The Tiny House Movement: Challenging Our Consumer Culture: Tracey Harris: Lexington Books

The Tiny House Movement

Challenging Our Consumer Culture

The Tiny House Movement

Challenging Our Consumer Culture

Description

The Tiny House Movement: Challenging Consumer Culture features in-depth interviews with movement residents, builders, and advocates, as well as the author’s insights from her fieldwork of living tiny. In it, we learn how the movement is challenging consumerism, overwork, and environmental destruction and facilitating a more meaningful understanding of home.
This book highlights that the tiny house movement is more than a lifestyle choice and that the movement challenges the consumerist lifestyle. In Canada and the United States, we are taught that bigger is better and that constant growth in our personal wealth, accumulation, and in the economy is a sign of our success. We sacrifice well-being and life satisfaction because of our relationship with ‘stuff.’ This leads to personal debt and unsustainability in our relationships, communities, and the environment. This is the first book to examine the tiny house movement as a challenge to consumer culture by demonstrating its potential to offer individual, collective, and societal change.

Introduction
Chapter 1: Is Bigger Really Better?
Chapter 2: What is the Tiny House Movement?
Chapter 3: When Less Equals More
Chapter 4: Challenging our Consumer Lifestyle
Chapter 5: Criticisms and Critiques of the Tiny House Movement
Chapter 6: From NIMBY to YIMBY!
Appendix
Bibliography

Product details

Published	Oct 06 2020
Format	Paperback
Edition	1st
Extent	138
ISBN	9781498557474
Imprint	Lexington Books
Dimensions	9 x 6 inches
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

In The Tiny House Movement, sociologist Harris (Cape Breton Univ., Canada) provides a sociological account of the tiny house movement and why homeowners are choosing to live in small spaces. Harris draws not only on interviews with those presently living in such spaces, those constructing them, and those promoting their value but also on personal experience: she lived in several tiny houses with her family.

Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.

Choice Reviews
Harris’s The Tiny House Movement: Challenging Our Consumer Culture is a brief and accessible volume outlining just how they do this, drawing on a range of qualitative methods. . . . The book does provide a timely contribution to literature on the intersection of home and identity. . . . In her closing, Harris conveys that the goal of this book is to inspire readers ‘‘to look for novel solutions to counter the planetary crisis we face’’ (p. 94). The book succeeds on this front, providing insights into how one can intentionally reimagine home and belongings and the systems in which each are embedded. This work provides a helpful complement to studies of lifestyle movements as well as works on home, consumption, and environment.

Contemporary Sociology
This is an example of the public sociology we need more of: interdisciplinary and theoretically informed, yet eminently readable and accessible to a broad audience. Harris offers up a powerful critique of how our existing homes are ecologically and socially unsustainable but also celebrates how everyday folk are successfully challenging expectations of what a home can be.

Joseph G. Moore, Douglas College
An inspiring depiction of the tiny house movement, Tracey Harris shows tiny house building and living as fun and creative problem-solving, downsizing 'stuff' as a way of making room for more experiences, and living small as opportunities for re-imagining and re-creating community, all while considering critiques of the privilege involved in making the choice to live tiny. The Tiny House Movement details contemporary problems with overconsumption and gives hope to readers as it highlights those who choose to enjoy 'just enough.'

Elizabeth Cherry, Manhattanville College