Circulation of Things in a Swapshop in Riga, Latvia

Brīvbode is a volunteer-run swapshop 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.

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, standing 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.

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.

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.

For most of the years it has been operating, Brīvbode has been coordinated by Alise, a woman in her thirties with a background in the cultural sector and a wide network of contacts in Riga's creative community. 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. Alise manages Thursdays, and [Linards] – a resident of the quarter – covers Fridays, fulfilling his volunteer hour obligation in this way.

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 40 square metres, organised to accommodate both the intake and redistribution of goods. A storage room that 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.

In spring 2024, Brīvbode expanded into two additional rooms, almost doubling its size. The new spaces included a room for books, textiles and women’s clothing, centred around a large round table occasionally used for gatherings, 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.

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. Many items move quickly, with turnover often visible in real time as objects are brought in, sorted, and taken by other visitors.

The specific concept of Brīvbode – and the meaning attached to freecycling in this format – has been brought to Riga by Alise, as she adopted it from an organisation she had volunteered at in Berlin. There she experienced the swapshop primarily as a meeting point for neighbours:

"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)

Brīvbode is also 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.

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).

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.

[..]

Aspirations to sustainable consumption within the constraints of everyday life. Trying to find ways to relate to things well – to build oneself, to care for oneself and others.

Textile policies (short, coherent)

Textiles – the bulk of things circulating in Brīvbode.

At the political level, textiles have been identified as a priority sector in the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2020), a focus that has since been translated into concrete regulatory frameworks, including the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, mandatory separate collection of textile waste, and extended producer responsibility schemes.

“A key political question now emerging in the European Parliament and among stakeholders is how strongly the EU Circular Economy Act should prioritise waste prevention, reuse, repair and product longevity, rather than relying primarily on recycling and waste-management targets. Several scientific bodies and NGOs argue that absolute reductions in Europe’s material footprint will require binding resource-use targets and a stronger focus on upstream measures. [..]

With low recycling rates and high environmental impact, textiles are under growing regulatory scrutiny. The Act is likely to introduce product-specific obligations around durability, repairability, material disclosure, and separate collection. In each of these sectors, the Act could transform how circular performance is measured, and rewarded.”

EU Textile Strategy (2022-ongoing) states that textiles should be durable, repairable, reusable, and reuse should be part of the desired system outcome.

“Textiles were identified as a priority sector in the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2020) and subsequent policy developments indicate an increasing emphasis on reuse and product lifetime extension. The EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles foregrounds durability, repairability, and the wider availability of reuse services, while recent regulatory measures – such as extended producer responsibility schemes and restrictions on the destruction of unsold goods – embed reuse within emerging institutional frameworks.”

“In recent years, second-hand clothing markets have expanded rapidly in the Global North, driven by the growth of digital resale platforms and increased consumer participation. However, this boom is accompanied by structural imbalances. While higher-quality garments are increasingly retained and sold within local or regional markets, large volumes of lower-value clothing exceed the capacity of charity shops and resale systems. These surplus textiles are channelled into global redistribution networks, where “first selection” items tend to circulate within regions such as Eastern Europe, while lower-quality or unsellable garments are exported further to the Global South. As a result, the expansion of second-hand consumption in the Global North remains closely tied to the externalisation of textile surplus and waste.”

Vogue (2026) ‘Resale is booming. Why is there still so much waste?’, Vogue. Available at: https://www.vogue.com/article/resale-is-booming-why-is-there-still-so-much-waste (Accessed on 25 April 2026).

Historically, in the past decades in Latvia, second-hand has been more commonly associated with acquisition rather than divestment. The colloquial term humpalas – derived from humānā palīdzība (humanitarian aid) – reflects the legacy of donated clothing arriving from abroad, particularly in the post-socialist period. In this context, second-hand goods were often framed as assistance rather than as part of a reciprocal or circular system, and opportunities for individuals to pass on their own items in organised ways were typically confined to informal exchanges or charitable donations.

[Statistics on Baltics as the destination of other circular economies of other countries…]

A shift began with the emergence of more structured second-hand 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 second-hand consumption gradually moved from a one-directional flow of aid toward a more participatory system of reuse, in which giving and taking could coexist within the same framework. [Questions about destinations of these flows…]

At the same time, Brīvbode exemplifies a different configuration of circulation. While charity shops such as Otrā Elpa also enable both donation and acquisition, the latter remains within the context of monetary exchange. In contrast, in Brīvbode, the practices of giving and taking are co-present within the same space and moment, without being directly mediated by money. Donations are present, but as one form of exchange. Balanced exchange is an ideal upheld by the organisation, in practice [..]

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. [Embodying an ethos… Striving to become circular consumers.]

[Different modes – institutional, informal initiatives – that are also based on different types of work?]

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.

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 freeshop-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.

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.

[Although, for participants this aspect is not always important, Brīvbode sustains domestic reuse, without sending things to countries (although leftovers are absorbed by the textile collection system]. – Brīvbode operates with everyday goods.]

[Andele Mandele and Vinted – growing second hand sector.]

Access to infrastructure not distributed evenly.

References to other research in Latvia. Sufficiency lifestyles research. Circular textiles in Latvia… Andris Saulītis on barter shop.

How are divestment, acquisition and circulation organised and sustained in Brīvbode as a non-monetary, non-domestic site?

What social practice elements constitute freecycling in Brīvbode? How do these elements interact to constitute the practice?

What work does freecycling in Brīvbode demand from practitioners, and how is that work currently distributed?

[..]

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.

The name “Brīvbode” is a localization: “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.

In English, the organizers have a complicated relationship with the term “freeshop”. As Brīvbode manager Alise shared in an interview, the name already existed when she joined the initiative and they have not managed to replace it, despite trying to come up with alternatives. Their preference is given to the term “swapshop” which I also use in this thesis. “Swapshop”, as I discuss in Chapter 4, also positions Brīvbode as a site of exchange rather than charity. However, as a descriptive term for what actually happens there”, e.g. swapping overstates the symmetry and implies a more regulated exchange, with one to one logic.

To emphasise the circularity aspect, I use the term freecycling to refer to what happens at the swapshop generally. Freecycling has its own specific origin – it is associated with the Freecycle Network, an online platform for giving things away locally, most often organised via digital platforms – thus a different context from Brīvbode’s permanent, volunteer-run, physical site. 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.

Subsection: The structure of the work

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 (reference) 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).

While varied definitions of social practice exist, Warde (2005) 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).

Different frameworks have been articulated to account for the elements constituting practices.

Practice-as-performance - “doings and sayings”, embodied actions.

Practice-as-entity - materials, meanings, and competencies.

Practice-as-bundle (practice-as-system)

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. 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.

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 competences. “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. “Competences” 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.

[Rules as a fourth dimension of social practices have so far not been taken up by most scholars. Gram-Hanssen (2010: 155) criticizes that the element “competences” is “overly simple, as the authors do not distinguish between […] know-how or non-verbal knowledge and explicit, rule-based, or theoretical knowledge”. Other perspectives suggest that rules are part of the material or the competence dimension. The importance of rules should, however, be considered in an analysis of consumption practices (Giddens, 1984; Warde, 2005). In this paper, I consider rules as formal, institutionalized, and explicit rules (Gram-Hanssen, 2010). Informal rules are accounted for by the dimensions of know-how, and/or meaning, depending on the context.] “Lifestyles of enough: Exploring sufficiency lifestyle from spt perspective” – is this important/relevant?]

This threefold structure of elements of practice has been used widely across disciplines as it offers a clear conceptual approach for empirical research. 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 view Brīvbode as a complex where practices of divestment and acquisition intersect in new combinations within the non-monetary exchange regime.

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).

[Clothing as an industry creates global issues, is a resource intensive industry, with serious issues an concerns over the workers’ conditions.]

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 - [need to check this paper - Ieva]). 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.

Freecycling at Brīvbode sits at an interesting angle in this argument – it has both conventional and unconventional elements. It is not a widely shared, fully stabilised routine practice in Shove’s sense. Yet the practices it draws on – household divestment, secondhand acquisition, sequential use of goods – are not unusual, especially in Riga or Latvia; what is less common is their organisation within a permanent, non-monetary exchange site. It is also a practice that is becoming more prevalent, as similar spaces and infrastructures appear more in Latvia.

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

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, however, what practitioners say about why they do what they do is only one element of practice and “doings” hold the centre.

Practices of divestment are also changing, shaped by new infrastructure and policy developments – Latvia introduced mandatory textile collection in 2024, and new secondhand platforms and practices are expanding the routes available for 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.

“Only recently, have researchers begun to use second-generation practice theoretical approaches to investigate how environmental ethics and aspects of culture may play a role in the sustainable change of practices (Askholm and Gram-Hanssen 2022; Gram-Hanssen 2021; Katan and Gram-Hanssen 2021; Welch 2020). For instance, Welch, Halkier, and Keller (2020) argue that second-generation practice theoretical research has generally abstained from concepts pertaining to culture, and that it has been difficult to find a conceptual model for the role of the reflexive individual and their evaluative capacities. Arguably, this is due to the focus on mundane and inconspicuous types of consumption and the social organization of consumption, as well as the assumed association between ethics and symbolic and individualized aspects of consumption (Halkier 2020).” (Askholm, 2024: 2)

[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 freeshopping involve not only routine forms of circulation, but also moments of reflection, valuation, and ethical consideration.]

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).

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.”

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.

As a processual approach, practice theory directs attention to dynamics and trajectories of practices: how they emerge, stabilize, recruit practitioners, and change over time. Warde (2014: 297) observes, however, that practice theoretic approaches “may need supplementing with other frameworks, particularly to capture macro-level or structural aspects of consumption”. Evans (2020) develops this point, noting that the ways practice theory has been applied has been useful to elucidate the use of commodities within everyday practices but less equipped to address the institutional and systemic conditions that organise those practices. [..]

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

[“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).”]

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.

[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 rathe than redistributed.]

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.

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.

PIEVIENOT

“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)

consumption as a middle class sustainability “issue”?

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.”

“this dissertation conceptualizes disposal as a material, cultural, and social practice central to consumption, rather than a peripheral or undesirable act.

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.

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).

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).

“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).”

“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).”

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.

“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.”

“Social phenomena are understood as emerging from, and being embedded within, interconnected networks of practices and the materials that sustain them (Schatzki, 2019).”

“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 competences (e.g., dressing, laundering, repairing skills) (Maguire & Fahy, 2022; Skjold, 2016).”

“Textile disposal is conceptualized as a social practice embedded within everyday routines and shaped by normative expectations, identity work, and material needs.”

Schatzki’s site ontology

“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.”

​​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.

Shove conceptualizes material entities as one of the core elements of practice, alongside meanings and competences (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).

Practice as entity – how does the threefold model

Looking at a practice as entity – materials, meanings, competencies. MESOLEVEL.

Individual level of practice – practice as performance – doings, sayings, embodied experiences, movements, everyday parts… PRACTICE AS PERFORMANCE.

practice as bundle or practice as entity…

Acknowledge these three levels, focusing on practice as performance and practice as entity.

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 place, they keep accumulating and more so – it is actually myself who brings most things in.

In the morning, before arriving at 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 includes decisions about the future. There’s the skirt I got second hand online – it did not fit but is made of pure silk. Other things acquired or given with good intentions and quietly set aside. Getting rid of them feels necessary in order to begin again and to regain a sense of control over my environment. But are these pants washed and are good enough to pass over to someone? Would someone need a strong plastic bag? Should I risk and take away some toys in secret?

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.

Linards, 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, Valentīna, this box will be useful for your fine jewelry.”

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. Linards encourages keeping only the best garments: “People can go to Humana for ugly clothes.”

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 in exchange for his grandchild, 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.

[Maarja – This subchapter details your research methodology - which is ethnography - and relates it to practice theory. It’s good but also add a bit more on ethnography, e.g. define it using methodological literature. Right now the section is only focusing on practice theory]

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

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.

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.

Michal Sedlačko writes about the friction between adhering to the ontology consistent with theories of practice while conducting ethnographic research (Sedlačko 2017). He offers four main principles:

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;

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;

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,

and focus on reflexivity.

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."

[Maarja – Please start the section by first defining what is participant observation using methodological literature. Throughout the chapter you should support your narrative with methodological literature.]

I started the fieldwork for this thesis by volunteering in Brīvbode in February 2024, joining the weekly shifts for a couple of hours 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 recycling bins). I still cherish certain clothing and household items that remained in my household collection as favourites from that time.

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. Also, continuously handling material objects is a kind of activity that eases conversation (Appelgren, Bohlin, 2015; Holmes, 2018); sorting alongside someone, or commenting together on an object, easily opens exchanges, and I used opportunities to chat with fellow volunteers and visitors.

Consequently, I paid more attention to public discussions e.g. among friends, family and on social media when people shared their habits, practices, uncertainties and frustrations, and I have occasionally used them as secondary sources.

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.

Diary

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.

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.

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 [more].

[Also, taking Brīvbode as my research guides/thinking about ways my research could also be useful to them – e.g. asking what questions they would be interested in being studied in more detail – one suggestion was exploring the exchange networks that go beyond the visitors, making the network of beneficiaries a lot wider.]

Interviews are good for… Types of interviews.

Semi-structured interviews allow researchers to follow participant accounts flexibly while maintaining a thematic consistency across the fieldwork data (reference).

Four of the interviews were conducted with volunteers – with them I had the most rapport. A participant became a volunteer as well.

Some participants I recruited individually, some were suggested by Alise.

Some of the shorter conversations were one off contacts with people I met only once, so the nature of the conversation was different.

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 Alise – 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 2023). This also corresponds to how Appadurai (1986) speaks of “methodological fetishism” with regards to returning our attention to the things themselves.

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.

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.

Including various divestment routes available to them and on what occasions and how Brīvbode was chosen over other options.

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.

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.

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.

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 intepreting data through iterative coding, allowing patterns and themes to emerge from the material, while remaining open to revision (reference + more literature).

Both interview transcripts and fieldnotes were coded. Open coding generated descriptive codes close to the data, for example, —- Coding was informed throughout by practice-theoretical concepts – particularly the elements of meanings, competencies and materials, though themes were allowed to emerge from the data. 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.

Participants are identified by pseudonym. Where details might identify participants to people who know them, I have adjusted or omitted them, though some of the participants – particularly those in organisational roles – are more difficult to fully anonymise.

Before interviews, I informed the participants about my fieldwork and the purpose of the study. I asked for verbal constent prior to recording interviews and it was given in all cases.

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 aquisition practices might appear when observed and narrated. Those most embedded in the practice were not necessarily the most willing to talk about it.

How detachment and divestment happens? The emotional and moral weight of divestment.Why do people take things to Brīvbode (e.g. instead of containers or other divestment routes)?

How does the image of receivers (and other meanings) affect the material flow – what goes to Brīvbode?

There is demand for disposal, and disposal is normalised.

The material outcome of one practice present in Brīvbode (domestic divestment: things arrive) is a direct resource for another (sequential acquisition: things are taken), sustaining the circularity between different households and the freeshop. Instead of starting at the “shop”, freecycling in Brīvbode can be viewed as starting with the outward flow of things no longer needed or wanted in the household and the question of what to do with them. The practice of managing this flow (what Počinkova et al. (2023) call voluntary disposal) is what brings most donors to Brīvbode. The swapshop offers them both an opportunity for circulating materials and a way of managing attachment and detachment. Brīvbode is one node in the available infrastructure of divestment, and is distinguished from others by what it means to route things through it.

While the ideal encouraged by the organisers in Brīvbode is for participants to both give and take, the two roles do not always recruit the same carriers or sustain participation through the same meanings.

Giving in Brīvbode is typically more structured by the motives of givers rather than by the needs of the receivers. Instead of responding to a specific receiver’s demand, the givers contribute to a stock, shaped by their assessments of what is too good to throw away, their sense of responsibility toward still-usable objects, hopes for things finding new trajectories with other carriers, and their capacity to manage the work of getting rid of things well. [examples, situations]

Certain life situations generate larger pulses of divestment: moving home, renovation, and clearing out after a deceased relative: participants of this research described their experience, for example, sorting through an entire previous tenant’s life when she bought her flat, routing things to Brīvbode and to friends and relatives when downsizing, helping relatives to divest after moving home; fieldnotes record someone bringing in older person’s utensils and household items, apparently after their death.

Also, spring cleaning and similar seasonal rhythms shape divestment.

Space is a constituting material element also within the household dimension – there is a relation between the size of our homes and the pressure to move things out, for example, to fulfill the ideal of an uncluttered home – it requires both strong boundaries and established divestment routes.

The act of bringing to Brīvbode performs a moral work that throwing away does not – it relieves guilt of unnecessary, maintains the identity of responsible consumer, transfers some of the responsibility to the freeshop, adds to the social capital of giver. [examples]

When asked about the various divestment routes participants use, those who divest in Brīvbode often mentioned the non-transparency of the textile container system as one of the reasons. While both the textile containers and Brīvbode offer removal and a presumed social good, Brīvbode offers witnessed social good – the taking in Brīvbode can often be observed within moments and the circulation happens very quickly, a characteristic noted by many participants as peculiar. The divestment moment is completed by seeing or knowing it was taken, not solely the act of leaving the object.

Not only the visible, but also the imagined receiver is a meaning element that shapes the practice from the giving side. Līga describes her inner hope that an idealised figure, a homeless person from the neighbourhoods of Ķengarags or Purvciems, a person in genuine need will use what she brings. This imagery allows a wider sense of what counts as worth passing on: objects that might be marginal by taste standards become appropriate if genuine need is the criterion.

The supply that arrives in Brīvbode is shaped by the meanings attached to the practice – judgement about the value and quality of things, the practices of divestment – from various life events and —-

As such the supply is generally unpredictable.

Because of fast fashion, a lot of polyester dresses; observations – high-heals;

Shrunk woollen jumpers – people cherish the natural fiber materials and would like to maximise their use, however nobody can actually wear them comfortably. Upcycling initiatives contact Brīvbode for material acquisition – e.g. leather archery accessories maker.

Items that get stuck are more visible than the ones that circulate the quickest. Stuff that gets stuck. But overall different things, different styles, sizes.

Brīvbode tends to function as a route for divesting items that more regulated reuse channels would not accommodate – unfinished repair “projects”, textile fragments, photographs, used magazines, or not entirely complete sets of jigsaw puzzles.

Sometimes the volunteers would remark that they look for traces of why an item has been divested to Brīvbode in suspicion it was brought because of wear, tear or other defects.

For givers, this often makes it a route of the last resort for objects that are genuinely difficult to route anywhere else. What counts as acceptable and what counts as waste is decided through social judgment rather than formal criteria – and that boundary shifts depending on who is asking, who is watching, and what relationships are in play.

Sometimes I would bring things in my backpack, but not take them out because on a second thought they seemed too worn or not suited.

Often objects appeared –

a collection of sugar one time packages; a bunch of expired covid tests – I spend time unpacking the spirit napkins and see a woman take them. Carefully washed plastic containers – showing different versions about what counts as usable.

A delicate situation when I spoke to a woman who was bringing coloured wire offcuts her husband produces to the swapshop. She claims she has never met the person who always takes them, but she imagines it is someone who makes art or does craft work with children. She brings them regularly partly because having something to bring is itself a motivation to come. Her husband generates surplus from his practice (wire-working), she routes it to Brīvbode from her practice (domestic management), an unknown hypothetical third person absorbs it into their practice (craft or teaching). People in Brīvbode did not have the heart to tell her they were not used that way. [rewrite about a different object?]

Yet unpredictability works both ways – the same giver who previously sent in old, stain covered plates, returns with a bag full of colourful, folk style knitted mittens that stop visitors mid-browse. The uncertainty of supply is itself part of what sustains engagement with the practice.

[..] The same logic that makes divestment easy also makes Brīvbode available as a pressure valve,

Fast fashion is arriving at Brīvbode with tags still attached. A participant brought clothing that she had initially purchased online – after realising it did not fit she arranged a return, and the company returned the money but suggested she donate the clothing. Divestment is normalised and sought after.

An evaluation by Alise: perhaps Brīvbode is enabling more consumption rather than less for many visitors, as volunteer Alise observed: "Often we're simply a place to dump it all and go buy new things."

Brīvbode in this view appears as evidence of the structural conditions it appears to address rather than a solution to them.

There is a tension present in Brīvbode between the swapshop as an alternative caring system versus a low-threshold overflow channel, and this tension does not resolve neatly.

The unpredictability of the supply is what generates interest.

As mentioned, the turnover is high, and the demand for things is also real. On Thursdays and Fridays a queue has often formed before noon – sometimes more than ten people waiting to be let in. The first two hours are the busiest. Alise sometimes takes a breath before unlocking the door: "It begins." Things move fast. 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 (Larsen, 2023). This can also be said about Brīvbode. There’s excitement about things moving quickly. Within an hour of opening the extended venue, the decorations from the new room are gone. The globe, at least, is screwed to the shelf.

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.

The physicality and permanence of Brīvbode as a site is one of the main attributes setting it apart from other similar initiatives that often struggle with availability of affordable rental space, especially in high density urban areas. Tan and Yeoh (2024), writing about freecycling markets in Singapore where, because of this reason, organisers need to bin or redistribute excess items after every event, identify availability of rental and storage space as one of the main pre-requisites for functioning freecycling initiatives. It is therefore important to note how regular operation in the same physical venue constitutes the practice-entity, as it becomes a stable and recurring weekly infrastructure. This enables visitors to sustain a regular visiting rhythm through which, for many of them, freecycling becomes genuinely embedded in everyday life.

Physical instead of virtual presence also shapes the quality of encounters between people and objects. As Tan and Yeoh (2024) 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 in time. After expansion, Brīvbode finally offered a fitting space.

The space in Brīvbode is organised and decorated to resemble a retail environment with a DIY aesthetic – with hangers, 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. Alise 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." 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 each performance.

The volunteer in charge of the shift works as an anchor of the social experience. The personal relationships that accumulate over repeated visits set the atmosphere. "On Thursdays everyone asks where Ira is. And on Fridays everyone asks where Linards is."

Opening hours twice per week is not only a way to manage the necessary volunteer labour; the temporal tightening means that visitors are more likely to meet each other.

While it is not a primary site for socialisation – and most of the visitors I interviewed chose to answer they rather feel as individual visitors instead of part of a community – still, regular visitors noted the social aspect of visiting and the social contacts – Brīvbode as a place to go, a structure to the week, the reliability of known faces. the casual contact in everyday life.

Valentīna, living alone, describes … One of the founding stories about pensioners who met in Brīvbode initially and kept organizing excursions. Notably, mothers with young children find a casual social connection. As Linards observes: "things are rarely what anyone truly comes for, in a straightforward way – some want to gossip, some want to be pitied, some want attention, some want something else."

Within 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 to textile collection containers as 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 is sustainable – in a pragmatic, improvised manner – because of this material entanglement instead of trying to resolve the full material cycle on its own.

"My task is to sort and put out children's things – there are several bags. There's already a lot in the boxes – piles are forming. At one point I ask Alise: '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 children's clothes are dirty, because there simply isn't any more space."

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.

During one of my shifts, Alise offered me a handmade-looking black ceramic plate someone had brought that day. I was glad to take it, but before leaving confusion arose about where it had gone. It turned out, more stuff had literally piled up on top of it on the sorting table as visitors kept coming with their divestment. Alise laughed: “This is how it is here.” It captures something about Brīvbode as a material environment: things arrive continuously, pile up, and move on at a pace that can outrun you. The site is an active flow that requires tending and occasionally swallows its own offerings.

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 clothing acquisition, tidying and decluttering as domestic tasks. As noted in the methodology chapter, men do participate in Brīvbode, but on a lesser scale and with different practice career tendencies.

This assymetry extends to the compteneces required to manage the space. Linards described the challenge of developing a workable system for sorting women’s clothing: "Well, f*ck, look, where do I put it. Trying to systematize women’s clothing, it’s like a tree with many branches." The competenece of sorting – especially women’s clothing as in this case – is not self-evident as the proliferation of categories resists simple organisation.

Also the standards applied to men’s clothing operate differently. As there is simply less of it, 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 were looking through the clothing boxes for costumes for a film project. After one of them picked up an undershirt and commented on how disgusting it is, a man right next to them took it. Alise confirmed it was not in a good condition, but she had put it out because, as she put it, everything gets taken from the men’s section. The norms of assessment reflect whose consumption practices the swapshop is organised around.

Rules and norms in Brīvbode – competencies

There are written rules governing exchange in Brīvbode, yet those are framed in general terms. There are no rules excluding certain categories of things, the guidelines are framed relationally – bring things that would bring joy to someone; bring things you would give to a friend. Thus norms regarding acceptability of items circulating are defined and enacted situationally and relationally, which is both a strength and a source of friction.

While food items are certainly not central in Brīvbode, they are present and accepted. As opposed to many community-based exchange initiatives where the circulation of food is governed by strict rules, 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. For example, open packages may be accepted when brought by known or trusted visitors, suggesting that assessments of safety and acceptability are negotiated socially.

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, quietly 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. At the same time, other items that might be evaluated as borderline, such as packages of CBD gummies brought by the same person from the Central market, were accepted and even redistributed among participants. Avoiding direct rejection is an enactment of care for people, but indirect handling and comments can still produce discomfort or exclusion.

More generally, the rejection of items in Brīvbode is performed in situ and negotiated sensitively. Rather than formal refusal, workers may respond indirectly – when starting to work in Brīvbode back in 2021, I learned to approach people, for example, suggesting that perhaps they haven’t noticed, but items can be washed and brought back; or delaying decisions until the donor is no longer present. However, these moments can still produce tension. In some cases, items are sorted in front of those who bring them, with comments on their quality that may be overheard.

Being in Brīvbode – characterized by constant sorting of things, trying to maintain an acceptable level of presentation and quality of items. Balancing between lenience and care.

I often heard people feel uneasy about Linards openly commenting on things they have brought.

Practices have normative meanings – understandings upheld about what correct participation looks like, what the practice is for, and who belongs in it. In Brīvbode, normative work is done to hold the meaning of the practice as an exchange as opposed to a charity.

The exchange-not-charity framing is a normative aspiration – a claim about who belongs and on what terms, actively maintained against pressure from resellers, heavy-takers, and people wanting to use Brīvbode as a charity. It is held together by a moral vocabulary of equality and reciprocity. The norm that participants bring something or at least contribute is part of what defines participation in the practice rather than use of a service. This positioning work is needed also because Brīvbode is located in the neighbourhood of Gaiziņš night shelter.

As Alise puts it: “Exchange is a very honest way of operating, it requires responsibility from both sides. When both the wealthy and the poor come for exchange, the old and the young, 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?” Ira 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.””

Linards: "Well, on the other hand, yes, a person perhaps needs to donate something for the thing so they feel more of a sense of responsibility." Tad es domāju tīri par labdarības aspektu ir tā, ka, nu, mums nāk tas sociālais kontingents, kuram dot apģērbu ir tas pats, kas izmest viņu ārā, jo viņš viņu pēc trim vai četrām dienām novalkātu izmetīs ārā, jo viņi jau nemazgā un... Viņi tik ņem un maina. Ir tāds, tāds cilvēku sociālais kontingents, bomži, sauksim viņus tā.

The need to donate something in return –

Widlok’s (2017) analysis of give boxes offers a useful frame for what the non-monetary arrangement achieves socially. Give boxes, he argues, enable circulation while decoupling 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.

Still, this frames it as charity.

Brīvbode operates on a similar logic: the physical space mediates between participants, making it possible to give without knowing who receives and 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. Both dynamics are visible at Brīvbode and are examined in the moral economy section that follows.

More broadly, Widlok argues that sharing practices tend to minimise direct reciprocity by decoupling giving and receiving, often through spatial, temporal, or social distancing. This suggests that rather than focusing on exchange or reciprocity as analytical categories, attention should be given to how practices are organised to manage obligations, asymmetries, and social relations.

The imperative to keep things flowing and to avoid overflow creates a certain tolerance in case of suspicion for practices that formally fall outside Brīvbode’s rules. Reselling is not allowed, yet resellers are a suspected presence in Brīvbode (reference to other case studies where it’s an issue?). 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 Alise acknowledges as straightforwardly unpleasant. Yet because it is not always possible to prove, there is also a working accommodation, and Alise’s position is one of pragmatic acceptance: “At the same time it seems – if he'll find the next user for that thing anyway, the function is fulfilled, from one perspective." She laughs: "Well, what choice do I have but to believe… we support small business." And elsewhere: "Better that they make a little money and the thing finds its person, than some hoarder takes it and the things end up in a container."

This reveals a hierarchy of values operating within Brīvbode’s moral economy. The object’s trajectory to a sequential user is weighed as more important that the forbidden monetary transaction that may or may not occur along the way. The ethos of free exchange is real, but subordinated to the deeper logic of circulation – things must move. Besides, if visitors come with something in return, further trajectory is difficult to control.

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

“Best things in the world are not things” (confirmed in Brīvbode)

What might look like a single practice of “taking things in Brīvbode” is sustained by a variety of meanings that do not need to be shared or mutually coherent across practitioners. The following section examines the main meaning clusters and what each reveals about how the practice recruits and retains its carriers.

For Valentīna, Brīvbode enabled a form of self-presentation beyond her regular means of access: "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. This also has a competence dimension: knowing where to look, when to come, having access to a source others do not use.

Jana frames her participation with a desire for uniqueness: “I've always really disliked it when I'm wearing something and someone else is wearing exactly the same thing." This is a meaning that is neither based on sustainability nor thrift but aesthetic autonomy. Being a textile artist, Jana also has a sewing competency that works as an extension of the same desire – making her own as the ultimate guarantee of uniqueness: the competency of sewing is sustained by the meaning of distinctiveness. Brīvbode also enables Jana's daily performance of festivity: wearing a glitter dress as everyday wear is only possible because Brīvbode provides a low-stakes supply chain.

Zane describes a similar dynamic: “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. The absence of price lowers the threshold for commitment that normally accompanies acquisition. 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 got these size 43 court shoes... And that somehow challenged me to put them to use."

Marta’s participation is organised around her competency of craftsperson's gaze that allows seeing 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 is a specific competency that 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 rubbish turned out useful to Marta. This is an extreme 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 Marta’s rugmaking practice originated in having accumulated too many secondhand clothes – material surplus became the origin of a new practice.

Alongside the meanings of novelty, originality and access is the meaning of stigma. Some participants hinted at it subtly in conversation, but denied it when asked. Valentīna is the only one who explicitly named the shame associated with freecycling, and this cuts against any simple narrative of freecycling as normalized practice for people of all walks of life. While actively and regularly using Brīvbode and also praising the things she has managed to acquire as high quality and aesthetically pleasing, nevertheless, she also compares taking from Brīvbode to going through someone else’s trash. Especially when a TV crew came to Brīvbode and a journalist approached her for a couple of words, she flatly refused “I will not let them see that I've fallen so low as to come to Brīvbode." Yet in the same conversation she also reclaims the class label: "I'm common, simply common (prasta – common, plain, I.L.). I'll go, and I'll get what I need."

For some potential practitioners it is a barrier to entry, for others as something to manage strategically. Several participants mentioned using a strategy of withholding information about the origin of things, especially when giving gifts and passing things acquired in Brīvbode to other people. As Jana noted, grandmothers say: “'I don't tell my daughter where I got that jacket, because she wouldn't take it.' The gift economy of secondhand acquisition has its own secondary gift economy of strategic silence.

The stigma, however, is generationally uneven and appears to be dissolving. Some participants noted the changing meaning and normalization of secondhand acquisition in recent years – and observed the shift within her own family. Changing meanings are shifting the practice’s recruitability. Agate, a highschooler preparing for graduation at the time of fieldwork, uses the English word "thrift shops" to refer to second hand sites, frames her participation in explicit sustainability 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”.

A related strong meaning holds that secondhand items carry the energy of previous – often deceased – owners. Several participants mentioned this trope but adjusted it to their practice. Linards, laf-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, it's also like a kind of purgatory for things." Brīvbode can function as a threshold space in the object biographies where the weight of previous owners can be released.

The intensity of circulation in Brīvbode and its non-monetary character raise a question about the relationship between price and attachment. Evan’s (2020) framework suggests that attachment is produced through the acquisition-side moments of consumption – appropriation and appreciation, which are processes that are normally anchored by monetary investment. In Brīvbode, this aspect is absent, and the quality of possession is different.

Some participants articulate this directly. Alise describes how price normally operates as a binding force which Brīvbode alleviates: “You no longer have that heaviness around a thing, that 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." The monetary investment that normally binds a person to an object is absent, the cost of a wrong decision is lower. 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 is to invest as little as possible, so that afterwards there are fewer regrets."

Is there care in passing it further?

None of the participants explicitly stated that they would care how things would be used afterwards, nor that they thought much about the origin of the things.

The absence of price places a moral and relational value – ease of circulation and disposal.

Fieldwork observations capture this dynamic: “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..." On a very sunny day, another woman, whom I have seen before, laughs, as she is leaving her jacket in Brīvbode 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 woman also swaps her jacket on the spot for the one she prefers.

The possibility of a return after trial allows an opportunity to see whether attachment will form. Bringing something back if it does not work 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 on and so on."

My own divestment to Brīvbode often consisted of things I bought on second hand shops – thinking of saving money and sustainable acquisition – but did not want to invest my effort in selling.

Is higher cost associated with longer use?

High initial costs can lead to a phenomenon known as "financial myopia," where users find it difficult to detach from items they spent significant money on, even if they no longer use them. This results in "neglected possessions" accumulating in wardrobes as disposal is deferred to avoid the feeling of wasting a significant investment.

Linards also positions Brīvbode against charity: "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, whatever. That it's cool, that it's 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. Organising photo shoots and parties, playing with clothing are practical expressions of this.

After discussing the framing of Brīvbode as opposed to charity, I ask Linards if he sees working in Brīvbode as helping visitors or helping a cause: "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." Doing his shifts in Brīvbode – sorting, switching clothing, chatting with visitors and attending to the shop so that it continues operating well – has become sufficiently routinized for him that it no longer requires justification or much rumination about the meanings of it.

Alise 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 available – 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 Linards and Alise, the practice has become so embedded in their everyday life that philosophical meaning-making has receded. They are practitioners.

For Agate, the environmental meaning is primary rather than peripheral.

Laura presents a different configuration: the environmental meaning is present, but in tension with her actual acquisition practices. She identifies textile consumption as probably one of her most environmentally problematic behaviors, yet knowing 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.

The chapter demonstrated the plurality of meanings sustains the flows…

The persisting tension – the sustainability framing is partial and unevenly held. Brīvbode as a moral, sustainable circularity infrastructure vs an overflow channel – the practice continues irregardless of the framing for individuals (?)

Tension between Brīvbode as a way to care and to move the care and work over… The next chapter will reveal on what labour the flows described in this chapter depend upon.

Evans 2020: practice-theoretic approaches contribute key resources for conceptualising consumption as a process involving multiple ‘moments’.

[leftovers]

Divesting responsibly has become one of the ways people sustain and recreate identity in relation to their things. Noting how meanings migrate across practices, Shove et al. (2012) mention how thrift, for example, is no longer expressed through darning socks at home – now a rather rare practice – but has moved, as Gregson (2007) shows, into methods and styles of disposal and divestment.

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.

Is the stuff “given” // givenness of stuff in Brīvbode similar to givenness of waste in Pyyhtinen, Lehtonen (2023).

Laura L.: Un es tā kā es ļoti reti, kad tur arī kaut ko tā kā pati atrodu sev. S2: Un man liekas, ka es esmu diezgan tāda talantīga humpalu lietotāja, tā kā es protu diezgan labi atrast lietas un es visu pārčekošu un tā. Nu, man nav kaut kā baigi tur pēdējā laikā veicies.

There is a donation box in prominent sight from the entrance.

I simply go up and say: 'We work this way, and the principle is: you can bring two small things, take three small things. Nobody watches how many you take, but you need to bring something in exchange.'" Jana actively enforces the reciprocity norm at Viskaļi.

"Čista energetičeski vajag apmaiņa." Ira

Ienāk vīrietis pēc grāmatām, īgns, ka viņam neļauj ņemt visas. Alise saka – “Citi cilvēki arī gribētu ņemt grāmatas.”

Marta expressed the most enthusiastic statement of secondhand acquisition as pleasure and process.: "I really, really, really love just walking, browsing, exploring... I love that you never know what you'll come across, and that is the magic." The search and the possibility of encounter as values. "Other people go to museums, I like to walk around... not just to buy something, but also to find inspiration."

"I start from the first room and then slowly go to the end, then I come back when there's already something new."

Sandra: She has stopped going to charity shops entirely: "Es uz humpalu bodēm vairs neeju. Jo te ir labāk, un viss pa brīvu, un var apmainīt pret savējām." Brīvbode has replaced the charity shop as her primary secondhand venue. The reasons she gives are practical – free, exchangeable, better selection – but the substitution is total. a better material arrangement recruits a carrier away from a competing practice.

Meanings: "I'm looking for clothes, leggings. I go to an online shop's page and wonder whether I'm missing out if I don't shop there – the ability to be more stylish and grown-up, investing more in myself."

Some of these meanings blend with the values of traditional consumerism, but others complicate the relationship –

“Patrimonial pleasure” (pleasure and pride for providing for kids)

Analysis is present in the chapters. And relate to literature.

Brīvbode is not a craft practice or a domestic routine where embodied skill is the most visible element. Freeshopping does not require years of training to enact. A lot of the skills are “soft” – social and evaluative, such as knowing how to handle quality, when to put things out on the shelves and when to hold them back, how to redirect a donor without causing offense, handling social situations, creating a welcoming atmosphere, decision-making. The competency element is real but it is mostly social and evaluative rather than physical: knowing how to navigate the space, read quality, judge what to take and what to leave, manage the implicit norms of exchange. These are competencies but they are harder to see than, say, the skill of a carpenter or a cook.

Brīvbode is sustained by volunteers whose participation is only possible because their own lives are organized around sufficiency – flexible time, low monetary consumption – and whose labor includes not just physical work but the ongoing interpretive effort of finding meaning in conditions that frequently threaten to erode it.

"We ask Alise about the new stove – it has been fired up and is humming. We learn that Alise and Krišjānis welded the whole thing themselves. The woman first asks whether they have their own company or something? Learning that this is simply a one-off, she says she is lost for words, that it is unimaginable. Alise explains that inside there are three gas canisters, handles made from springs of some old sofa, another part from some kind of drain fitting, and so on. The stove is great. It hums because there is a fan inside." "But what do you do if you don't want to pay €1000 for a stove? You pick up the angle grinder yourself"

repair competency, sufficiency orientation, collaborative volunteer labor, making do with what is available.

Pieņemsim, mēs ar Krišjānu uztaisījām ratus, ar ko vest no Viskaļu Brīvbodes mantas uz konteineru, kas ir patālu. Jo vienmēr nest ir riktīgi smagi, un, davai, uztaisām ratus. (later Alise tells us how she promised to help Krišjānis sand his boat for a week in return)

Interpretative work: The work of finding and recalibrating meaning. “Ja tu strādā tikai tiem cilvēkiem, kas iet tālāk, pārdod, un beigās viņi ir vienīgie, kas uz tā visa nopelna un tu velti savu brīvo laiku, tad pazūd tā motivācija. Tāpēc katrs mēģina atrast sevī interpretēt vai samierināt. Jo katram ir savi motīvi, sava latiņa, pie kuras visi viņi sāk besīt, vai kas spēj iepriecināt, sadusmot. Bet katrs cenšas ar sevi…”

"Well, you know, all those down-and-outs come there. Well, truly, sometimes quite drunk or scruffy gentlemen and the like. And those same ladies every time – when they're already coming every day, you're already looking at them terribly... But the angrier you look, the more she'll smile at you, and you just feel like – 'You're doing this on purpose!' So, well, I think they also understand that we already see them every day at Brīvbode, and then we also start to think: 'Why are we doing this? Is it for these 10 people, or still with some larger purpose? Does anyone else need this besides these 10 people?' Because sometimes that motivation – well, what I've often heard from Linards or also from Ingūna, I think, from time to time – 'Can we please get some new visitors? Maybe we need to apply somewhere, maybe we need to go somewhere so there would be new visitors. I'm a little bit already fed up with those regulars.' Because they are very massive."

DIVESTMENT NETWORKS

​​The social reach of Brīvbode extends considerably beyond the people who physically visit it. Several of the most embedded participants do substantial divestment work not just for themselves but for neighbors, colleagues, and family members, functioning as logistics nodes through which other indirect participants’ surplus flows to Brīvbode.

Similar to the gender dynamic in the wider practice, also these carriers of this extended network are overwhelmingly women.

Acquisition networks – men look for books, electronics.

Through the work of most active participants, Brīvbode's social reach extends beyond the people who physically visit – and the carriers of this practice are overwhelmingly women. Several regular visitors do substantial divestment work not just for themselves but for neighbors, colleagues, family members, and strangers. The practice has extended outward from their own households and made them logistics nodes for others. Ira rescues things from the street before the garbage collectors arrive.

The labor of carrying others' divestment falls on those who are already most embedded in the practice. Like Ira, Valentīna has become a logistics node for her building – neighbors give her things to take because she goes. This consumption work has become naturalized into her role. ​​The practice has become part of Valentīna's known social identity in her building. It recruits additional participation from neighbors who route their divestment through her. This is how practices expand their reach through existing social networks.

The practice of bringing things to Brīvbode has become a weekly routine organized around and through Ita. The practice has stabilized into a rhythm that recruits additional participation from neighbors. This is the temporal and social structure of practice in action. She also goes to neighbors to collect things – active divestment work on behalf of others who do not or will not come themselves. At least five neighbors regularly give her things. She coordinates pickups, meets neighbors on the way, takes requests for specific items. This is consumption work that has become a near-weekly routine organized entirely around Brīvbode. The neighbors outsource to Ita because she is willing and organized. Only one neighbor out of many actually goes themselves. The rest route their divestment through Ita.

JANA: "Darba kolēģes sajūsmā. Viņas izmanto mani. Viņas sagatavo paciņas, kas man jānogādā uz Brīvbodi. Un tad viņas saka: 'Vai tu vari apskatīties kaut ko priekš viņām?'"

Austra also takes for her husband – finding larger sizes for him as his weight has changed – and occasionally for a grandchild or a distant relative with young children. The consumption work extends outward from her household to the family network.

LĪGA

Līga helped relatives relocate and spent months coordinating the dispersal of their possessions – arranging Facebook market pickups, allocating specific items to specific people who had expressed interest, making 30 trips to Brīvbode. She explicitly acknowledges that a single call to a clearance firm would have resolved everything in one visit: "Ja būtu firma, viņi izmestu ārā vienāpiegājienā viss, un viss jau ir tīrs." She chose the harder route because she could not allow things to be discarded.

This is the most extreme example of consumption work as a self-imposed labor burden. The 30 trips are the direct cost of refusing the easy disposal option. "Sometimes you really do want to just throw it out, but well, that inner feeling simply won't let me do it." The inner sense that prevents easy disposal. This phrase appears early and recurs throughout the interview as the motor of Līga's behavior. It functions as a powerful constraint on how she manages material excess.

[No Singapūras pētījuma] Campbell-Johnston et al.’s (2020) argument that an item’s sequential (re)use is not a given. Rather, (re)use is underpinned by relational labour bound up in what Hobson (2020) calls social circularities.

Not unlike systems thinking that undergirds a circular logic, we have shown that ‘energy’ (i.e. volunteer, re-lational labour) as well as material inputs (i.e. things for recirculating, an available/accessible venue) are required for sustaining free(cycling) markets, and that this can only be accomplished as a community.

Freecycling markets may be environmentally sustainable but not-so-sustainable with respect to the space, time and labour needed to run them in Singapore. Such a disjuncture illuminates the significance of contextualising sustainable materialist movements in its spatio-material and socio-cultural context. While material inputs in terms of reusable things are readily available, suitable spaces, unpaid volunteer labour and community networks necessary to organise and sustain such markets are in short supply.

The node is non-domestic but the work that sustains it is continuous with domestic consumption work

The clearest empirical demonstration is the divestment-network: consumption work ordinarily inside households is delegated outward to embedded carriers (Ita, Valentīna, Marta, Līga) who in effect privatise the logistics of the public node.

The competencies required for participation in Brīvbode: e.g. skills in identifying value in used items (e.g., repair potential, quality);

Emotional work: letting go of items, managing desires and impulses;

Care networks (taking for others, bringing from others), reciprocity, and informal exchanges;

The labour of divestment in households, the work of sustaining the freeshop, what the practice demands from its carriers. Skills that people must develop in order to be successful at freecycling: assessment of what might still be useful / usable? What is appropriate?

Kersty Hobson on consumption work in the circular economy – the activities, skills, and labor (cognitive, emotional, temporal resources) involved in acquiring, managing, and disposing of goods in a sustainable way.

Women as moral agents in consumption (Miller)

It is often empirically observed that in domestic context women regulate what comes in the house (e.g. Reno, e.g. Miller) Reno: Wife – the one who decides what consumable commodities may enter their home from the outside and how. (barriers to scavenging)

Care as social work: fostering responsibility and trust within the Brīvbode community; examples of breaking trust – giving unusable things; taking or giving too much.

Consumption work / social norms & competencies – ko nest, ko nest ir vēlams, ko nevēlams, kas ir vērtīgs.

“Our findings also highlight, in line with the previous studies, the fact that circular consumption requires constant effort in the form of tinkering, affective practices, or ethico-political action. We have chosen to study frontrunner consumers who already have integrated circular practices into their lives, but even so, they perceive them as laborious and even troublesome. For example, sometimes circular consumption becomes a struggle against unpleasant bodily sensations. At other times, consumers must rely on embodied knowledge to care. This emphasises the situatedness and proximity of caring. Caring is not easy, and it connotes “the acceptance of some form of burden” (Tronto, 1993, p. 103).” (Mesiranta et al. 2025: 25)

“Our study has focused on a group of consumers in an affluent society in which finding meaningfulness for this extra, unpaid work is a requirement for its existence (cf. Sutcliffe, 2022). For these types of consumers, meaningfulness relates to sharing private consumption practices publicly as a form of collective effort and ethico-political action. We acknowledge that for consumers in emerging economies, consumer work in CE may entail types of care that are motivated by survival (Korsunova et al., 2022). Thus, we also call for more research on diverse consumer groups. Furthermore, our findings suggest that this ‘work’ of care is not dependent on human aspirations but, rather, becomes enacted in close relations with nonhumans.” (Mesiranta et al. 2025: 25)

“As suggested by these researchers, joint efforts involving various types of actors, such as non-profit organisations and local communities, can help balance marketised care. Examples of this within circular consumption include repair cafés, clothes-swapping events, and community fridges for sharing leftover food in the neighbourhood. Community-based aspects of circular consumption have recently been highlighted (for a review, see Luukkonen et al., 2024), and the role of local communities in adopting and appropriating circular consumption and care should be further examined. Frontrunner consumers may have a significant role to play in establishing these communities and crafting policies that are built from the bottom-up and aligned with their everyday lives.” (Mesiranta et al. 2025: 26)

Agnese: "Well okay, since I eat plant-based food, that's usually a challenge too. I'm already used to having to search, to having to keep in mind that not everything will suit me... And so with the world of things too I understand that not everything will suit me, I have to search a bit, but that's actually good, because it perhaps also limits and stops me."

Agnese has developed the same orientation toward objects as toward food – constraints (vegan diet, material preferences, aesthetic coherence) are not frustrations but useful filters that slow down acquisition and make it more deliberate.

ROUTING DECISION

Several participants noted a structure of divestment routes based on the perceived value of items: the most valuable things are sold (often online on Andele Mandele or now Vinted),

Agnese has specific routing logic for different kinds of objects (Brīvbode for bulk children's things, Otrā Elpa for potentially valuable items, Andele for things that can be sold, H&M container for worn-out textiles).

Brīvbode is chosen as a route for bulk children’s items, when things are thought as not appealing to the public

Zane R.: "I assess how valuable the item is. Well, if it's valuable, I try to sell it first... Then, if that doesn't work, I tend to put things in the “Free yourself from things Riga” group... and then if, for example, I've assessed that the item isn't worth selling... then I take it, yes, to Brīvbode." "The risk I see both in Otrā Elpa and Brīvbode, and in donating things generally, is that it's not clear whether on the other side there will be the person who needs this."

Zane has an explicit and systematic routing hierarchy: sell first (Andele, Facebook), give via direct request in a freecycling group, Brīvbode for things that don't merit the effort of selling. The routing logic is both practical and moral: she prefers direct person-to-person transfer over anonymous donation because she can see that a specific person wanted the specific thing. Other – swapping events and routing to kindergarten.

SORTING

Laura L. The two-tier wardrobe: stable items she has invested in, and additional items that circulate in and out. Different garments occupy different positions within the practice of dressing – some are durable elements, others are passing. The freeshop is a more a mechanism for the circulating tier, less for the stable one.

Sandra describes her divestment practice as rather “chaotic” – no regular sorting, things accumulate and are brought when she gets around to it.