An Introduction to Sustainable Materialism

Here we introduce the types of food system, community energy, and sustainable fashion movements we will examine in this work, in particular those activists and organizations dedicated to reworking the flows of materials through environments, bodies, and communities. We lay out our reasoning for a focus on activism around everyday life and collective material practices, and detail the participatory methodology of the study. We also lay out the motivations we have found articulated by activists in these movements, including concerns about traditional political processes, justice, power, and sustainability, and describe how we use those as the frameworks for analysis we will apply in the following chapters.