Post Consumption Citizenship: Conditions for and practices of engagement in sustainable well-being.

Post-Consumption Citizenship: Conditions for and practices of engagement in sustainable well-being. The downsides of growth and decades of resource depletion is showing more and more in today's society. Growth is however deeply embedded in capitalist societies steered by market liberalism. Excessive consumption has previously been associated with growth and prosperity. Now, an increasing number of people and communities are looking elsewhere to increase their quality of life and wellbeing at home, work, or in their spare time. These types of initiatives are the ones Post CC wants to investigate more closely. Through case studies, media, and literature analysis, in addition to more exploratory methods, Post CC will look for what motivates actors and characterise both new and more long-established practices and initiatives that enables ways of living with lower consumption and increased well-being. Or in other words, what enables post consumption citizenship in neighbourhoods, workplaces, and leisure arenas. The research in the project is based on close dialogue, where people's experiences, behaviour, associations, opinions, and attitudes to reduced consumption and wellbeing is investigated. In addition to a range of qualitative methods, surveys will be conducted at several points in time from the same group of people to identify potential changes in behaviour and opinions. Post CC wants to uncover the kind of resources and infrastructure necessary to support practices of lower consumption. Post CC will communicate and disseminate this knowledge to different groups in society, targeting diverse genders, ethnicities, age groups, and people of various socioeconomic status in addition to policy makers, and the academic community, to spread ideas, knowledge and actions supporting Post Consumption Citizenship on all arenas in life.

Growth is an embedded premise of capitalism and market liberalism that is proving more troublesome to fit into today's society, increasingly marked by the downsides of the growth paradigm, and decades of resource depletion. While excessive consumption previously has been associated with growth and prosperity, there is an increasing number of people and communities that are choosing other paths to increase their quality of life and wellbeing at home, work, or in their spare time. Post CC will map various such initiatives through desk research like media analysis and literature review. Further, Post CC will conduct empirical research in a selection of predetermined cases, aiming to unravel what motivates and characterises both new and long-established initiatives that enable post consumption citizenship. We will do so in selected neighbourhoods (Svartlamon and Lilleby), a large and multifaceted workplace (NTNU), and two types of low-consumption leisure arenas (DNT:publicly available cabins, and public libraries). The empirical research will be based on close and ongoing dialogues throughout the project period, and experimenting with a range of qualitative methods, like autophotography, photo elicitation, and video-response dialogue, where people's experiences, behaviour, associations, opinions and attitudes to post-consumerism, and wellbeing are captured. Quantitative surveys will be conducted from the same group of respondents throughout the project to detect changes in said behaviour and opinions. By doing so, Post CC intends to uncover what kind of resources and infrastructure the initiatives rely on, as well as produce themselves. Post CC will strategically communicate and disseminate this kind of co-produced knowledge to different groups in society, of diverse genders, ethnicities, age groups, and socioeconomic status in addition to policy makers, and the academic community.