We held our kick-off workshop online as due to covid-19 we were unable to meet in Helsinki in the beginning of April. Nevertheless, the online program provided a forum for us to become familiar with each other and our research projects. The aim was to make space for reflections on young researchers’ roles in the Nordic region in sustainable consumption research. Altogether 24 people participated in the online workshop during two days.
Much of the discussions in the workshop were based on a provocation paper circulated among the participants before the online meeting. The paper outlined recent research paradigms and posed three sustainable consumption continuums from the sustainable consumption literature: incremental vs radical; acquisition vs appreciation vs appropriation; and collective vs individual.
The program started with an introduction to the NONESCO project and presentations to get to know each other and what we do. After this, our keynote Mikko Jalas gave an inspiring lecture on Time and time-use as perspectives in sustainable consumption research. Then it was time for our first break-out session where, inspired by Jalas’ lecture, we took up incremental versus radical sustainable consumption with a lively discussion on the implications of each strategy. After a concise wrap up we left for the day to ponder over our discussions.
The second day, after some Zoom small talk (we are still not quite experts here) we dove straight into our second break-out session on acquisition vs appreciation vs appropriation, discussing how to observe and analyse the buying vs the using up of products and services. Many of us felt the sustainable consumption literature focused on the moment of acquisition and were interested in pushing research into the appreciation further, as well as incorporating well-being into the literature. In the last break-out group, we tackled the third continuum of collective vs individual sustainable consumption. Here we felt that the Nordic region, with a historical emphasis on collective, carries possibilities for important contributions. In our last session we all gathered in the same group to share our discussions and pave the way toward our next meeting in Copenhagen on methods for studying sustainable consumption. Having everyone together helped us come to some new insights on potential discussions and we left full of ideas and questions for future discussions.
Workshop participants:
Group 1: Tullia Jack (Lund university), Eliisa Kylkilahti (University of Helsinki), Daria Morozova (Aalborg university), Aleksi Ojala (University of Helsinki), Josefine Løndorf Sarkez-Knudsen (Lund university)
Group 2: Anders Rhiger Hansen (Aalborg university), Nils Ehrenberg (Aalto University), Line Valdorff Madsen (Aalborg university), Maria Sandberg (Hanken School of Economics), Francesco Colona (Linköping University)
Group 3: Nicklas Neuman (Uppsala university), Agnese Bankovska (University of Helsinki), Laura Krumm (Copenhagen Business School), Patricia Eustachio Colombo (Karolinska Institutet), Carolin Zorell (Örebro University)
Group 4. Jenny Rinkinen (University of Helsinki), Jesse Schrage (University of Bergen), Freja Friis (Aalborg university), Anne Nielsen (University of Copenhagen)
Group 5: Senja Laakso (University of Helsinki), Marius Korsnes (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Anne Sofie Møller (Aalborg university), Tuija Kajoskoski (University of Helsinki), Sarah Kollnig (Lund University)