'Doing' Sustainable Consumption: Living Simply in Families and Personal Relationships

The conduct of familial and personal life in the affluent Minority World is hugely impactful on the global environment. Everyday domestic consumption patterns are problematic in in terms of resource extraction, carbon emissions, pollution and waste. In recent decades consumption has become been an important international policy issue, with behaviour change interventions in the UK targeted at the individual at home to encourage lower impact choices. However, due to the piecemeal and individualised nature of these campaigns, they have largely been ineffective to change habitual consumption behaviours to any meaningful level. Sociological scholarship in family and environment intersections has gone a long way to deindividualize the analysis of problematic consumption, revealing how individual agency is embedded within routines of emotionalised relationships and care-giving responsibilities that can shape ethical concerns and actions towards environmental protection. But to date, empirical work in this field has been mostly oriented towards singular issues such as food waste, energy usage and transportation. This PhD will use a holistic lens on low impact living by exploring the lived experience of families and friendship groups who have adopted the pioneering and emerging lifestyle movement of 'voluntary simplicity'. Voluntary simplicity originated as a counter-culture way of life in the US in the 1960s and has since spread across affluent world regions. The movement's politically aware philosophy eschews popular notions of 'the good life' to choose an alternative, low-impact set of everyday practices to minimise personal social and environmental impact such as frugality, reduced working hours and non-market based leisure practices. Drawing on theories of social practice and the psychosocial literature, the study will employ a qualitative methodology of ethnographically-informed multi-media diary methods with semi-structured interviews. 20-25 families and friendship groups will be recruited to participate in a UK-based study. The project will seek to uncover how groups in personal life adopt, sustain, reimagine or oppose low consumption, low impact lifestyles. By illuminating whether - and how - pro-environmental values and practices are transmitted within family and personal relationships, this PhD could inform policy makers and activist groups who seek social change towards environmental stewardship, as well as informing debates on adapting to a resource-constrained future.