Global Heritage Futures Research Group invites to a lunch seminar:
Shapeshifter: the troubled materiality of secondhand things
Alida Payson, Cardiff University, School of Journalism, Media and Culture
Rising interest in second-hand as an antidote to climate catastrophe has raised new questions about the troubled materiality of second-hand things. Second-hand things have varied lives (Kopytoff, 1986), their value often yawing wildly from trash to treasure to trash again. Second-hand things also have stubborn “afterlives”, sticking around as lost and broken parts, shed fibres and deliquescing, often poisonous materials (Stanes and Gibson, 2017; Liboiron, 2021). Secondhand value, as both an object of study and of collective investment, refuses to stay put. Using second-hand things instrumentally to achieve sustainability aims therefore presents both practical and conceptual problems.
Here, I draw on a three-year research project on charity shops to explore second-hand things’ stubbornly fungible – even flammable – materiality. Drawing on science and technology studies approaches, I argue for considering second-hand value as a generative, destructive and inextinguishable ‘fire object’ (Law and Singleton, 2005). In so doing, I explore some of the perversities, traps and possibilities in thinking through and with second-hand things.
References:
Kopytoff, I. 1986. The cultural biography of things: commodification as a process. In: Appadurai, A. ed. The social life of things. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 64 – 94. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819582.004
Law, J. and Singleton, V. 2005. Object Lessons. Organization 12 (3), pp.331-355.
Liboiron, M. 2021. Pollution is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021445
Stanes, E. and Gibson, C. 2017. Materials that linger: An embodied geography of polyester clothes. Geoforum85, pp. 27–36 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.07.006
