (Welch and Warde 2015: 88). The analytical payoff lies in how Schatzki conceives of larger social phenomena. Bundles of practices and arrangements connect with other bundles to form constellations; together these constitute what Schatzki calls the "plenum of practice" (Schatzki 2017: 145). Any social phenomenon "consists either in a practice-arrangement bundle or in features of such bundles" (Schatzki 2009: 55). The move from "settings where practices happen" to "settings *as* configurations of bundled practices and arrangements" is what makes the framework useful for an ethnography of a small, specific site. Schatzki's own example is illustrative: at the Keeneland racetrack on race day, "promenading, betting, talking and watching races are carried out amid... viewing stands, concessions, the trackside holding area, the interior paddock, and the passageways, staircases and doorways that permit movement between these" (Schatzki 2009: 55). The racetrack is not a backdrop for a practice of horse-racing; it is the bundle in which several practices — betting, drinking, selling horses, corporate operations, taxi services bringing people in — are held in working relation by a distinctive material arrangement. Brīvbode is a much smaller bundle of the same kind. Its sorting table, racks, fitting room, storage room, and corridor of incoming and outgoing visitors do not host freecycling as a pre-existing practice; they constitute the specific arrangement through which divestment, acquisition, sorting, repair, sufficiency, sociality, and waste management are bundled together. Move the same activities to a once-a-month event in a different room, as in some of the other Latvian *brīvbode* initiatives discussed in §1.1, and the bundle reconfigures. Two further features of Schatzki's account are useful for the empirical chapters. First, those who design or arrange material settings exercise "a special hand in configuring practices and their relations": "the material spatialities that designers and producers set up form a background for the bundling of practices" (Schatzki 2009: 60). At Brīvbode, the curatorial work of organisers and volunteers — where to put the racks, what to leave on the sorting table, what to move into storage, how to display — is exactly this bundling work, even when it does not present itself as design. The disagreements over aesthetic that Rasa describes in §4.2 are, in Schatzki's terms, low-key contests over which practices the arrangement should support. Second, Schatzki's account of differential location within a practice-arrangement bundle (1996: 208) provides a way to think about how the same site recruits different participants into different positions: a volunteer, a regular taker, a passing visitor, a reseller, and a heavy-taker each occupy distinct locations in the bundle, even when they move through the same room. This framework dovetails with Hobson's (2016) call to attend to "generative spaces" in the circular economy. Where Schatzki names the constitutive interplay of practices and arrangements through which a site exists, Hobson identifies the political stakes of attending to such sites. Mainstream circular economy discourse, she argues, has foregrounded industrial closed-loop systems and consumer "acceptance" of practices designed by others, while obscuring "spaces where disparate forms of the CE may emerge and/or be fostered" (Hobson 2016: 95). Brīvbode is one such space. Its generativity rests precisely on the multiplicity that Schatzki's ontology makes legible: the swapshop does not perform a single bounded practice of freecycling but holds in working relation a configuration of divestment, acquisition, repair, sewing, sufficiency, sociality and care. Its participants are, in Hobson's terms, designer-consumer-user-repairer citizens, and the small, permanent, non-monetary site is the kind of arrangement that makes such hybrid roles practicable. Reading Brīvbode through Schatzki and Hobson together has a direct methodological consequence for what follows. Following the practice-arrangement bundle means following both the things and the elements of practice — materials, meanings, and competencies in Shove et al.'s (2012) more compact vocabulary — as they cross into and out of the bundle's frame. The empirical chapters are organised by this dual movement. Chapter 4 traces how things and elements travel through the site and recombine; Chapter 5 attends to the labour through which the bundle is held in working relation, and to whom that labour falls. --- **A few notes on the citations:** - **Schatzki 2002** = *The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change* (Penn State UP). The "interconnected human bodies, organisms, artifacts, and things" definition is from p. 38 (cited via Spaargaren and Fraanje and Hui/Shove/Schatzki, but worth verifying directly). - **Schatzki 2009** = "Timespace and the Organization of Social Life," in Shove, Trentmann and Wilk eds., *Time, Consumption and Everyday Life* — you have this in the corpus (#3N7TTE), which is convenient. The Keeneland passage is on p. 55, the designers/producers passage on p. 60. - **Schatzki 2017** = his contributions to Hui, Shove and Schatzki eds., *The Nexus of Practices* (#R49AUC). The "practice-arrangement nexuses" formulation appears at p. 44, the "plenum of practice" at p. 145. - **Schatzki 1996** = *Social Practices* (#VKBZ23 in your corpus) — the differential-location-in-bundles point is at p. 208. - **Welch and Warde 2015** is already in your reference list (#KWZ2A4) and it usefully glosses Schatzki's "strong" position; you can swap it for Hartmann's framing if you prefer. Want me to do a quick pass to update §2.6 (the conclusion synthesis I drafted earlier) to lean on this new §2.5 a bit more explicitly? Right now it cites Schatzki only briefly; with this section in place, it could carry more weight. ### 21. User ah, yeah, please! ### 22. Assistant Here's the revised §2.6 with §2.5 doing real work in it. --- ## §2.6 Conclusion — revised draft This chapter has assembled the conceptual tools through which the thesis examines freecycling in Brīvbode. They cluster around three commitments, each of which has direct consequences for how the empirical chapters proceed. First, following Warde (2005) and Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012), consumption is not itself a practice but a moment within practices, and the elements that organise a practice — materials, meanings, and competencies — should be understood as travelling, recombining, and circulating across sites and carriers. Read together with Schatzki's site ontology (§2.5), this commitment shapes how the thesis treats Brīvbode itself. Brīvbode is not a setting where the practice of freecycling occurs; it is a particular practice-arrangement bundle in which several recognisable practices — household divestment, wardrobe management, repair, craft, sociality, sufficiency, sorting, volunteering, resale — are held in working relation by a specific material arrangement. *Freecycling*, as I use the term in this thesis, names this bundle: a configuration dense enough to coordinate and to be recognised, but not so settled that it has integrated into a single shared routine. Following Shove et al.'s distinction between bundles and complexes (2012: 95–101), freecycling is a bundle, not a complex; in Nicolini's (2017: 28) compatible vocabulary, Brīvbode is a *nexus* — "a scene of action where several practices intersect and are knotted together." This framing allows the analysis in Chapter 4 to follow how meanings and competencies *move through* the site rather than requiring freecycling to behave as a unified routine in Shove's (2003) earlier sense of inconspicuous, taken-for-granted consumption. Brīvbode is a site of circulation in two registers at once. Things move through it: a garment is detached from one practice and becomes available to be enrolled in another. But the elements of practice travel alongside the things. Competencies acquired in one practice — recognising fibre quality, judging a hidden stain, mapping a wardrobe — are recruited into others. Meanings migrate: thrift moves out of darning at home and into modes of divestment (Shove et al. 2012: 75; Gregson 2007); sustainability attaches itself to acts of bringing and taking that practitioners describe in entirely different terms. Materials cross practice boundaries when wire offcuts become craft supplies, when a stranger's garment becomes a costume, when an expired alcohol wipe becomes a useful object again. Shove et al.'s observation that meanings can be "unpacked" in new settings (2012: 70–71) describes a mechanism that, at Brīvbode, the site makes routine. This is what I take Hobson (2016) to mean by *generative spaces*: not just venues where alternative configurations of the circular economy emerge, but sites whose generative capacity comes precisely from holding multiple practices close enough that their elements can be recombined. Recent second-generation work in practice theory (Welch et al. 2020; Askholm 2024) has begun to reintroduce questions of ethics, reflexivity, and cultural meaning that the strategic move toward routine had bracketed; the present study sits within that broader reopening. Second, following Evans (2020), consumption is best understood as a full cycle that includes appropriation and appreciation but also devaluation, divestment, and disposal — or, more economically, attachment and detachment. This expansion is essential for studying a site that operates equally as a route for letting go and a route for acquiring, and that depends on the willingness of carriers to disengage things from one practice so that they can be enrolled in another. The site-ontological framing of §2.5 sharpens the point: detachment from a practice is also detachment from a particular practice-arrangement bundle, and Brīvbode is the threshold at which that detachment becomes available for re-enrolment elsewhere. The analytic attention I pay in Chapters 4 and 5 to the meanings, competencies, and forms of labour involved in detachment — which earlier practice-theoretical work on sustainable consumption tended to underweight (Ehgartner and Holmes 2022) — follows from this framing. Third, while practice theory describes how circulation is socially organised, it tends to underplay the labour that sustains it. Wheeler and Glucksmann's (2015) *consumption work* names this labour directly — the tasks of sorting, cleaning, assessing, repairing, transporting, deciding — and offers a vocabulary for analysing how it is distributed: technically, across people and skills; modally, across paid and unpaid arrangements; processually, across the full span of a consumption process. Hobson et al. (2021) argue that this work intensifies under circular economy conditions, and that responsibility falls disproportionately on those already absorbed into household management work — most often women. Recent work at the intersection of practice theory and circular consumption has begun to reframe such labour as *care* (Mesiranta et al. 2025; Tölg and Fuentes 2025), and Bankovska's (2020) ethnography of Latvian organic provisioning bridges the two registers by showing, after Graeber (2018), that care is not always joyful but often involves obligation, hesitation, and effort that cannot easily be put down. Consumption work and care, in the analysis that follows, are the labour through which a practice-arrangement bundle is held in working relation: without this labour, the site would not coordinate the practices that converge on it. These commitments are complementary rather than competing. Schatzki's site ontology and Shove et al.'s bundle vocabulary describe the social form: how recognisable practices meet at a particular practice-arrangement bundle and exchange elements. Evans's expanded conception of consumption tracks the movement of things and people through the moments of attachment and detachment that the bundle makes available. Wheeler and Glucksmann's consumption work, together with the care register foregrounded by Mesiranta et al. and Bankovska, describes what holding the bundle in place costs and how those costs are distributed. The two empirical chapters use these tools together. Chapter 4, *Keep It Moving*, follows the materials, meanings, and competencies through which the bundle of freecycling is sustained as a recognisable form. Chapter 5, *Hold It Together*, turns to the labour and care that keep the site working. Brīvbode, I argue, is a setting in which the conditions of circular consumption become unusually visible — because the price-mediated devices that ordinarily disguise this work are absent, and because the proximity of practices at a single small site makes their meeting points legible. What remains is the bundle itself, and the people doing the work to keep its elements moving. --- The main changes from the earlier draft: - **§2.5 is now load-bearing rather than ornamental.** The "site as practice-arrangement bundle" framing introduces the bundle/freecycling-as-name move, instead of presenting it as a stipulation. Schatzki and Shove et al. work as primary and compact vocabularies of the same phenomenon. - **The "elements travel alongside things" passage** now sits inside the practice-theoretical synthesis rather than orbiting it. It's the conceptual heart of the chapter and earns its place as the second paragraph. - **The Evans paragraph** picks up §2.5's vocabulary explicitly: detachment isn't just from a thing but from a practice-arrangement bundle. This makes the Evans expansion feel necessary rather than additive. - **The closing paragraph** explicitly threads all three frameworks through the empirical chapters and gestures at the bundle/labour pairing without overclaiming. - I've kept Welch et al. 2020 / Askholm 2024 (the second-generation reflexivity move) in but tucked it inside the longer practice-theoretical paragraph rather than orphaning it. If you want, the next high-leverage piece is probably revising the Chapter 4 opening (#PL9BXR, #SJE87E) to land inside this framework instead of setting up its own framing from scratch — they're already very close, but a few sentences would cinch it. ### 23. User ah, yes, let's try that ### 24. Assistant Here's the revision. The current openings are actually doing the right work — the job here is mostly subtractive: stop re-establishing the framework, lean on §2.5–§2.6's vocabulary, and let the chapter get to its empirical business sooner. --- ## Chapter 4 opening — revised drafts **Replacing #PL9BXR:** This chapter follows the circulation of things through Brīvbode and, alongside it, the circulation of the meanings and competencies that travel with them. Building on §2.5–§2.6, I treat Brīvbode not as the setting of a single practice of freecycling but as a practice-arrangement bundle in which several recognisable practices — household divestment, wardrobe management, dressing, craft, repair, volunteering, sorting, social visiting, resale, waste management, and sufficiency work — are held in working relation by a specific material arrangement. Following Warde (2005: 137), taking or giving at Brīvbode is not itself a practice but a moment that becomes part of one or another of these. The chapter's task is to show how the moments of giving, taking, sorting, and refusing are folded into plural practices, and how the elements of those practices — materials, meanings, and competencies (Shove et al. 2012: 14, 23) — get unpacked and recombined as they cross the threshold of the site. This dual circulation organises the argument. A garment leaving one wardrobe and entering another is the visible movement; the less visible movement is the migration of meanings, competencies, and norms that travel with it. The competence of recognising wool from synthetic, learned in careful dressing, is recruited into volunteer sorting. The meaning of *thrift*, once organised around domestic darning, attaches itself to acts of bringing things to the swapshop (Shove et al. 2012: 75; Gregson 2007). A leftover from one practice — wire offcuts from a hobby workshop, an unfinished embroidery, a half-completed jigsaw — becomes a resource for another. Brīvbode's generative capacity, in Hobson's (2016: 95) sense, lies precisely in this proximity: the material arrangement of the room makes recombination available in ways that more dispersed routes of divestment do not. **Replacing #SJE87E:** 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. --- **What changed and why:** - **Cut the front-loaded justification.** The original #PL9BXR spent a lot of words explaining *why* not to treat freecycling as one practice — that's now done in §2.5. The replacement gets to the analytical task of the chapter sooner. - **Made the "two senses of circulation" point load-bearing** rather than concluding: it's now the second paragraph and gets concrete examples (the wool/synthetic competency, thrift's migration, the leftovers becoming resources). These examples are cued forward to the empirical material in §4.1, §4.5, and §4.7. - **Used Hobson's "generative spaces" as a hinge** between site ontology and the empirical chapter, rather than reserving it for the §2.5 paragraph. - **Roadmap paragraph maps to actual section titles** and gives each a one-line analytical orientation rather than just listing topics. - **The bundle/complex citation is moved to the closing sentence** of the roadmap so it functions as the chapter's analytic claim rather than throat-clearing. - **Kept the original's best moves**: the list of converging practices, the "compressed into proximity" phrase (lovely), the "moments... folded into plural practices" formulation. These survive intact. Things I deliberately did *not* try to do: - Add care/labour framing here. That's Chapter 5's job, and the chapter divisions work better if Ch.4 stays focused on the bundle and the elements travelling, with Ch.5 picking up the cost. - Re-introduce Schatzki by name. He's done his work in §2.5; "practice-arrangement bundle" carries the freight. If you want, the parallel job for the Chapter 5 opening (#DM28T4, #EF5DET, #S6HFAC) is much smaller — those paragraphs are already tight and only need a sentence or two adjusted to point back at "the bundle Chapter 4 described." Happy to do that pass too. ### 25. User would be great! ### 26. Assistant Smaller surgical pass. The bumblebee opening is great and the two-registers structure works; just need to swap "freecycling as a practice" for the bundle vocabulary and tighten one transition. --- ## Chapter 5 opening — revised drafts **Replacing #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. **Replacing #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. **Replacing #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 changed:** - **#DM28T4**: dropped "examined freecycling as a practice" (the framing we just retired); replaced with "the bundle of freecycling coordinates several practices at once," which now points back at the established framework. Changed "what that practice costs" to "what holding that bundle in working relation costs" — the chapter title *Hold It Together* now does conceptual as well as poetic work. Tightened "venues, materials, meanings, and competencies, and the moral economy" — that list was unnecessary because Ch.4 just did it. - **#EF5DET**: added one closing sentence that ties consumption work and care to the bundle framework explicitly. Otherwise unchanged — it was already doing the right thing. - **#S6HFAC**: tightened the Bankovska sentence to land its analytic point (care as labour-that-must-be-done) earlier; added the Hobson et al. citation at the end so the "invisibility to policy" claim is grounded. Otherwise unchanged. If you adopt these, the framework is now consistent across the introduction, theory chapter, both empirical chapter openings, and (already) the chapter conclusions. The remaining big writing jobs are the placeholder-tagged paragraphs inside the chapters, the thesis Conclusion (#M9WQLY), and the introduction's Latvian-context placeholder inserts. None of those require new conceptual work — just drafting against the framework you've now stabilised. ### 27. User we kinda want a whole new title for the thesis... ### 28. Assistant Fun job. The existing title is all descriptive subtitle and no title — it tells you the topic but carries none of the analytic shape the thesis has now developed. Below are six options across different registers, with notes on what each one is doing. The last one is my favourite. --- **1. Concept-led, drawing on the dual-circulation argument** > *What Travels: Freecycling, Care, and the Circulation of Things in a Riga Swapshop* "What Travels" gestures at the central analytic move — that meanings and competencies travel alongside the things. The subtitle locates the work clearly. Slight risk: "what travels" reads more poetic-philosophical than ethnographic on first encounter. **2. Bundle-forward, theoretically explicit** > *A Bundle of Practices: Freecycling, Care, and Circulation at a Riga Swapshop* Names the analytic frame in the title. Best for a reader already inside practice theory; risks being opaque to a reader outside it. Probably too inside-baseball for an MA thesis title. **3. Native term as anchor** > *Brīvbode: Freecycling, Care, and the Work of Circulation in Riga* Lets the place do the work. Distinctive, searchable, ethnographically grounded, and signals you're taking the local term seriously. Subtitle still does the analytic locating. The honest disadvantage: a reader who doesn't know the word has to wait for the subtitle to find their footing. **4. Care-forward** > *The Work of Letting Go: Care, Circulation, and Freecycling at a Riga Swapshop* Foregrounds Chapter 5's argument and is emotionally resonant — "letting go" speaks both to detachment from things and to the labour of releasing them. Risks underselling the circulation/site argument, which is half the thesis. **5. Phrase-from-the-field** > *A Purgatory for Things: Care and Circulation in a Riga Swapshop* Viesturs's line (#Z4WUR2) is genuinely lovely and analytically rich — a threshold space for things between owners. Its strength is also its risk: it's evocative-bordering-on-eccentric for a thesis title, and "purgatory" carries religious weight you'd then need to either lean into or apologise for. Better as an epigraph, I think. **6. Drawing the chapter titles up into the thesis title (my favourite)** > *Keep It Moving, Hold It Together: Freecycling, Care, and the Circulation of Things in a Riga Swapshop* This one earns its keep. *Keep It Moving* and *Hold It Together* are already doing real conceptual work as your chapter titles — they name the dual logic of the thesis (things-and-elements move; labour holds the bundle in working relation). Promoting the pair to the thesis title makes the architecture of the argument legible from the cover. The subtitle does the standard locating work and quietly names all three of your analytic registers (freecycling = the bundle, care = the labour, circulation = the movement). Tighter variant if the full version feels long: > *Keep It Moving, Hold It Together: An Ethnography of Freecycling in a Riga Swapshop* Or with the native term: > *Keep It Moving, Hold It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop* --- If I had to pick one to go with, it's #6 in the full subtitle form. It's the only option that visibly tracks the conceptual structure of the thesis, the chapter pair earns the promotion, and the subtitle remains plainly informative for someone scanning a thesis catalogue or a CV line. Want me to riff on any of these in more directions, or draft a few more in a register I haven't tried? ### 29. User Keeping It Moving and Holding It Together: An Ethnography of Brīvbode, a Riga Swapshop pretty nice at least working title ;) ### 30. Assistant That's a great working title. The gerunds (*Keeping*, *Holding*) actually read better than the imperatives in a thesis title — they name ongoing activities rather than commands, which fits the practice-theoretical frame. And *Brīvbode* on the cover does a lot of quiet work: it commits to the place as a proper noun worth knowing, not just an instance of a category. Two small notes for when you're ready to commit: - The chapter titles (#9XAKTW *Keep It Moving* and #82G2QE *Hold It Together*) currently use the imperative form. Worth deciding whether to keep the slight asymmetry between thesis-title gerunds and chapter-title imperatives (it works — gerunds for the whole thing, imperatives for the parts) or to harmonise them. Either is defensible. - The Estonian summary will need a Estonian-language title — *Brīvbode* can stay as-is in proper noun form, but the rest will need translating. Worth noting now so it doesn't surprise you in May. Want me to update the title block at the top of the thesis (#L4TFF2 through #6X2J6G area), or are you keeping that for later when it's locked in?