Moving things along: the conduits and practices of divestment in consumption

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Abstract This paper provides a geographical analysis of divestment. Drawing on two years of intensive qualitative research with households, we explore empirically the range of conduits that figure in household divestment, showing how surplus and excess things are routinely moved through specific conduits. We argue that, rather than focusing on the trajectories of things in divestment, it is practices of divestment that merit attention, and that divestment itself is also a practice. Further, we argue that divestment practices are about trying to constitute a normative around surplus and excess things; that they connect up to the reproduction of particular consumption practices and to the meta practice of consumption (Warde, 2005). The paper also considers the relation between divestment practice and the question of disposal. We argue that, as well as paying attention to conduits, connectivities and the work of the return, there is a need to focus on placings and practices, that not only have the potential to act-back but which are always acting-back.

Mapping international flows of electronic waste

“…There is an important body of researchnotably in anthropology, geography, history and sociology-that understands disposal and waste quite differently. Rather than an endpoint in a narrowly defined economic process, disposal is understood to be part of complex cultural practices of social constitution, ritual and reproduction (Douglas 1966;Thompson 1979;O'Brien 1999;Gregson and Crewe 2003;Shove 2003;Hetherington 2004;Drackner 2005;Gregson et al 2005;Gregson 2007aGregson , 2007bGregson et al 2007) that have not only changed over time in our own society (Rathje and Murphy 1992;Strasser 1999;Benidickson 2007), but also vary geographically in culturally distinctive ways (Kretschmer 2000;Postill 2003). Our research suggests a need to put these two different ways of approaching disposal and waste-as a technical, linear problem and a socio-cultural processinto productive conversation with one another.…”

Following things of rubbish value: End-of-life ships, ‘chock-chocky’ furniture and the Bangladeshi middle class consumer

“…Where extended lives have been addressed within geography, this has largely been in terms of constituting the home -especially 'the material cultures of objects and their use, display and meanings within the home' (Blunt, 2005, page 506;Leslie 6 and Reimer, 2003) -where the linkage of products and practices is seen as what consumption actually involves (Shove and Southerton, 2000;Warde, 2005;Watson and Shove, 2008). The thing is occasionally followed into the domestic world, but rarely beyond it, in spite of the emerging work on second-hand exchange, consumption and disposal (Gregson and Crewe, 2003;Clarke, 2000;Gregson et al, 2007aGregson et al, , 2007bReno, 2009). Taking its inspiration from both Kopytoff and Thompson, this latter work rests on a reading of consumption that emphasises not the realisation of value in the initial point of sale but combines the senses of consumption as practice or making use with the material etymological sense of consumption as depletion, exhaustion and using-up, and as intrinsically linked to ridding, disposal and wasting (Hetherington, 2004;Gregson, 2007;O'Brien, 2008).…”

Materiality and Waste: Inorganic Vitality in a Networked World

“…Detailed ethnographic work in shipbreaking yards is the type of work that Gille's paper highlights as a notable absence from current waste scholarship. This paper takes the methodological approach that has enhanced understanding of both consumer disposal practices (Gregson et al 2007a;2007b) and waste management work (Reno, 2009) and puts this to work on demolition. In so doing, the paper shows that materials, and particularly materials classified as wastes, matter profoundly to demolition, to the bodies and lives of those who do this work, and to the geographies of this work.…”