Since the last surge of academic interest in the charity retail sector, there have been significant changes to the UK’s socioeconomic landscape, and to modes of retailing and consumption. In light of these changes, and in anticipation of another wave of charity shop scholarship, this essay revisits three landmark contributions to charity retail literature: Charity Shops: Retailing, Consumption and Society by Suzanne Horne and Avril Maddrell, Second-hand Cultures, by Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, and Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia, by Karen Tranberg Hansen. It considers the foundation they lay for the study of the contemporary UK charity retail sector, and highlights the need for new empirical knowledge. In particular, the changing spaces of charity retail, the role of charity shops within wider systems of consumption and disposal, and the influence of organisational practices on labour relations, social impact, and material flows, are argued to require further research.
Indonesia has witnessed the proliferation of thrift culture. While it used to be for the consumption of the urban poor, thrift clothing has been gentrified into the practice of the younger generation, presumably doing such practice for the sake of environmental consciousness. The emergence of thrift fashion is also widespread by online thrift shops on Instagram, Facebook, and other social networking platforms, often selling thrift fashion as 'trendy' fashion. This paper investigates how the Indonesian youth make sense of the thrifting culture and what motivates them. We surveyed 94 participants and organised FDG interviews with 12 participants who are frequent thrift customers. Towards the quantitative and qualitative data, this research found that most participants took part in thrifting culture not solely because of environmental consciousness but predominantly out of economic reasons. However, how the younger generation interprets thrifting is much deeper than just economic considerations. This research found that thrifting practices have many layers of meaning, ranging from thrifting as a way of life and strategy in dealing with economic challenges, identity and individuality issues, community belonging, and social responsibility to the environment. This finding also suggested that the thrifting culture in Indonesia creates many additional problems because most secondhand fashion is imported goods from other Asian countries, far from its initial conception as a way to reduce over-consumption. While not much research has been done regarding thrifting practice in Indonesia, this paper is helpful as preliminary research and can inspire further research in this subject.
This special issue responds to a series of unfolding environmental and social crises that have contributed to an unsettled period in second-hand cultures. While these worlds have long existed as part of the informal economy, they have often been overlooked, even as a growing body of work across a range of approaches began to examine the second-hand as an integral area of cultural and social life. This special issue draws on themes and work shared at a particular moment of reflection and urgency: an interdisciplinary and international online symposium called "Second-hand Cultures in Unsettled Times", held online during the 15-16 June 2021 as the world was trying to recover from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic . From this conference, we identify three emerging areas of study and practice in this growing field: death, waste, and the lives and "afterlives" of things, extraction and gentrification, and repair and reparation. We map the many methods and approaches to studying second-hand cultures and economies in the field. We also sketch the contours of the articles that comprise this issue around themes of waste and value, politics and change, and emotion and repair in second-hand. Finally, we outline future political orientations, questions and directions for this important area of cultural study.
This paper brings together literature on welfare, austerity and second-hand cultures with theories of the makeover to analyse the cultural politics of charity shops in the UK, and their real aftereffects. Based on an analysis of two television programmes, a 2009 BBC Two reality television makeover programme Mary, Queen of Charity Shops, and a camp, cult-hit comedy web series, Charity Shop Sue (2019), the article traces the politics of makeover culture in second-hand spaces. In the first programme, retail celebrity Mary Portas sweeps in to make over a shabby British charity shop, sweeping out old things, people, and spaces, to make way for new ones. Tracing how the programme not only valorises but causes changes across the charity retail sector, the article shows how a regime of the makeover of things, people, and places in charity shops relates to a regime of real-world austerity politics I call makeover welfare, in which makeover is offered instead of welfare. Yet despite efforts to enforce makeover welfare, second-hand things, people, and places resist and escape this regime. In the second programme, analysing the camp satire of Charity Shop Sue's failed makeovers, I unpack second-hand's counter-aesthetic: a surprisingly durable second-hand politics located in unruly tatt, stubborn subjects, and rummage spaces. Further, because charity shops are important but overlooked instruments of welfare provision and governance, understanding their cultural politics opens up insights into how late capitalism is lived and felt.
House clearance companies frequently operate as the first brokers of goods as they move from first-hand usage to second-hand repurposing or to disposal. Especially in their end-of-life formation, house clearers process and disperse diverse ranges of unwanted goods, accumulated over lifetimes, making commercial decisions at speed about their next directions. The small-scale study of UK house clearance practice is underpinned by empirical observation of disposal and dispersal processes at three key points - the cleared house, the waste processing site, and the reselling location – and by interviews with those who make the choices about what to keep and what to trade, as well as with those who buy it and sell it on. Taking a material culture approach that draws on wardrobe studies, garment biographies and design histories, this study puts disembodied dress at its centre. It examines how clothes can move, in less than a week, out of wardrobes and into the domain of secondhand dealers and consumers, through declining scales of value, until garments are given away for free. What remains unwanted at the end of this process is culturally marked by many rejecting hands and constitutes the lowest ebb of utility and desirability, illuminating how cultural and financial value is constructed and deconstructed through local and global circuits of manufacture and reuse, and ultimately how waste is classified and produced.
Cutting through social, cultural and racial boundaries, the car boot sale appeals to those who are involuntarily excluded from mainstream commerce as well as groups who simply enjoy the freedom provided by a marginal retail space. Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe’s work from the late 1990s and early 2000s remains the most detailed study of the event, however changes to the social and cultural climate suggest that a reexamination of the sale’s enduring appeal is long overdue. This article provides an updated assessment of how the car boot sale functions in an age of economic and social uncertainty and considers what specific pleasures and opportunities it offers attendees. The article combines the critical framework of fan studies with ethnographic research in order to discuss the ways ‘booters’ accumulate and exchange subcultural capital, engage in acts of collecting, and foster thriving communities through attendance, conversation and consumption. The article transforms the author’s ‘lived experience’ into an examination of the complex cultural practices that occur throughout the car boot sale. In highlighting the role skill, knowledge and expertise play in the successful navigation of the event, the work draws attention not only to the manner in which boot fairs allow for feats of consumption and dispossession, but also how these acts enable attendees to develop and affirm significant and meaningful social identities.
Since the 2000s, second-hand clothing consumption has increased rapidly in acceptability, visibility and fashion-ability in the UK. Diversifying from informal, domestic sites like charity shops and car-boot fairs, second-hand channels now include more formalised, profit-driven retail spheres, including vintage boutiques, chain stores and online marketplaces. Clothes swaps are perhaps less visible due to their informality and ad-hoc organisation. However, within local communities swaps have begun to proliferate- from student union free-for-alls, to swap parties, to ‘gender swap’ events for trans people- and there is now at least one dedicated clothes swapping app, Nuw. This essay analyses the growing activity of clothes swapping as material-cultural practice. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories spanning cultural geography, anthropology and feminist theory, I explore three case studies in Norwich, UK. Exploring different types of swaps allows a wider view of swapping practices; the interplay of space, exchange and sociality; and the diverse journeys or ‘flows’ which garments take as ‘mobile’ matter, rather than merely the accumulated possession of individuals (Gregson and Beale 2004, p.692). Since clothing enables exploration of the self, I consider how swaps sustain collective negotiations of identity and style. At private swaps, for example, clothing’s inalienability from previous wearers can prove problematic, blurring boundaries between self and other, whereas at public swaps, the opportunity to experiment with style can be liberating. Finally, I examine swapping’s relationship to wider fashion systems, both dependent on and undermining first-hand consumption. Participants’ attitudes and motivations often imply opposition to mainstream fashion, though this is complicated by the flow of clothing into swaps and the volume of their clothing acquisition. Nevertheless, in circumventing the pressures and ethical issues of the fashion industry, swappers may find space in which to question and challenge dominant modes of consumption.
Methodologies of affect and embodied materiality are key components of the second-hand embued in clothing and fabrics. These ideas are the unspoken, the hidden areas of tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is seen as the raw data in research, which reveals itself as strands; it is visible data driven by its transparency, such as the predictions for growth in second-hand markets over the next five years. Making is a key component of tacit knowledge, as it is in the making where hidden knowledge can be made and embedded. The emotion and affect embodied in the second-hand can be embedded in the visible repairs or the additions that can create unique meanings within artefacts, beyond looking at the fabric manufacture, or garments on the surface. It is this hidden origin which is the tacit, and the reasons why the second-hand can have value and a unique quality not necessarily attributed to those garments made at the designer level. The second-hand does play an important role in the original materials, where tacit knowledge forms the part of embodied materiality, encompassing the meaning of the work in making, and making new meaning in repairing. This application of tacit knowledge can be embedded, as used fabrics can be used to make new uses for materials that can hold emotional meaning. Using these seamless methodologies allows another meaning that reveals itself in the work that goes beyond the surface fabrics of the second-hand. This article is based on reflections and discussions in a hands-on repair workshop held as part of the Second-hand Cultures in Unsettled Times Symposium, in which participants were invited to work on their own repairs.
This paper will discuss the dynamics of second-hand markets in Puebla-Tlaxcala, Mexico, from the 'tianguis' to eCommerce on Instagram. Our work will analyse the increasing use of second-hand clothes in Mexico from a sociological and anthropological perspective. 'Ropa de paca' are second-hand clothes that arrive illegally to Mexico from the United States and are distributed around the country to be sold in markets known as 'tianguis'. These markets have been around for centuries and are located in marginal and peripheral areas in Mexican cities. This paper aims to discuss the dynamics inside the markets and commercialisation through social media. Finally, we will problematise the current issue surrounding the second-hand market, which is currently going through gentrification. In the last years, and with the increasing trend of second-hand clothes, people from upper economic backgrounds have been more interested in buying them and reselling them online for lucrative means and under the excuse of sustainability. We acknowledge that the current dynamics are essential, but they are also greenwashing the market. The use of second-hand clothes is an essential alternative to the current fast fashion system, but gentrification in the Global South and its implications must be discussed.
This article uses a micro-ethnographic approach to investigate the shop-floor presence of 'professionalisation' in the UK charity shop sector. Previous literature on charity retail has described how business-like, professionalising practices have invaded their operations (Gregson and Crewe 2003, p. 75). However, these arguments focus upon top-down processes, without observing how these are played out by actors within the physical space of the charity shop itself. A key component of second-hand culture is the variable nature of value within it – and value is all the more unpredictable in a time of global flux. Using the examples of price negotiation and haggling behaviours on the charity shop floor, this study concludes that professionalisation of charity retail is tempered by customer/worker interaction and social imperatives. Thus, charity shops house a hybrid of professionalised and non-professionalised actions and behaviours that demonstrate the value systems and humanity of shop actors. These 'participant-driven experiences' of value negotiation enable those on the shop floor to challenge the 'iron cage'-like characteristics (Weber, 1977) that have infiltrated the 21st century second-hand world: bureaucracy, rationality and impersonality.
This article explores through narrative autoethnography: how a single, vintage, handmade garment travels subjectively through spaces and times in what Arnould and Thompson (2005 p. 871) call “process-oriented categories of acquisition, consumption, and disposition”. Second-hand consumption involves more than a single moment but instead covers a spectrum of activities and practices, extending backwards and forwards through time and the imagination. Equally, it travels in and out of different spaces as it moves from one owner to another. The cloak, like other vintage and second-hand garments, is theorised as always in process, on its way to somewhere else and towards the future. The author’s subjective and entangled relationship with the cloak, is used to express the complex bricolage of modern second-hand consumption, with historical and geographical components at the acquisition, possession, and disposition moments. Including reflections on existing literature on secondhand clothing cultures, this paper theorises that second-hand consumption is like a patchwork, with the individual pieces of fabric representing spaces and times and its bricolage construction echoing its symbolic, experiential, and embodied nature.
From 2013 to 2017, Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson was the star vehicle in four unrelated science fiction films that saw her portray a posthuman female enabled by artificially intelligent technology. As such technologies become ever more ubiquitous in the world, so too are the burgeoning discourses around posthumanism and artificial intelligence, which are predominantly disseminated to non-specialists through science fiction and journalistic media. These discourses hold the power to influence our perceptions of incoming technological advancements. Therefore, it is important to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of these discourses and their intersections in order to contribute to the cultivation of a general population that is technologically literate and empowered, as well as foster productive dialogues between specialists from within and across the sciences and humanities fields. The media’s configuration of Scarlett Johansson as an ‘exceptional’ woman, often by drawing upon the lexicon of science fiction, has initiated underlying connections between the actor and posthuman figures within the genre, contributing to her perceived suitability for such roles. Despite appearing to be the ‘ideal’ candidate for posthuman female roles, Johansson’s repeated casting poses several problematic implications, particularly when taken into consideration through a feminist lens. Not only does it contribute to an agenda that establishes improbable conceptions of how artificial, posthuman entities should look and behave, but it also perpetuates retrograde notions of gender roles.
Like the previous collection first published in 1998, this edition includes both topical and high-profile stories such as the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter but also the covert but no less damaging and harmful actions and behaviours that compound gender inequalities. With an impressive breadth of subjects, the book sets out to build on familiar research themes including the influence of media ownership and control, sexism and women’s employment to issues of politics and identities, gendered racialisation, cyber feminism and feminist discourses in a post-truth era.
This article explores the concept of 'modernity' that is often associated with the West. Using Malaysia's modernisation project as a case study, it offers insight into Malaysian modernity in the post-Mahathir era. Apart from dealing with the question of what version of modernity the Malaysian government intends to achieve, this article also highlights issues of Malaysian identity, Asian values, multiculturalism and religion. It places Malaysia in the discourse of modernity and argues that being 'modern' does not necessarily mean being 'Western'.
This article examines the representation of Agent Skripal’s poisoning on the public service broadcasting channel Czech Television (CT) in the first half of 2018, using content, discourse and semiotic analyses. We analysed the representation of this event on the following five television news programmes: Events (Události), Events and Commentaries (Události komentáře), News at 23 (Zprávy ve 23), Horizon CT24 (Horizont ČT24) and 90’ CT24 (90’ ČT24). The event’s representation was based on the presentation of aspects of the event and statements by individual actors. The article shows naturalisation of the British explanation of the event in the Czech television broadcasts. This so-called ‘British narrative’ was the prevailing framing of the event. Differences in the representation of various opinions and in the proportionality of the time devoted to the individual actors were present. However, significant systematic intentional implications, obvious evaluations or identifiable authorial signposting was not evident in the researched sample. We argue that the television coverage of the Skripal case represents a habitual form of the news reporting by the Czech public service broadcaster within the applicable law.
Most of what is written about the current crisis in journalism focuses on failed business models, massive job losses, plummeting advertising revenue in short, a national and international industry struggling to survive, let alone thrive, and the subsequent damage to democracy as it collapses. News blackholes, news deserts and zombie news coverage are real dangers in an era when fake news is on the increase and trust in journalists is deteriorating. The big question being asked by academics, industry commentators and decision-makers is: how can power be held to account if the media ceases to function and that which survives loses credibility?
Throughout 2020 and into 2021, set against a global pandemic, Thai emancipatory activism unfolded. This paper offers a postmodernist theoretical discourse about such activism, built around the emergent discipline of Web Science. Drawing on a review of surveillance culture insights from Michel Foucault, Manuel Castells, Bruno Latour, Hans Kelsen and David Hume, and textual analysis insights from media studies, we frame acts of internalised colonisation by a powerful government. We suggest these are contested by ‘emergent postcolonialism’ via hashtag activism. As a basis for future research, we offer the theoretical model of a socio-technical political pendulum. Across it, digitally native Thais challenge internal colonialism, through counter-power drawn from the Internet as a postcolonial structure. In doing so, they propel or attract other actors. This momentum creates an emergent emancipatory society where many are still caught in the middle of shifting opinion, which is problematic to mediation. We conclude that Web Science offers a basis for educational reform in Thailand.
In Citizen Media and Practice: Currents, Connections, Challenges, editors Hilde C. Stephansen and Emiliano Treré (2020) bring together contributors to explore ways to further our thinking about media practices with a specific focus on citizen and activist media. The book is intended to stimulate dialogue among scholars in different fields and promote discussion and debate over media practice approaches between Anglophone and Latin American scholars.
