This is a strong hypothesis — strong enough that I think it could be the spine of your conclusion, not just a paragraph. Let me lay out where it already lives in the Mikael draft, where the empirical material backs it, and a couple of moves that would sharpen it.

The argument is already half-written, in #RX9JDU Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Conclusion #75D5UH #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.

Your final paragraph of Chapter 5 says: “the absence of price does not produce a frictionless flow of materials. It produces a different kind of work.” That’s the throughput-friction claim in nuce. The hypothesis you’re naming now extends it: it’s not only that friction generates labor the metric ignores — it’s that the friction is constitutive, not residual. A swapshop optimized for throughput would not be a swapshop. It would be a textile container with extra steps.

Mikael himself says this almost verbatim in #5LL7GM / #F58RAZ: he distrusts the appearance of properness, the smoothness of the loop. “When I do it properly, actually I’m just somehow… there’s an appearance of it being proper, but actually it’s more like I get to feel good about it and then someone who works there just has to like get rid of it somehow.” His paranoia is about frictionless circulation: the seamless loop is suspect precisely because it absorbs his moral residue without requiring anything of him.

The frictions that make Brīvbode Brīvbode (already in your chapters)

Read #9XAKTW Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation #9XAKTW #9XAKTW Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation and #82G2QE Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode #82G2QE #82G2QE Holding It Together: Care and Consumption Work in Brīvbode through this lens and almost every section turns into evidence:

• Friction as moral pause. Viesturs reframing the shop as “a kind of purgatory for things” ( #Z4WUR2 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition #W2WRDC #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. ) — objects need to linger to shed the energy of previous owners. A frictionless loop would not absolve anyone.

• Friction as valuation. Without price, valuation moves into the open and onto volunteers ( #U7QJHT Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care #SLFJ9K #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. , #KWPAYN Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care #SLFJ9K #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. ). Anna sniffing the bag before opening it. Rasa’s “filter” ( #7X9BV4 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care #SLFJ9K #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. ) holding items back for specific people. This is friction as care.

• Friction as restraint. Madara learning to mentally substitute “exchange” for “free” ( #CUBS5Q Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation #QP7HMF #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. , #4HW9DD Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Priceless Valuation: Sorting, Curation, and Care #SLFJ9K #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. ) — the practitioner introduces friction because the price-friction has been removed. Sufficiency is friction self-imposed.

• Friction as relational embedding. Aiga’s thirty trips instead of one clearance call ( #Y344XY Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / It’s On Me: Networks, Gender, and the Transmission of Care #L38KUE #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. ). She chooses the slower route because she cannot bear what frictionlessness would do.

• Friction as curatorial tactic. Viesturs not putting items out when a reseller is in the room ( #ERMRTL Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange #PZH45P #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. ). Rasa: “the emptier the shelves, the more people find” ( #KMD7AJ Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Where It Begins: The Site as Active Flow #PBFQ5E #KMD7AJ The space in Brīvbode is organised and decorated to resemble a retail environment with a DIY aesthetic – with hangers and shelves, and garments sometimes arranged by colour in the manner of the formerly operating secondhand chain Degas. The aesthetic is not fixed, however, as curatorial disagreements exist over the best presentation and each shift can leave its own curatorial mark. Rasa describes the tension between celebrating volunteer initiative and an aesthetic that, in her view, would communicate more value through similarity to a retail environment, leaving more space between things, signifying that quality items can be found in Brīvbode. "The emptier the shelves, the more people find," she notes. A different aesthetic displaying abundance of things on offer and decorating with plushies appeals to another volunteer. These mundane disagreements hold competing views about which meanings the practice of freecycling should enact. Material and meaning elements of the practice are not settled but are actively contested through performance. ) — deliberately slowed presentation.

• Friction as the affective closure of divestment. Givers who value witnessing circulation in Brīvbode versus the textile container, which is “too distanced to imagine who benefits” ( #PQV5PN Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home #2JEZWG #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. ). The smooth loop is alienating.

• Friction as trial. The possibility of bringing things back ( #34Z7TB Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Letting Go: Attachment Without Price #7Z8WUY #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." ) — circulation deliberately doesn’t terminate at the first acquisition.

The two most quotable empirical anchors for the hypothesis itself: Aiga’s thirty trips, and the wire offcuts ( #HN8W7V Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Incoming Flow: Divestment From Home #2JEZWG #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. ) — items the volunteers know aren’t being used but don’t have the heart to refuse, because the giver’s imagined third user is part of what holds the practice together. Pure throughput accounting would discard her bags as friction; ethnographically, those bags are doing the work.

Where the literature backs you up

You’re closer to a publishable critique than you may realize. The throughput-vs-friction frame lines up cleanly with several pieces you already cite:

• Shove & Rinkinen 2023, #RP8YNG Material culture and the circular economy #R69WZQ / 4. Discussion #FAPRPA #RP8YNG A third still more significant issue is that policies that are intended to foster a circular economy avoid or marginalize fundamental questions about the constitution of need, including the part that policy making itself plays in reproducing unsustainable practices and systems of provision. If the primary ambition is efficient flow and use of resources and goods, then changes in patterns of consumption and reduction of resource use is secondary ambition and treated as such. There is a risk that circular economy initiatives cling on to narrow growth-oriented : “If the primary ambition is efficient flow and use of resources and goods, then changes in patterns of consumption and reduction of resource use is secondary.” Cite this as the explicit statement of the throughput logic you’re criticizing.

• Hobson 2021, #UMYA27 , #BKS58J The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies #XK6L5Q #BKS58J Welch et al. (2017) argue that there is a curious incongruence at the heart of Figure 1. To date, the majority of CE debates and research have focussed on products, materials, markets, and value extraction from specific energy and/or resource life cycles: the materials and processes that constitute the CE. Yet it is the ‘consumer’ and ‘user’ – all of us, the creators, perpetuators, and subjects of the economy – that have central place in the EMF ‘butterfly’ diagram, as the nodes around which CE circular loops and cascades revolve and return to (Hobson et al. , forthcoming ). As such, how our roles and agency are framed and enacted is a crucial component of the successes or failings of CE interventions. Or as Korhonen et al. have put it (2018, p. 41), ‘the new consumption culture is a critical part of the circular economy in its effort to reduce the nature-society-nature linear throughput flow of materials and energy.’ : the CE’s “butterfly diagram” treats users as nodes around which loops revolve — exactly the framing that makes friction look like inefficiency rather than constitution.

• Tan & Yeoh, #273AZV Freecycling Markets as Sustainable Materialist Movements? Closing Reuse Circularity Loops in Singapore #FHZZ6U / 2. STATE POLICIES AND DISCOURSES IN SINGAPORE'S CIRCULAR TRANSITION #DNLVCU #273AZV to measuring a reduction in consumption/waste and reuse rates). Although recycling rates are often mobilised as a proxy for quantifying how 'circular' an economy is, high recycling rates should not be conflated with high circularity rates (Price and Joseph 2000; Reike et al. 2018). Third, whereas the imperative to reduce and reuse threatens a consumerist-capitalist system, recycling is less damaging to the status quo and the retail landscape, since the recycling of post-consumer waste requires consumption in the first place. Economic sustainability continues to be the state's foremost concern, as reflected in the state's constant refrain about how a circular transition can present Singapore with new employment opportunities (Singapore Government News 2020a; 2020b). : “high recycling rates should not be conflated with high circularity rates.” Same point at policy-metric level.

• McLaren & Niskanen, #AQCZ9W The Political Economy of Circular Economies: Lessons from Future Repair Scenario Deliberations in Sweden #LB5ACW / Introduction #Z2VAH4 #AQCZ9W In the dominant interests, at least in the West [4], circular economy is an eco-modernist technocratic concept [5, 6] resting on the idea that the current linear “extract-produce-use-dump material and energy flow model of the modern economic system is unsustainable” [7, p.37]. CE concepts posit that these unsustainable flows can be curbed and redirected by keeping services and products in use for longer and by reusing materials in new products and services over time. This can make for strange bedfellows where CE brings together environmental interests and heavy industry under a common umbrella of increased material circularity [8]. : CE as an “eco-modernist technocratic concept” centered on flow.

• Welch et al. / Hobson on consumption work: this is your bridge — the labor argument is the empirical wedge into the throughput frame.

• Bohlin 2019 ( #ZJUEY4 ): people want to dwell at the moment of donation. Friction is part of the affective satisfaction.

A sharpening move

The current Mikael draft frames the punchline as labor: “a different kind of work.” That’s true and important — but it concedes more to the throughput logic than your hypothesis does. The labor frame says: here is hidden cost the metric misses. The friction frame says: the metric measures the wrong thing, because the friction IS the practice. The first invites compensation (recognize and support the labor); the second invites a deeper revaluation (a maximally efficient swapshop is not the goal, and not even desirable).

Both arguments can coexist, but they have different political teeth. Your conclusion ( #M9WQLY Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / CONCLUSION #M9WQLY #M9WQLY CONCLUSION is empty? worth checking) is the place to make the stronger claim. Something like: Brīvbode’s value to circular economy thinking is not that it diverts tonnes from landfill efficiently — it is that it shows how the circulation of things is held together by the very moments throughput accounting treats as friction: the pause to evaluate, the lingering to release, the relational route chosen over the fast one, the witnessing that closes the divestment cycle affectively. A swapshop optimized as the metric would prefer would no longer be ethnographically recognizable as a swapshop.

That’s a paragraph that earns its place.

Here’s a clean orientation to Hobson and the wider circular-economy critique she’s done — written so you can drop a version of it into your introduction or your theoretical framework with light editing.

A two-paragraph primer

The Circular Economy (CE) emerged as a policy framework in the early 2010s that promises to replace the linear “take–make–dispose” model with closed loops in which products, components, and materials are kept in use for as long as possible (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2013; #SF6H7V The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / Introduction: Circular Economy as ‘weak’ sustainability rebooted? #8N33DB #SF6H7V 'an alternative to a traditional linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life' (Wrap 2019, no page) ). It synthesizes older ideas from industrial ecology, cradle-to-cradle design, and product-service systems, and has been picked up rapidly by the EU, China, and major economic forums as a strategy that promises environmental sustainability and continued growth. The dominant CE imagination is technical and managerial: better design, better business models, better recycling infrastructure, with consumers placed at the receiving end as nodes through which materials flow back into the loop ( #BKS58J The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies #XK6L5Q #BKS58J Welch et al. (2017) argue that there is a curious incongruence at the heart of Figure 1. To date, the majority of CE debates and research have focussed on products, materials, markets, and value extraction from specific energy and/or resource life cycles: the materials and processes that constitute the CE. Yet it is the ‘consumer’ and ‘user’ – all of us, the creators, perpetuators, and subjects of the economy – that have central place in the EMF ‘butterfly’ diagram, as the nodes around which CE circular loops and cascades revolve and return to (Hobson et al. , forthcoming ). As such, how our roles and agency are framed and enacted is a crucial component of the successes or failings of CE interventions. Or as Korhonen et al. have put it (2018, p. 41), ‘the new consumption culture is a critical part of the circular economy in its effort to reduce the nature-society-nature linear throughput flow of materials and energy.’ ). Its measure of success is throughput — tonnes diverted, materials recovered, loops “closed.”

Kersty Hobson is the most consistent and useful critic of this framing for your purposes, and her work runs across three papers in your corpus, each doing something distinct:

The three Hobson papers, briefly

“Closing the loop or squaring the circle?” (2016, #8ZKAT7 ) is the early intervention. Hobson’s worry here is that CE, as it was being institutionalised, looked a lot like “weak ecological modernisation” rebooted ( #RSXV9L Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy #8ZKAT7 / II What is the circular economy and how do we get there? #S7EQE3 #RSXV9L In this section, the concept of the CE will be unpacked further, along with a consideration of some of the political agendas behind its current rise. It is argued here and in following sections that some of the strategies currently in use to foster the CE are in danger of repeating the failures of 'weak ecological modernization' (Lane and Watson, 2012), as they sidestep pressing socio-political issues across scales and spaces. , #ENHUAJ Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy #8ZKAT7 / II What is the circular economy and how do we get there? #S7EQE3 #ENHUAJ One plausible reason for the above is the predominance of 'weak' ecological modernization policy frameworks and interventions in post-industrial countries over the past few decades (e.g. see Lane and Watson, 2012). With an emphasis on continued economic growth and neoliberal governmental/market-based interventions (Bakker, 2010; Bridge, 2011, 2013), such approaches have been roundly critiqued as ineffective at addressing the core causes of environmental unsustainability. Instead, their emphasis on 'win-win' scenarios fails to question the status quo and offers weak policy instruments and easily co-opted discourses of green capitalism and consumerism (e.g. Dauvergne ): a technical fix that leaves consumption norms, governance, and political-economic arrangements untouched. Her positive move is to argue that human geography — and by extension other socio-cultural disciplines — needs to claim CE as its territory, because the socio-material and everyday dimensions of circulation are exactly what the dominant framing elides. She introduces the idea of “generative spaces” of CE: sites where citizens are not just acceptors of redesigned products but designers, repairers, prosumers, “everyday activists” ( #NB8CR8 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy #8ZKAT7 / VI Concluding comments #ACNZ3L #NB8CR8 This paper has aimed to bring recent and growing debates around ideas of the CE into conversation with some facets of human geographical research. The aim is to outline how research into a CE requires much broader analytical lenses than are currently deployed, given the profound 'transformative change' advocates speak of. The purpose here was to provisionally locate generative spaces and practices that embody a CE which goes beyond re-jigged industrial systems and business models. Rather, the case is made that any consideration of the CE must encompass forms of 'everyday activism' that foreground the 'vital materialism' (Gregson et al., 2010: 853) necessary to rethink, re-envision, recreate, reuse and 'move on' the goods and services that currently meet everyday needs. In other disciplines, researchers and practitioners talk of addressing unsustainable production and consumption through frameworks such as product service systems. This (perhaps rather dry) phrase is not found a great deal in human geographical work, but it does intersect with – and arguably has much to contribute to – research that explores practices embedded within, and enacted through, multi-scale socio-technical systems (Davies et al., 2014; Watson, 2012). , #4G9UV6 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy #8ZKAT7 / VI Concluding comments #ACNZ3L #4G9UV6 Advocates of the CE appear to consider the role of citizens as being the acceptance (or not) of practices that have been formulated on their behalf by designers, engineers, economists and policy-makers. One key aim of this paper has been to highlight how this presents an impoverished view of the properties and capacities that new assemblages of the CE are bringing forth, or could potentially create. That is, a seemingly narrow set of practices and spaces for citizen action (e.g. the High Street) are supplemented and/or challenged by the multifarious practices of the designer-consumer-user-repairer citizen. Indeed, as mentioned above, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation suggests that a new contract is emerging between business and the consumer. In their understanding, this relates to a direct and legally binding agreement between two or more parties. Yet this paper is essentially arguing that broader notions of a contract can be evoked here, where roles, competencies and responsibilities are redistributed and reconfigured throughout the lifetime of products and services, recalibrating the social relations and arrangements that currently favour the purchasing-ownership-disposal model of citizen-consumer practices. Such socially transformative enactments of the CE are thus implicit but under-explored within current debates, and this paper has aimed to highlight the potential for rich engagement, through both further conceptual and empirical exploration. ). This is the paper that opens the door for ethnography of places like Brīvbode to count as CE research at all.

“The limits of the loops” (2021, #UMYA27 ) is the sharper, more political follow-up. The argument: CE is not just business-as-usual rebranded, but something more troubling — a framework that looks transformative while quietly accelerating the resource use it claims to address ( #A5NZ9C The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / ABSTRACT #4S872F #A5NZ9C Circular Economy (CE) is now a key governance framework that aims to reconfigure how value is extracted from resources. Despite its widespread uptake, CE commentary to date tends towards descriptive and/or celebratory. In response, in this paper I outline some ways that environmental politics researchers have much to contribute to CE research, arguing that current examples of CE policies and practices potentially accelerate resource use into this century. A key weakness is how proponents frame us all as particular forms of ‘user-consumers’. Such framings fail to account for what is at stake for all of us as part of the CE project: and I conclude this paper by posing several key research questions, to encourage more critical environmental politics research on and around issues of CE. , #CXWVEV The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / Introduction: Circular Economy as ‘weak’ sustainability rebooted? #8N33DB #CXWVEV On the one hand, it would be relatively straightforward to argue that, in essence, CE is a framework that rebrands and repackages decades-long 'weak sustainability' agendas. Here a focus on continued economic growth has created and entrenched various forms of 'green accumulation' (see Goodman and Salleh 2013), which has done little to transform prevailing economic systems, norms, and practices. However, in the next section, I make the case that the CE is potentially something more than (green) 'business as usual'. Instead, myriad policies and interventions brought together under a CE framework contain incongruous and problematic assumptions and mechanisms that potentially signal new sites and spaces of green accumulation, which together potentially accelerate the very problems the CE looks to address. In particular – and in line with my long-standing research interests in consumption, everyday practices, and sustainability (e.g. see Hobson 2013) – I focus in the subsequent section on one particular suite of problems with current conceptualisations of the CE: the circular 'user-consumer'. I argue that the role CE proponents ascribe for us all in the project – of choosing better business models and engaging in 'win win' everyday practices (e.g. forms of the 'sharing economy') – underplays what is actually at stake for us all, if the CE is to be as transformative as it promises and indeed needs to be, given ensuing climate emergencies and escalating global resource use. ). Her central diagnostic is the figure of the “user-consumer” in the EMF butterfly diagram ( #BKS58J The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies #XK6L5Q #BKS58J Welch et al. (2017) argue that there is a curious incongruence at the heart of Figure 1. To date, the majority of CE debates and research have focussed on products, materials, markets, and value extraction from specific energy and/or resource life cycles: the materials and processes that constitute the CE. Yet it is the ‘consumer’ and ‘user’ – all of us, the creators, perpetuators, and subjects of the economy – that have central place in the EMF ‘butterfly’ diagram, as the nodes around which CE circular loops and cascades revolve and return to (Hobson et al. , forthcoming ). As such, how our roles and agency are framed and enacted is a crucial component of the successes or failings of CE interventions. Or as Korhonen et al. have put it (2018, p. 41), ‘the new consumption culture is a critical part of the circular economy in its effort to reduce the nature-society-nature linear throughput flow of materials and energy.’ , #47382C The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies #XK6L5Q #47382C What, if any, are the problems with having ‘consumer acceptance’ as our key role in the CE? I argue that problems with this framing are both material and socio-economic. For one, the idea of ‘consumer acceptance’ or ‘buy in’ evokes a predominantly passive role for us all. It assumes that the form new ): central in image, passive in script. The user-consumer’s role is reduced to “acceptance” or “buy-in” of new circular business models — choosing the leased phone, remembering to recycle. Hobson points out, citing Welch et al., that this misses what CE actually demands: not consumer choice but a recalibration of “life itself” (Tukker), the reorganisation of time, skill, relationships, and material practices. This is also where she names consumption work (Wheeler and Glucksmann) as the missing concept ( #DUTG22 The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies #XK6L5Q #DUTG22 Miller 1998, Shove and Warde 2002), as well as their place as habitual, normalised, and intertwined parts of our everyday material realities (Mylan 2015). Such intertwining means that adopting a particular ‘circular’ business model has potential knock-on effects throughout our lives. For example, does time spent repairing goods – that is, the ‘consumption work’ (see Wheeler and Glucksmann 2016) required of us all by the CE – mean there is less time available for other forms of ‘circularity’ in one’s life, thus excluding one from other SE opportunities? And do forms of social and cultural capital gained from, say, participating in a ‘Repair Café’ facilitate (or not) other relationships and practices, thus ‘spilling over’ into different spheres of energy and resource use? While these might seem like micro-sociological questions of minor significance to questions of macro-scale system transformations, cumulatively they underscore how little we know of the actual impacts experienced by those endeavouring to take up some of the consumer-user practices outlined in Figure 1. ) — directly relevant to your Chapter 5.

“From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices” (2020, #4AE86F ) is a short intervention extending the critique spatially: CE policies (and the “circular city” agenda specifically) imagine an idealised circular consumer abstracted from the urban environments and infrastructures that actually shape what people can do ( #6UWRFU From circular consumers to carriers of (unsustainable) practices: socio-spatial transformations in the Circular City #4AE86F / ABSTRACT #LKDJQD #6UWRFU Debates about the ‘Circular City’ have underscored the need to rethink consumption practices within urban spaces. This intervention explores these arguments, and suggests that some research and interventions to date have under-played the relationship between unsustainable consumption practices and urban spatial forms, drawing on work into mobile phones and the ‘circular consumer’. ). It’s a reminder that circularity is not a property of individuals but of socio-spatial arrangements — useful background for arguing that Brīvbode’s specific urban embeddedness (a physical venue, walkable, with rental space, in Āgenskalns near Gaiziņš) is constitutive of the practice, not incidental.

What’s useful for your thesis

Three takeaways you can lean on:

1. The “metric problem.” Hobson is the citation that authorises your throughput-vs-friction critique. CE measures circularity by efficiency of material flow; she argues this is impoverished and possibly counterproductive. Pair her with Shove & Rinkinen #RP8YNG Material culture and the circular economy #R69WZQ / 4. Discussion #FAPRPA #RP8YNG A third still more significant issue is that policies that are intended to foster a circular economy avoid or marginalize fundamental questions about the constitution of need, including the part that policy making itself plays in reproducing unsustainable practices and systems of provision. If the primary ambition is efficient flow and use of resources and goods, then changes in patterns of consumption and reduction of resource use is secondary ambition and treated as such. There is a risk that circular economy initiatives cling on to narrow growth-oriented (“if the primary ambition is efficient flow… reduction of resource use is secondary”) and you have the canonical critique in two sentences.

2. The user-consumer as passive node. Her framing of the EMF butterfly diagram ( #BKS58J The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies #XK6L5Q #BKS58J Welch et al. (2017) argue that there is a curious incongruence at the heart of Figure 1. To date, the majority of CE debates and research have focussed on products, materials, markets, and value extraction from specific energy and/or resource life cycles: the materials and processes that constitute the CE. Yet it is the ‘consumer’ and ‘user’ – all of us, the creators, perpetuators, and subjects of the economy – that have central place in the EMF ‘butterfly’ diagram, as the nodes around which CE circular loops and cascades revolve and return to (Hobson et al. , forthcoming ). As such, how our roles and agency are framed and enacted is a crucial component of the successes or failings of CE interventions. Or as Korhonen et al. have put it (2018, p. 41), ‘the new consumption culture is a critical part of the circular economy in its effort to reduce the nature-society-nature linear throughput flow of materials and energy.’ ) is the diagnostic image you can invoke whenever you want to mark the gap between policy imagination and ethnographic reality. Brīvbode participants are not nodes; they are the labour, the moral economy, and the friction that make circulation happen.

3. Consumption work as the bridge. Hobson explicitly points to Wheeler and Glucksmann’s “consumption work” as the kind of concept CE research needs ( #DUTG22 The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies #XK6L5Q #DUTG22 Miller 1998, Shove and Warde 2002), as well as their place as habitual, normalised, and intertwined parts of our everyday material realities (Mylan 2015). Such intertwining means that adopting a particular ‘circular’ business model has potential knock-on effects throughout our lives. For example, does time spent repairing goods – that is, the ‘consumption work’ (see Wheeler and Glucksmann 2016) required of us all by the CE – mean there is less time available for other forms of ‘circularity’ in one’s life, thus excluding one from other SE opportunities? And do forms of social and cultural capital gained from, say, participating in a ‘Repair Café’ facilitate (or not) other relationships and practices, thus ‘spilling over’ into different spheres of energy and resource use? While these might seem like micro-sociological questions of minor significance to questions of macro-scale system transformations, cumulatively they underscore how little we know of the actual impacts experienced by those endeavouring to take up some of the consumer-user practices outlined in Figure 1. ). Your Chapter 5 is essentially what she’s calling for. You can cite #DUTG22 The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / The user-consumer in Circular Economy: beyond competitive prices and increased efficiencies #XK6L5Q #DUTG22 Miller 1998, Shove and Warde 2002), as well as their place as habitual, normalised, and intertwined parts of our everyday material realities (Mylan 2015). Such intertwining means that adopting a particular ‘circular’ business model has potential knock-on effects throughout our lives. For example, does time spent repairing goods – that is, the ‘consumption work’ (see Wheeler and Glucksmann 2016) required of us all by the CE – mean there is less time available for other forms of ‘circularity’ in one’s life, thus excluding one from other SE opportunities? And do forms of social and cultural capital gained from, say, participating in a ‘Repair Café’ facilitate (or not) other relationships and practices, thus ‘spilling over’ into different spheres of energy and resource use? While these might seem like micro-sociological questions of minor significance to questions of macro-scale system transformations, cumulatively they underscore how little we know of the actual impacts experienced by those endeavouring to take up some of the consumer-user practices outlined in Figure 1. as the moment a leading CE critic flags exactly the framework you build the chapter on — that’s a strong move.

The shortest version, for an intro paragraph: Circular Economy emerged in the 2010s as the dominant policy framework for sustainable resource use, promising to replace linearity with closed loops of repair, reuse, and recycling. Its imagination is technical and managerial, its metric is throughput, and its consumer is a passive node accepting redesigned goods. Critics — Hobson (2016, 2020, 2021) most prominently — have argued that this framing systematically underplays what circulation actually demands of everyday life: time, skill, relational labour, and the recalibration of socio-material practice. This thesis takes that critique into ethnographic territory.

How the thesis currently argues about CE

The CE argument in the draft is mostly structural and oblique rather than frontal. You don’t take aim at CE as your central target; you set the thesis up as an empirical contribution that shows CE policy what it underestimates. The argument runs roughly:

1. CE depends on practices it doesn’t see. The intro ( #J4M2WK Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Introduction #ZF9EYF #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). ) cites Hobson et al. 2021 to make the claim immediately: CE positions reuse and lifetime extension as solutions, but their success “depends on everyday practices that are labour-intensive and socially uneven.” This is the thesis’s foundational CE move — and it’s quite modest, almost concessive in tone.

2. Brīvbode is one of the spaces CE policy is being told to look at but doesn’t. #BTDD45 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Introduction #ZF9EYF #BTDD45 Hobson et al. (2021) argue that research into circular economy consumption work must “move beyond the domestic sphere and space of the household” to examine consumption-based practices in other spaces, including Repair Cafés and community-based circular economy models, whether or not these are explicitly labelled as such. 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. quotes Hobson et al.’s explicit call to move beyond the household into community-based CE sites; you position Brīvbode as exactly that site.

3. Practice theory + consumption work is the apparatus for seeing what CE doesn’t. Chapter 2 builds the toolkit. The CE critique is implicit in your choice of frameworks: practice theory because CE behavioural models flatten everyday life; consumption work because CE policy doesn’t account for the labour circulation requires ( #ZBGB9J Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Consumption Work #23NMLX #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. ).

4. The empirical chapters then deliver the pay-off. Chapter 4 shows the practice as it actually is. Chapter 5 names the labour. The conclusion ( #U2PZ9C Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / CONCLUSION #M9WQLY #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. ) summarises: Brīvbode “operates within the conditions of overproduction… while it enables reuse and access, it also absorbs the material overflow generated elsewhere.”

5. The most pointed CE statement is #RX9JDU Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Conclusion #75D5UH #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. : the absence of price doesn’t produce frictionless flow, it produces a different kind of work. That’s your strongest direct contribution to the CE debate, and it’s currently buried at the end of Chapter 5.

So: the thesis’s CE argument is there but it’s distributed and somewhat shy. It doesn’t quite name the throughput-vs-friction problem you articulated in the earlier hypothesis. That argument would fit, naturally, but you haven’t planted it yet.

Chapter 4’s through-line

Yes — Chapter 4 is, basically, a chapter about the plurality of value and the moral economy that holds plurality together. The argument you’ve actually written runs like this:

• Set-up ( #PL9BXR Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation #9XAKTW #PL9BXR This chapter examines freecycling as a practice constituted by a physical venue and the materials flowing through it, the meanings that recruit and retain participants, and the competencies that order the exchange. Throughout the chapter I move between analysis of freecycling as practice-entity and as performance, especially attending to moments of friction and tension where the two pull against each other. – #L252MY Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Keeping Things Moving: Brīvbode as a Practice of Circulation #9XAKTW #L252MY Across the chapter, I sustain the view that the character of Brīvbode as a non-monetary site of exchange is held together less by a single definition than by the moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist. ). Frame freecycling as practice-entity and performance, attending to “moments of friction and tension where the two pull against each other.” The chapter’s stated ambition is to show how “the character of Brīvbode as a non-monetary site of exchange is held together less by a single definition than by the moral economy that allows incompatible orientations to coexist.” That sentence is your through-line, stated explicitly.

• Section 4.1 (Incoming Flow). Givers come for diverse reasons — moral relief, decluttering, social rhythm, witnessing circulation, routing things to imagined receivers. The gap between donor self-assessment and what’s actually useful is the first source of friction; the swapshop accommodates a wide range of incoming meanings.

• Section 4.2 (Site as Active Flow). The materiality of the site — physical permanence, retail aesthetic, coexistence with textile collection infrastructure — is what allows the practice’s plurality to stabilise. The site itself absorbs disagreement (Rasa vs. the abundance-aesthetic volunteer; the curatorial disputes) without breaking.

• Section 4.3 (Reading the Room). Norms are situational, not formal — “defined and enacted situationally and relationally, which can be both a strength and a source of friction” ( #F9CK8T Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Reading the Room: Norms and Competencies of Circulation #QP7HMF #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. ). Competency is partly the ability to read which norm applies in a given moment.

• Section 4.4 (Not a Charity). The most explicit moral-economy section: organisers actively maintain “exchange” against the pressures of charity, reselling, and heavy-taking. But — and this is the chapter’s interesting move — the moral economy bends. Resellers get reframed as “forest sanitarians” ( #ERMRTL Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange #PZH45P #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. ); the deeper logic of circulation can override the official rule against monetary transactions ( #QKY57B Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Not a Charity: The Moral Economy of Exchange #PZH45P #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. ). The moral economy is normative and pragmatic.

• Section 4.5 (Letting Go). The non-monetary regime reshapes attachment — people experiment, return things, treat acquisition as low-stakes — but it also can intensify acquisition unless practitioners introduce restraint themselves (Madara’s “I switch off the word free”). Sufficiency as self-imposed friction.

• Section 4.6 (Plural Meanings of Acquisition). This is where the plurality argument is most forcefully made: dignity, originality, craft material, style experimentation, social contact, class-marked stigma, generational normalisation. “The heterogeneity of meanings allows the practice to recruit across a wide and socially diverse public” ( #5L3QYB Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / What People Find Here: Plural Meanings of Acquisition #W2WRDC #5L3QYB Taking things in Brīvbode is sustained by a variety of meanings that do not need to be shared or mutually coherent across practitioners. The heterogeneity of meanings allows the practice to recruit across a wide and socially diverse public. The following section examines the main meaning clusters and what each reveals about how the practice recruits and retains its carriers – what do people experience as useful and rewarding when they opt to take things in Brīvbode. ). Crucially, meanings don’t need to be coherent or shared.

• Section 4.7 (Quiet or Reflected Sustainability). The plurality extends to the practice’s relationship to sustainability itself. Some practitioners articulate it (Luīze); for others it has receded behind the doing (Viesturs, Rasa). Smith and Jehlička’s “quiet sustainability” lets you hold both without forcing a single motivational story.

• Section 4.8 (Conclusion). “Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space” ( #M3VCHH Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations #A3X9XX #M3VCHH Freecycling in Brīvbode is sustained by a plurality of meanings that are compatible enough to coexist within the same space. Givers come to resolve the moral weight of unwanted things, the site’s permanence and visibility offer a trusted route for it. Takers come for dignity, experimentation, craft materials, social contact or simple convenience. The moral economy of exchange holds these heterogenous orientations together, as it is actively maintained against the pressure of resellers, heavy takers and people looking for charity, yet flexible enough to accommodate them when the alternative is overflow. ). The moral economy is what makes coexistence possible. And — this is the residue you leave for Chapter 5 — the tension between alternative-circularity-infrastructure and overflow-channel “does not resolve easily” ( #MHM9Q5 Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Conclusion: Holding Together Incompatible Orientations #A3X9XX #MHM9Q5 This does not resolve the tension running through the chapter of Brīvbode functioning simultaneously as a moral circularity infrastructure embodying an alternative value regime of exchange and responsible material life – and as a low threshold overflow channel that absorbs the surplus generated by the consumption patterns it aspires to counter. This tension just reflects the observed dynamic of how sustainable practices are embedded in contemporary life. ).

So the spine of Ch4 is something like:

Brīvbode is held together not by a unified meaning of what it is, but by a moral economy flexible enough to absorb plural and even incompatible orientations — donors looking for moral relief, takers looking for dignity or distinction or craft material, organisers maintaining “exchange” against charity-claims while quietly tolerating resellers when the alternative is overflow. The non-monetary regime is what makes this plurality possible (no price means no single legible standard of value), but it is also what generates the situational friction the practice has to keep negotiating.

That’s a strong and clear argument. The question, if you wanted to sharpen it for the conclusion or for the CE framing: plurality is not just an empirical finding; it’s a structural answer to a CE design problem. Throughput-oriented CE imagines circulation as a single flow with a single metric. Brīvbode’s actual viability depends on its ability to host many flows under one roof — moral, aesthetic, material, social — and the moral economy is the technology that lets it. That reframing would let Chapter 4’s plurality finding talk back to CE more directly than it currently does.

Yes — you’re tracking it, and let me sharpen the map a bit, because there are actually several distinct critical traditions clustered around CE, and your thesis sits at a specific intersection of them. Getting the layering right will help you write the introduction with confidence.

The dominant paradigm

Circular Economy as institutional project: EU CE Action Plan (2015, updated 2020), EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles (2022), national strategies (China 2008, Wales, Spain, Canada), industry advocacy via the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Intellectual roots in industrial ecology, cradle-to-cradle design, and product-service systems — engineering and design traditions reaching back to the 1960s–70s. Its imagination is technical-managerial: redesign the product, redesign the business model, recover the materials, close the loop. Hobson ( #CXWVEV The limits of the loops: critical environmental politics and the Circular Economy #UMYA27 / Introduction: Circular Economy as ‘weak’ sustainability rebooted? #8N33DB #CXWVEV On the one hand, it would be relatively straightforward to argue that, in essence, CE is a framework that rebrands and repackages decades-long 'weak sustainability' agendas. Here a focus on continued economic growth has created and entrenched various forms of 'green accumulation' (see Goodman and Salleh 2013), which has done little to transform prevailing economic systems, norms, and practices. However, in the next section, I make the case that the CE is potentially something more than (green) 'business as usual'. Instead, myriad policies and interventions brought together under a CE framework contain incongruous and problematic assumptions and mechanisms that potentially signal new sites and spaces of green accumulation, which together potentially accelerate the very problems the CE looks to address. In particular – and in line with my long-standing research interests in consumption, everyday practices, and sustainability (e.g. see Hobson 2013) – I focus in the subsequent section on one particular suite of problems with current conceptualisations of the CE: the circular 'user-consumer'. I argue that the role CE proponents ascribe for us all in the project – of choosing better business models and engaging in 'win win' everyday practices (e.g. forms of the 'sharing economy') – underplays what is actually at stake for us all, if the CE is to be as transformative as it promises and indeed needs to be, given ensuing climate emergencies and escalating global resource use. ) calls this an “eco-modernist technocratic” project; McLaren and Niskanen say the same.

This is, as you put it, modernist optimization — the idea that the resource problem can be solved by smarter engineering of flows without disturbing the political economy or the cultural organisation of consumption. Hobson and others link it to “weak ecological modernisation” ( #ENHUAJ Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy #8ZKAT7 / II What is the circular economy and how do we get there? #S7EQE3 #ENHUAJ One plausible reason for the above is the predominance of 'weak' ecological modernization policy frameworks and interventions in post-industrial countries over the past few decades (e.g. see Lane and Watson, 2012). With an emphasis on continued economic growth and neoliberal governmental/market-based interventions (Bakker, 2010; Bridge, 2011, 2013), such approaches have been roundly critiqued as ineffective at addressing the core causes of environmental unsustainability. Instead, their emphasis on 'win-win' scenarios fails to question the status quo and offers weak policy instruments and easily co-opted discourses of green capitalism and consumerism (e.g. Dauvergne ): the longstanding move that promises sustainability through efficiency gains while keeping growth-based capitalism intact.

The critical traditions around it

There are three overlapping but distinguishable critical bodies of work in your corpus, each doing slightly different work:

1. The practice-theoretical critique (Shove and her circle)

This is the lineage you’ve built your framework on. Elizabeth Shove (Lancaster), with Pantzar, Watson, Spurling, Trentmann, Rinkinen, etc. The argument: behaviour-change models (Attitude–Behaviour–Choice) and consumer-acceptance models miss how consumption is actually organised — through bundles of materials, meanings, and competencies that are reproduced socially, often unreflexively.

Applied to CE specifically (Shove and Rinkinen 2023, #R69WZQ ): if CE is committed to “efficient flow,” it makes the constitution of need a secondary question. It treats consumption as something to be optimised rather than transformed. Practice theory says: the volume and pace of throughput is itself produced by the practices CE leaves untouched.

This is the “don’t optimise the wrong thing” critique. Practice theory is a tool for seeing what CE’s metrics render invisible.

2. The consumption work / labour critique (Wheeler, Glucksmann, Hobson, Welch et al.)

A specific extension: even if you accept CE’s goals, achieving them requires huge amounts of labour that CE policy doesn’t account for. Wheeler and Glucksmann ( #4LST57 ) developed the concept for household recycling — sorting, rinsing, transporting — and showed it was gendered, unpaid, and structurally necessary. Hobson, Welch, Holmes and Wieser ( #NUEUVY ) extended it to circular economy more broadly: as you do more of the loop yourself, the consumer becomes a worker.

This is the “who does the work and who pays for it” critique. It’s compatible with practice theory but more explicitly political.

3. The anthropological / ethnographic critique

This is more diffuse but important. Several traditions converge here:

• Material culture / object biography (Appadurai, Kopytoff, Miller, Bohlin and Appelgren): things have social lives, value is multiple, circulation transforms objects rather than just moving them.

• Anthropology of waste and reuse (Gille, Reno, Isenhour, Martínez, Hawkins, Alexander, Sosna): waste is not a residual category but a productive site where value is made and unmade.

• Anthropology of care, repair, and quiet sustainability (Smith and Jehlička, Mosgaard and Moalem, Corwin and Gidwani, Martínez): sustainable practices that don’t articulate themselves in sustainability terms; care as the relational substrate of repair and reuse.

• Anthropology of post-socialist thrift and second-hand (Alexander and Sosna, Gille, Holmes, Hulme, Kuppinger): historically situated practices of making-do that pre-exist and exceed the CE framing.

The anthropological critique says, roughly: CE is a young Western policy abstraction that flattens older, more various, more morally complex practices of circulation into a single technocratic loop. Things have meanings, people have biographies with objects, communities have moral economies that won’t reduce to flow metrics.

Where your thesis sits

Your thesis sits at the intersection of (1) and (2), with significant but currently mostly implicit moves toward (3).

• The framework you’ve explicitly chosen is practice theory (Shove) + consumption work (Wheeler/Glucksmann), updated through Hobson’s CE-specific applications and recent care-theoretical extensions (Tölg, Mesiranta et al., Närvänen et al.).

• Your method is ethnographic, your discipline is anthropology, your sensibility is about plurality, moral economy, biographical attachment, “purgatory for things” — all anthropological registers.

• Your chapter 4 argument (plurality, moral economy, quiet sustainability) is doing more anthropological work than the framework chapter currently acknowledges. The Bohlin and Appelgren paper, the Bohlin “It will keep circulating” paper, the Smith and Jehlička concept, the Martínez waste-as-care line, Bankovska’s care not-work — these are anthropological resources you’re using, and they share a sensibility that’s distinct from Shove’s sociological practice theory.

So a more accurate framing of your thesis’s position might be:

CE is a dominant governance paradigm rooted in industrial ecology and ecological modernisation, treating circulation as an engineering and market-design problem with throughput as its measure. Critics in the practice-theoretical tradition (Shove, Hobson, Welch) have argued that this framing misreads how circulation is organised in everyday life, both as routinised practice (Shove) and as distributed labour (Wheeler and Glucksmann, Hobson). This thesis builds on that critique ethnographically: through participant observation in a Riga swapshop, it shows that the circulation CE policy depends on is sustained not by efficient flow but by a plural moral economy and the gendered, care-laden consumption work of the people who keep it running.

That’s a paragraph that places you precisely in the conversation. The practice-theory-plus-consumption-work apparatus is your toolkit; the ethnographic finding about plurality, friction, and moral economy is your contribution.

A small flag

One thing worth being explicit about: practice theory in Shove’s mature form is sociology, not anthropology. It’s compatible with anthropology, and Bankovska’s thesis is one good example of an anthropologist using it well — but it’s not native to your discipline. Your thesis can lean into the anthropological tradition more than it currently does (object biography, moral economy, care, post-socialist material life) without losing the practice-theoretical scaffolding. That would let your contribution sit more comfortably as anthropology of circulation in a CE policy moment rather than applied practice theory with ethnographic data. Worth deciding consciously how much of that to do given your deadline — but it’s a real choice.

Yes — and I think you’ve just articulated the spine of your contribution. Let me push it back at you sharpened, because I think this is the framing the thesis has been reaching for.

What you’ve just said, restated

Brīvbode is a textbook circular-economy initiative on paper: volunteer-run reuse infrastructure, diverts textiles from landfill, plausibly aligns with EU CE Action Plan and the Latvian textile collection mandate, the kind of place that would happily appear in a policy report as a “community-based circular initiative.” Its outputs are legible to CE accounting (tonnes diverted, items rerouted to textile collection, etc.).

But ethnographically — and this is the move — the things that make it actually work, that recruit and retain its participants, that sustain it across years, are precisely the things that make it illegible to CE accounting. Plurality of meaning. Moral economy that bends. Friction as constitutive. A “purgatory for things.” Aiga’s thirty trips. Madara learning to switch off “free.” The wire offcuts no one will tell her aren’t being used. Witnessing circulation. Knowing whose things are whose. The shop as social rhythm, as biographical infrastructure, as a route for ethical labour you can’t help doing.

Brīvbode is not a charity (organisers actively resist that), not a market (no price), not a bin (it actively curates against waste), and not a CE node (it refuses optimization in practice). It sits in a negative space defined by what it isn’t, and the positive content of that space is — as you say — irreducibly anthropological. It’s held together by the kind of social fabric ethnography is uniquely equipped to describe and policy is uniquely poorly equipped to register.

Why this works conceptually

You have the citations to back this up almost exactly:

Hobson’s “generative spaces” ( #NB8CR8 Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy #8ZKAT7 / VI Concluding comments #ACNZ3L #NB8CR8 This paper has aimed to bring recent and growing debates around ideas of the CE into conversation with some facets of human geographical research. The aim is to outline how research into a CE requires much broader analytical lenses than are currently deployed, given the profound 'transformative change' advocates speak of. The purpose here was to provisionally locate generative spaces and practices that embody a CE which goes beyond re-jigged industrial systems and business models. Rather, the case is made that any consideration of the CE must encompass forms of 'everyday activism' that foreground the 'vital materialism' (Gregson et al., 2010: 853) necessary to rethink, re-envision, recreate, reuse and 'move on' the goods and services that currently meet everyday needs. In other disciplines, researchers and practitioners talk of addressing unsustainable production and consumption through frameworks such as product service systems. This (perhaps rather dry) phrase is not found a great deal in human geographical work, but it does intersect with – and arguably has much to contribute to – research that explores practices embedded within, and enacted through, multi-scale socio-technical systems (Davies et al., 2014; Watson, 2012). ) is precisely the concept you want. She introduced it in 2016 as the alternative to CE’s industrial-systems imagination: sites of “everyday activism” and “vital materialism” where citizens are not nodes accepting redesigned products but designers, repairers, prosumers. Brīvbode is exactly such a generative space, and the things that make it generative are exactly the things CE metrics can’t see.

Bohlin and Appelgren’s “Harnessing the Unruly” ( #B3CVMW ) — the title alone is your argument in three words. They’re explicitly about anthropological contributions to applied reuse projects, and the “unruly” is what reuse keeps producing that engineering and policy approaches struggle to absorb. Worth reading carefully if you haven’t recently — it likely says exactly what you’re saying.

Smith and Jehlička’s quiet sustainability ( #WVG7HV ) is the same logic in different vocabulary: practices that produce sustainable outcomes precisely because they are not articulated as sustainability, not market-mediated, not legible to the CE register.

Martínez’s “waste is not the end” ( #6C82ER ) and the wider anthropology-of-care-and-repair literature: care is not a metric, and the maintenance of ordinary material life happens in registers that resist quantification.

The reframe this opens up

If you adopt this framing, the thesis stops being “an ethnographic study of a CE initiative that adds nuance to CE policy” and becomes something more pointed:

An ethnographic argument that the very features which make community reuse projects work are the features the CE paradigm cannot register, and that this illegibility is not a flaw in the paradigm to be patched but a constitutive limit of its modernist-optimization framing.

Brīvbode is then interesting because it sits inside the CE policy moment and refuses to behave as CE imagines. It’s neither outside CE (it’s funded and legitimised by exactly that environment) nor reducible to it. That double position — legible enough to be supported, illegible enough to remain itself — is what makes it ethnographically and politically interesting.

And the “something” that resists, as you put it, is itself ethnographic. By which I mean: the participants are practicing something that anthropology has long described — plural value, moral economy, situated negotiation, biographical attachment to objects, gift-like circulation that isn’t gift, threshold spaces — and they’re doing it inside an institutional environment that increasingly tries to make all this legible as flow. The ethnography is not just describing the practice; it is recognising that the practice is doing the same kind of work ethnography does, against the same kind of reductions.

That’s a thesis with bite.

What it would mean for the writing

You don’t need to rewrite — most of the argument is already there in the empirical chapters. What changes:

• The introduction can declare this position more openly. Right now #J4M2WK Practices of Divestment, Acquisition and Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia #4V8VH7 / Introduction #ZF9EYF #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). is concessive (“CE policy depends on labour-intensive practices, this thesis describes some of them”). It could be directive: this thesis argues that CE’s framing systematically misreads what makes circulation work, and Brīvbode is a case where that misreading is visible.

• The theoretical chapter can acknowledge that practice theory and consumption work are your tools for making the anthropological argument — not the argument itself.

• The conclusion is where the throughput-vs-friction / generative-space / illegibility argument lands. Right now the conclusion is mostly summary; it could be the place this whole framing finally crystallises.

• Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 already do most of the work. They just need to be read by the reader as evidence for this argument.

A working sentence for the introduction, if it’s useful:

Brīvbode is the kind of initiative that the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan would happily count among its successes: a volunteer-run reuse site that diverts textiles from landfill at the edge of a city. But this thesis argues that the features which make Brīvbode work — its plural moral economy, the friction of valuation without price, the gendered care-laden labour of keeping it open, the biographical and relational attachments that route things through it — are precisely the features the CE paradigm cannot register. This illegibility is not a gap to be closed by better metrics; it is what generative spaces of circulation look like when ethnography rather than throughput accounting is doing the describing.

That’s the shape of it. You’re not adding an argument — you’re naming the one you’ve already made.