McAssey, Tara Marie (2023) Flea-ing Clutter: Consuming, Containing and Casting Out in a Dublin Flea-Market. PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.

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Abstract

This research investigates the circulatory networks second-hand goods flow along as they move unilaterally between spaces that connect the home to broader social and cultural spaces and practices. Representing over four years of ethnographic investigation, I focus on the Dublin Flea Market, charting its founding in 2008 through its later loss due to the redevelopment of Newmarket Square in 2018. In Newmarket, I trace the lived experiences of traders who operate within and around the markets, identifying how the flea market acts as an important node in the circulation of material objects as they travel between the trader's stalls, homes, bins, and other channels of acquisition and divestment. I follow these circuits of flea market objects, questioning how changing cultural conceptions about second-hand, consumer ethics and re-use have influenced consumer trends displayed at such sites. How do the traders of second-hand items construct narratives of value around these material objects? Finally, I question how practices of procuring and divesting material goods at second-hand markets impact domestic practices of home-making, decluttering and discarding. To understand this, I build on existing ethnographies of second-hand and alternative markets and contemporary debates in consumption studies, which emphasise the importance of the quotidian, everyday, oft-deemed superficial material belongings and practices of home-making. Whilst much of this scholarship has focused on how we make ourselves and construct our identities via consumption, I focus on how the continual acts of divestment, decluttering and curation that traders engage in personally and professionally can be considered a means of value-making for the material objects and the traders themselves. Ultimately, I argue that the flea market functions as a fluid and contested space that facilitates the circularity of second-hand material goods and makes apparent the contradictions accompanying such object biographies within competing ideologies of clutter, waste, minimalism, home-making and consumption.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Keywords:	Flea-ing Clutter; Consuming; Containing; Casting Out; Dublin Flea-Market;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology
Item ID:	18313
Depositing User:	IR eTheses
Date Deposited:	26 Mar 2024 11:30
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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