Staying (with) Things: Alternatives to Circular Living and Consuming
Short description
This project studies alternatives to circular economy solutions and explores what it means to "stay with things." It aims to critically rethink contemporary discussions about consumption, growth, and sustainability. Specifically, we study why some objects stay in households for a long time instead of being thrown away or replaced. We also look at the conditions that make people prefer keeping and using items longer over discarding or buying new ones. In addition to advancing academic knowledge, the project will also collaborate with activists and stakeholders to identify ways of stimulating interest in using things for longer.
Research aims and questions:
The overall purpose of this project is to investigate the social and material configurations that lead to things remaining in households for extended periods of time rather than being divested. Through ethnographic fieldwork in households, focusing on people’s relationships to their belongings, the aim is to understand the nature of human-thing entanglements as they evolve over time and to explore whether and how the material-affective dimensions of objects affect domestic practices of use and retention. A related aim is to identify under what circumstances keeping things is preferred to acts of discarding and/or buying new and to identify factors that are conducive to this. In addition to providing academic knowledge about the conditions for such non-circular alternatives to living with material culture, another aim is to explore the implications of this knowledge for applied sustainability work in focus groups co-developed with activists and stakeholders, focusing on ways of stimulating interest in using things for longer.
Five key questions form the basis of our study:
- Which types of objects (in terms of function, materials, shape, size, histories etc.) tend to stay in households and how do household members perceive and speak about their longevity?
- How do members of the households perceive and handle material transformation of belongings in everyday life and how is such physical change related to the length of time they stay in the household?
- What practices, e.g. using, sorting, appreciating, maintaining, or repairing, are involved in human-thing relationships that lead to things remaining in households?
- How is the “staying” of household belongings and associated practices of maintenance, repair and care structured by factors such as availability of resources, gender and power structures?
- Under what circumstances are the keeping of things and the things themselves, valued positively and preferred to discarding or buying new?