Overview

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.

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9781498557474

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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 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 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 *

Author Information

Tracey Harris is assistant professor of sociology at Cape Breton University.

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