Ambivalent storage, multi-scalar generosity, and challenges of/for everyday consumption
Affiliation
University of Chester; University of WollongongPublication Date
2021-09-05
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Storage plays an important role in domestic practices as a banal yet essential means of practically accomplishing ‘living together’ and caring for people and material ‘stuff’. However, storage and stored things also occupy a provocative and paradoxical place in debates around the sustainability of household consumption. Driven by renewed popular and scholarly attention to ‘decluttering’ and eschewing anything that does not ‘spark joy’, this paper considers the emotional and practical implications of generosity – as both concept and practice – in articulating the sustainability potential in storage and stored things. In so doing we problematise assumptions about ‘clutter’ as unsustainable. Drawing on vignettes from two projects concerned with material consumption in young adulthood, and drawing on – but going beyond – extant framings of geographies of care, we illustrate how shifting spatial and temporal liminalities of storage mediate opportunities to engage in and with different scales of generosity. We argue that spatialities of storage are often less about deferring acts of divestment than they are a space in which to situate materialisations of significant emotional, care-ful(l) connections. We reflect on the implications of storage for sustainable consumption in the home and suggest how future work drawing on geographies of generosity might usefully enrich our understanding.Citation
Collins, R., & Stanes, E. (2021). Ambivalent storage, multi-scalar generosity, and challenges of/for everyday consumption. Social and Cultural Geography, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2021.1975166Publisher
Taylor and FrancisJournal
Social and Cultural GeographyAdditional Links
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649365.2021.1975166Type
ArticleDescription
This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a published work that appeared in final form in Social and Cultural Geography. To access the final edited and published work see http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2021.1975166ISSN
1464-9365EISSN
1470-1197ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1080/14649365.2021.1975166
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/