Arve Hansen

• Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Hansen, Arve; Solbu, Gisle; Heidenreich, Sara; Heyes, Cornelius & Næss, Robert (2026). Performing sustainability across socio-economic groups: Consumption, class and inequality in Norway. Journal of Consumer Culture. ISSN 1469-5405. doi: 10.1177/14695405261494986. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  There is a pressing need for rapid sustainability transformations that are simultaneously fair and inclusive. Research has demonstrated how climate emissions to a large degree follow patterns of income levels and lifestyles. Still broader sustainability discourses tend to ignore uncomfortable questions regarding inequality and class. This paper seeks to shed light on inequality dynamics in sustainability research, exploring how sustainability is understood and performed at the household level, how these dynamics are differentiated across income groups, and what potential tensions may arise across class. The analysis is based on extensive qualitative interviews and workshops with low-, middle- and high-income groups in Norway. Drawing on practice-theoretical approaches and the concepts of habitus, bounded creativity and consumption work, we examine the material, social and bodily factors that shape sustainability performances. Our findings demonstrate significant variations across the three socio-economic groups: how sustainability is understood and motivated; the amount of consumption work considered manageable; and differences in ecological habitus that create class-specific boundaries around what was considered appropriate and doable in terms of sustainability performances. The research further underscores the necessity of incorporating a class-sensitive lens into sustainability discussions and policies, which is vital for a sustainability transformation that does not perpetuate existing social hierarchies.

• Korsnes, Marius; Hansen, Arve; Sundet, Øyvind; Volden, Johannes & Loeng, Martin (2026). Bodies in tension: embodied persistence and change in meat-eating. Food, Culture, and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. ISSN 1552-8014. p. 22–22. doi: 10.1080/15528014.2026.2740964. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article examines how embodied knowledge contributes to both the reproduction and possible reorientation of meat consumption. Drawing on household interviews and a dietary experiment with consumers in Norway, we analyze three interconnected dimensions of embodied meat-eating: shared cultural understandings of meat as healthy and nutritious; habituated routines of shopping, cooking, and eating; and interpreted bodily experiences of taste, satiety, craving, and discomfort. Together, these dimensions show how meat becomes part of what feels normal, practical, satisfying, and at times necessary in everyday life. They also reveal tensions arising when habituated ways of eating, bodily experiences, and demands associated with health, social expectations, or dietary aspirations do not fully align. Inspired by practice theory, we conceptualize these frictions as “bodies in tension.” Such tensions may reinforce established conduct, be accommodated within familiar routines, or create openings for dietary reorientation. The article contributes to food studies by showing how bio-social bodies shape both the persistence and transformation of meat-eating. More broadly, it demonstrates that dietary transitions depend not only on changing attitudes or intentions but on creating alternative ways of shopping, cooking, tasting, and eating that can become familiar, satisfying, and socially supported.

• Hansen, Arve (2026). Consumption, Sustainability and Variegated Consumer Societies: Development and Distinction in Late-Socialist China and Vietnam. Sociologica – International Journal for Sociological Debate. 20(2), p. 85–104. doi: 10.60923/issn.1971-8853/23738. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Contemporary accounts of consumption and sustainability are often criticized both for ignoring the non-Western world and for not paying sufficient attention to the structuring effects of capitalist political economy. This paper suggests a way to do both through a variegated consumer societies framework. Such a framework involves a multi-scalar approach to production-consumption complexes, including attention to both everyday life and consumption environments, as well as governance, production networks, and broader consumer-cultural frames. A central point is that capitalist consumer societies always take similar but varied shapes, depending on local institutions and cultures as well as the multi-scalar connections behind goods, trends and fashion. In this article, I use this framework to study changing consumption in China and Vietnam, two countries that have been among the fastest-growing economies and home to some of the fastest-expanding consumer-class populations globally over the past decades. I study the emergence of capitalist consumer cultures in these nominally socialist countries, zooming in on sustainable consumption and new forms of distinction through two core consumption domains: mobility and food.

• Adolfsson, Johanna Sofia; Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2025). Between Distributed Agency and Choice Architecture: Comparing Nudge and Practice Theoretical Approaches to Changing Consumption. In Jacobsen, Eivind; Strandbakken, Pål; Dulsrud, Arne & Skuland, Silje Elisabeth (Ed.), Consumers and Consumption in Comparison (Volume 37). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. ISSN 9781835493144. p. 189–213. doi: 10.1108/S0195-631020240000037009. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). Consumption and Global Connections in Vietnam: New Middle Classes and Changing Everyday Practices under Consumer Socialism. In Nguyen, Minh T.N. & Endres, Kirsten W. (Ed.), Reconfiguring Vietnam: Global Encounters, Translocal Lifeworlds. Yale University Southeast Asia Studies. ISSN 9781732610248. p. 267–286. Full text in Research Archive
• Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Hansen, Arve & Sandnes, Thea (2024). Swamped in dinosaurs with LED lights: negotiating sustainability in a high-consumption society. Consumption and society. 3(3), p. 254–275. doi: 10.1332/27528499Y2024D000000008. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Unsustainable patterns of consumption in affluent societies are at the heart of global climate and environmental challenges and seemingly highly resistant to change. While decades of research have revealed how consumption is deeply embedded in society, recently calls have been made for (re-)engaging with the systemic conditioning of consumption in studies of everyday practices. In this paper, we analyse the ways in which eco-conscious households in Norway (N=20) perform and negotiate sustainability in everyday life. With theories of practice as a point of departure, we combine Bente Halkier’s work on social interaction with Sherry B. Ortner’s conceptualisation of agency as power (dominance and resistance) and agency through ‘projects’ to study how sustainability is negotiated in the everyday. Through this framework we explore how consumers perform ‘sustainability projects’ and how these are defined through, constrained by and negotiated against everyday normativity and dominant socio-material arrangements. Our findings demonstrate the compromises, trade-offs and negotiations that participants engage in when balancing their sustainability projects against other social roles, expectations and goals, often carried out within socio-material arrangements that are scripted towards less sustainable options. Hence, they provide detailed insight into the boundedness of consumer agency, being both socially and materially negotiated and contextualised. While often undertaken as mundane actions, the challenges our participants experienced is ultimately part of negotiating consumer society, often experienced as a constant pressure towards more consumption as expansive consumption is embedded in, and embodied and habituated through, a wide range of social practices.

• Hansen, Arve (2024). Eating Out in Contemporary Hanoi: Middle-Class Food Practices, Capitalist Transformations, and the Late-Socialist Good Life. Positions. ISSN 1067-9847. 32(1), p. 49–67. doi: 10.1215/10679847-10889947. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Vietnam's embrace of the Leninist-capitalist hybrid known as the socialist market economy has led to a number of food transformations. These include increasing food imports, heavy investment by powerful domestic and foreign actors in food production and retailing, and the scaling up of domestic agriculture, as well as a range of problematic dietary changes. In an urban food scene that is tremendously rich in the number and diversity of its food spaces, the prevalence of eating out has increased dramatically. Related to affordability, convenience, time, consumer culture, and the search for the good life, eating out has become embedded in everyday life in late-socialist Hanoi. Ongoing food transformations are seeing many of these food practices move from the streets to air-conditioned restaurants. Based on eating ethnography, this article analyzes the boom in eating out in contemporary Hanoi. Studying the interplay among social practices, urban foodscapes, and political economy, and focusing on the middle-class good life and the structural conditions underpinning it, the article analyzes the visible and invisible geographies of food. The latter includes the increasing dominance of capitalist actors in late-socialist foodscapes as cheap food is enabled by intensified animal slaughter and the deep structural inequalities produced by Vietnam's compressed capitalism.

• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). The new middle classes: Consumption, development and sustainability, Handbook of International Development and the Environment. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISSN 9781800883772. Full text in Research Archive
• Sundet, Øyvind; Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). Performing meat reduction across scripted social sites: exploring the experiences and challenges of meat reducers in Norway. Consumption and society. doi: 10.1332/ZGZV3476. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Current meat consumption trends are associated with extensive resource use, environmental degradation, and detrimental effects on animal and human health, making meat reduction a core sustainability target. The experiences of meat reducers, often conceptualised as flexitarians, have gradually attracted more academic attention. This literature has shown that in many cases meat reducers do not radically reduce their meat intake and have untangled a complex web of factors contributing to meat consumption, reduction and avoidance. This article contributes to a nuanced understanding of the experiences, approaches and challenges faced by meat reducers. The data was collected through in-depth interviews with 26 self-declared meat reducers in Norway. By framing consumption as embedded in social practices, this article highlights how broader cultural, social and material conditions structure eating and hence meat consumption. A central finding is that through processes of socialisation and habituation, performances of eating often conform to the prevailing conventions inscribed in the socio-material environment in which they are embedded. We thus question the popular depictions of individuals as efficient drivers of dietary changes and highlight the many factors involved in reproducing the ‘normalness’ of meat-intense diets, demonstrating how individual intentions, choices and habits are themselves rooted in, and circumscribed by, prevailing conventions, that is, practices.

• Hansen, Arve & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (2023). Consumption, Sustainability and Everyday Life. In Hansen, Arve & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (Ed.), Consumption, Sustainability and Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9783031110696. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Capitalism, Consumption, and the Transformation of Everyday Life: The Political Economy of Social Practices. In Hansen, Arve & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (Ed.), Consumption, Sustainability and Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan. ISSN 9783031110696. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). ‘It's just pølse’: Convenient meat consumption and reduction in Norway. Appetite. ISSN 0195-6663. 188. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2023.106611. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Meat consumption and convenience food are both located at the heart of contemporary, industrialized, unhealthy and unsustainable food systems. In this article, we study the intersections between convenience food and ‘meatification’ of diets, focusing on the ‘pølse’—an umbrella term including both hotdogs and a range of sausages—as the epitome of convenience food in Norway. We explore how the pølse is embedded in Norwegian food practices, and why it is considered convenient in different contexts. In doing so, we seek to explain how pølse eating is co-shaped by socio-material scripting processes that further entrench meat in food practices and complicate meat-reduction efforts. The analysis is based on 52 in-depth household interviews and autophotography in four geographical contexts in Norway, in addition to 22 park interviews and survey data centering on household food and meat practices. We use a theoretical apparatus combining social practice theory, foodscapes and socio-material scripts to analyse the conveniencization of pølse. The articles demonstrates how meat consumption and convenience food become entwined in specific social practices, and how conveniencization intersects with practices of care, notions of class, social expectations and normativity. Moreover, we show that despite the range of plant-based ‘pølse’ substitutes on offer, meat-eaters remain skeptical to its taste, and substitutes rather seem to offer a way into established social occasions for non-meat eaters than a way out of meat eating.

• Knutsen, Hege Merete; Hansen, Arve; Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn & Potapohn, Manoj (2023). Brewing the Global Shift: Variegated Capitalism, Firm Strategies, and the Restructuring of the Southeast Asian Beer Industry. Journal of Contemporary Asia. ISSN 0047-2336. doi: 10.1080/00472336.2023.2254774. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Asia has become the world’s largest beer-consuming region, and Southeast Asia sees the strongest growth in demand. While the Asian beer industry attracts investments from global and regional capital and is undergoing significant restructuring, there has been little academic attention to these transformations. In this article, the focus is on Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand to analyse how global and regional lead firms adapt to changing competition and increasing demand in Southeast Asia. A combination of theorisations of variegated capitalism with embeddedness and symbolic value is used to explain firm strategies on accessing markets, managing risk and building stronger brands. This analysis demonstrates how regional and global production networks co-exist and interact, and how regional lead firms struggle to challenge global lead firms in accessing the Southeast Asian beer market. The findings show how regional and global capital to a limited extent dissociate from established networks when representing a reputational risk and illustrate how firms co-create the demand for beer. The analysis gives a strong account of the role of embeddedness for expanding market access, and how lead firms seek to strengthen their position through buying up local competition to profit from their established reputation, and territorial and societal embeddedness.

• Hansen, Arve; Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Efstathiou, Sofia & Volden, Johannes Rudjord (2023). Towards plantification: contesting, negotiating and re-placing meaty routines. Consumption and society. doi: 10.1332/WPKF9257. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Pitkänen, Outi Milja Kristiina & Nguyen, Binh (2023). Feeding a tourism boom: changing food practices and systems of provision in Hoi An, Vietnam. Food, Culture, and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. ISSN 1552-8014. doi: 10.1080/15528014.2023.2263986. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  While food studies have increasingly gone beyond the “Western” experience in food globalization processes, research on food and tourism has often prioritized the (Western) tourist’s gaze. In the literature on food and tourism in Asia, little attention has been given to the experiences of host populations. Responding to this lacuna in the literature, this paper analyses how a tourism boom is fed and how tourism-driven “foodway encounters” shape food practices and systems of provision. Focusing on the major tourism transformations seen in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Hoi An, Vietnam, over the past decades, we study how hosts approach tourists’ demand for both comfort food from home and new food experiences that are simultaneously “authentic” and safe. We analyze how both Vietnamese and foreign hosts seek to understand, influence and adapt to the culinary preferences of visitors, and how they develop the necessary skills to do so. Furthermore, since feeding tourists often requires a wide range of food traditionally unavailable or uncommon in Hoi An, we analyze how hosts acquire the ingredients necessary for changing food practices and how systems of provision both shape and take shape through the process of catering to the particularities of touristy foodways.

• Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Ellsworth-Krebs, Katherine; Hansen, Arve; Changede, Sejal & Spaargaren, Gert (2022). Reworking boundaries in the home-as-office: boundary traffic during COVID-19 lockdown and the future of working from home. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. 18(1), p. 325–343. doi: 10.1080/15487733.2022.2063097. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The COVID-19 crisis has led to an unprecedented acceleration in the number of people working from home (WFH). This article applies a practice theoretical lens to expand the pre-pandemic telework literature which often overlooks how WFH is part of complex socio-material arrangements. Based on 56 household interviews in the UK, the United States, and Norway during lockdown in Spring 2020, we reveal the everyday realities of WFH, exploring their implications for the future of work. Developing the concept of boundary traffic, which refers to the additional interaction and collision of a range of everyday practices normally separated in time and space when working outside the home, we provide some insights into how disruption and de- and re-routinization vary by household type, space, and employer’s actions. Much teleworking scholarship highlights technological and spatial flexibility of work, without recognizing the mundane realities of WFH when there is no space for a large computer monitor, preferences to be with children even when a secluded home office is available, or a feeling that important social connections diminish when working on a virtual basis. We discuss the future of work in relation to digitalization, social inequality, and environmental sustainability and conclude by stressing how WFH cannot be understood as merely a technical solution to work-life flexibility. Rather, lockdown-induced WFH has deeply changed the meaning and content of homes as households have resolved the spatial, material, social, and temporal aspects of boundary traffic when embedding work into the domestic practice-bundle.

• Volden, Johannes & Hansen, Arve (2022). Practical aeromobilities: making sense of environmentalist air-travel. Mobilities. ISSN 1745-0101. doi: 10.1080/17450101.2021.1985381. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Flying has become an increasingly contested form of consumption, but ‘green’ consumers often continue to fly. This paper provides novel insights into the stubbornness of air-travel by specifically studying the obstacles that environmentally conscious consumers face when trying to limit or eliminate aeromobility. Through in-depth interviews with Norwegian environmental organization workers – conceptualised as particularly self-reflexive when it comes to environmentally contested forms of consumption – we analyse how environmentalists negotiate one of the most environmentally destructive aspects of their consumption patterns. To explore how the social embeddedness of flying complicates the reduction of air-travel in these accounts, we draw on a combination of mobilities and social practice approaches. The participants considered flying to be problematic, but also often necessary in specific practices. Various expectations related to convenience, time, and sociality, led to a certain ‘lock-in’ of (aero)mobility. Zooming out to consider broader practice geographies, we argue that aeromobility contributes to the tempo-spatial expansion of many practices, changing their contents, meanings, and the contexts in which they unfold. To achieve sustainable mobility, we suggest that attention must be shifted from the air-travels of individual consumers to the broader practices in which aeromobility is embedded.

• Hansen, Arve (2022). Driving Doi Moi: Motorbikes, Cars, and Capitalism in Vietnam's Socialist Market Economy. In London, Jonathan (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Vietnam. Routledge. ISSN 9781315762302. Full text in Research Archive
• Greene, Mary; Hansen, Arve; Hoolohan, Claire; Süßbauer, Elisabeth & Domaneschi, Lorenzo (2022). Consumption and shifting temporalities of daily life in times of disruption: undoing and reassembling household practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy. doi: 10.1080/15487733.2022.2037903. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The way in which time is produced and consumed during everyday life has crucial implications for sustainable consumption. Social practice approaches in particular have directed attention to the intersection of personal and collective temporalities as important for the patterning of everyday consumption. This article examines the temporal dynamics of daily practice-arrangement bundles experienced in “locked down” households in Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, and the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on 97 in-depth interviews with participants in all five countries, we investigate quotidian experiences of the breaking and (re-)making of daily routines in response to the pandemic. In doing so, we explore and document the temporal processes by which daily practice-arrangement bundles become undone, reassembled, and reconfigured. Our analysis reveals the institutional ordering of temporal relations between practices in terms of how they hang together, synchronize, or compete for householders’ time. Giving particular attention to socially differentiated lockdown experiences, we analyze how disruption-induced changes to social institutions and systems of provision impact the hanging together of daily practice-arrangement bundles and the strategies employed to restructure and rebundle them in unequal ways. We further consider varied experiences in temporal reorganizations of daily life that support sustainable consumption of food and mobility and reflect on the implications of the analysis for sustainability governance.

• Hansen, Arve (2021). Negotiating Unsustainable Food Transformations: Development, Middle Classes and Everyday Food Practices in Vietnam. European Journal of Development Research. ISSN 0957-8811. 34, p. 1441–1459. doi: 10.1057/s41287-021-00429-6. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Abstract Amidst calls for making food systems more sustainable, new unsustainable food transformations unfold alongside economic development. Explanations for unsustainable food transformations in emerging economies vary greatly, but there is widespread agreement that demand from new middle classes play a crucial role. Yet this demand is to a large extent co-created by systems of provision, and middle-class consumers are constantly navigating food transformations in a search for healthy and safe food. Focusing on Vietnam’s dramatic food transformations, and combining attention to the political economy of food with a social practice approach to consumption, the paper zooms in on the how middle-class households in Hanoi negotiate the rapid transformations of food systems and food environments. The paper concludes that new thinking on sustainable food systems is urgently needed and argues that vital insights can be gained by studying food practices and their interaction with everyday geographies of consumption.

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• Hansen, Arve (2025). Mopeddagbøkene - utviklingssuksess og kvardagsliv i det nye Vietnam. Fonna Forlag. ISBN 9788251304146. 140 p. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Nielsen, Kenneth Bo (2023). Consumption, Sustainability and Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783031110696. 387 p. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783031141669. 203 p. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Syse, Karen Lykke (2021). Changing Meat Cultures: Food Practices, Global Capitalism, and the Consumption of Animals. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 9781538142653. 224 p. Full text in Research Archive

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• Brekke, Tarjei & Hansen, Arve (2026). Making sanwenyu: How Norwegian salmon becomes Japanese food in Chinese cities. doi: https:/www.globe.uio.no/aktuelt/arrangementer/2026/how-norwegian-salmon-becomes-japanese.html. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Over the course of the last 30 years, Atlantic salmon in China has gone from being virtually non-existent to estimated import volumes surpassing 100 000 tonnes per year following 2025. What is this food doing to urban eating practices? The shifting practices which enable consumption at this level within the country did not appear solely as an outcome of the much-discussed rise of the Chinese middle class, but rather in conjunction between aggressive marketing by salmon-producing countries, changing expectations towards food safety and healthiness, established customs of displaying social capital (“face” or mianzi), and compulsions to “eat the modern” in Chinese urban environments. In this talk, PhD student Tarjei Brekke presents some of his findings from his doctoral research to shed light on how Atlantic salmon in China came to be and what this food is doing to urban eating practices. Throughout the talk, he will aim to show how the dense network of actors which enable salmon consumption in China are not necessarily completely new nor unprecedented neither within nor without China, but are nonetheless highly consolidated and, in spite of the salmon’s proposed important role in the transition to low-impact diets, thoroughly unsustainable.

• Hansen, Arve (2026). Meat replacement and protein futures and pasts in Asia. Full text in Research Archive
• Banik, Dan & Hansen, Arve (2026). Vietnam’s remarkable development turnaround. doi: https:/in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com/episodes/hansen. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Vietnam is a celebrated development success story, but rapid growth is also reshaping everyday life through rising inequality, changing consumption, and mounting environmental pressures. Dan Banik speaks with Arve Hansen about what Vietnam’s next phase of development may look like and the trade-offs it will require.

• Hansen, Arve (2026). Interview on bicycling in Hanoi. [TV]. Vietnam Today. doi: https:/drive.google.com/file/d/1rJlzQlmGBMBf05_N-GEY8Cw1S_U6ritN/view. Full text in Research Archive
• Bui, Trang & Hansen, Arve (2026). Hotpots, barbecues and alcohol: A diet gone red. [Journal]. Mekong Eye. doi: https:/www.mekongeye.com/2026/06/01/a-diet-gone-red. Full text in Research Archive
• Brekke, Tarjei & Hansen, Arve (2025). From eating for sustenance to eating for pleasure: Examining thoughts on sufficiency, demand and need in Shanghai salmon consumption. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Problem Over its soon-to-be sixty-year history, Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) farming has shifted global shipping lanes for seafood, transformed coastal communities and produced debates on the animal rights of fish (Lien 2015). For finfish, they are globally part of the fourth most farmed species group, the salmonids, in terms of volume at 4,2 million tonnes in 2022 (FAO 2024). Atlantic salmon is lauded in Norway for its high retention of macro- and micronutrients from feed compared to livestock, and is marketed globally as a healthy, high-quality seafood. While the Norwegian seafood business claims that Norwegian seafood is feeding the world sustainably, in the case of Shanghai in China, salmon seemingly remains an expensive “everyday luxury”, challenging the necessity of the salmon farming industry as a food producer. Like many other industrialised animal products, the scale at which salmon is produced receives adverse attention due to its impact on fish stocks and supply lines for foodstuffs that could have otherwise gone to human consumption. Overfishing produces reduced availability of fishmeal and fish oil, the key ingredients ensuring the presence of the nutrients that salmon is famous for. Furthermore, in its immediate environment, the spread of sea lice facilitated by sea-cage salmon farming is responsible for the near extinction of both wild Atlantic salmon and sea trout (Salmo trutta). In the sea pens, the average death rate was around 15 percent in 2023 (Grefsrud et al. 2024). These detriments alone should be enough to reconsider the cost-versus-benefit of the industry from a sustainability point-of-view. Yet at the same time, potentially reducing opportunities for salmon farmers to continue their expansion for the sake of sufficiency overlooks the symbolic value for Chinese citizens of access to expensive, imported seafood. In a culture where the idea of “face” (mianzi) remains strong and expensive purchases are a way of showing status and charitability to others, salmon occupies a price niche which remains accessible to many in the lower middle class. As a vehicle for the Chinese Dream, Atlantic salmon seems effective at proving to both young and old that the country has come far and that they have transitioned from the days of famine – the time when the main goal was to eat until full (chi de bao) to a time when one should eat for pleasure (chi de hao). Method Framed through the lenses of systems of provision (Bayliss and Fine 2020) and domestication and infrastructuring (Berker 2023; Karasti & Blomberg 2018), this presentation analyses the development of the demand for salmon in Shanghai from a systemic and constructionist angle. Drawing on interview data with 18 individuals from five months of fieldwork in the JiangZheHu-region of China (Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai), this paper examines interviewees’ thoughts on salmon consumption and whether China really needs salmon as a case on the role of luxuries under sufficiency as an organizing principle. Results and relevance This study indicates that dietary consumption limitations are undertaken out of concern for one’s health rather than concern for sustainable planetary stewardship.

• Hansen, Arve (2025). Meat replacement and systems of edibility in Asia (and beyond). Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). Balanserer mellom stormaktene: – Særdeles komplisert. [Internet]. ABC Nyheter. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). Nudging og forbruksteori. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). Breaking the system of moto-mobility? Just everyday mobilities in Hanoi. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). Nudging og praksisteori. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; House, Jonas & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2025). Systems of edibility and alternative proteins: The role of Asia. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). Systems of edibility: Food systems, everyday practices and the changing geographies of meat replacement. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). Variegated protein transitions: Meatification and demeatification in Northern Europe and Southeast Asia. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2025). Sufficiency vs the system: Negotiating everyday limits in consumer society. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). Participation in panel: "Democracy in the Balance: Climate, Conflict, and the Politics of Sustainable Development". Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; House, Jonas & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2025). Geographies of meat replacement: Alternative proteins, variegated capitalism and local food practices. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2025). De rømmer fra en av verdens raskest voksende økonomier. Full text in Research Archive
• Anantharaman, Manisha; Greene, Mary; Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2025). Everyday life and societal transformations: Inequality, agency and power in consumer society. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2025). Forbruk og endring: Kvifor er det så vanskeleg å vere berekraftig forbrukar? Full text in Research Archive
• Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn & Hansen, Arve (2025). Overproduksjon og overforbruk: Hvordan formes forbruket vårt? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2024). Det komplekse forbruket. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Greene, Mary & Wertheim-Heck, Sigrid (2024). Changing consumption at the nexus of practices: Disruption, connections and everyday practice geographies. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2024). Consumption, social class, and environmentalism: from tensions to transformations. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; House, Jonas & Rein, Angelique Kristine (2024). The global meat replacement complex and its geographies: Production, provision, consumption. Full text in Research Archive
• House, Jonas; Wertheim-Heck, Sigrid & Hansen, Arve (2024). What does it mean to replace meat? The ontological politics of meat substitution across cultural contexts. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2024). Negotiating sustainability: Agency and power in consumer society. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Greene, Mary & Wertheim-Heck, Sigrid (2024). Changing consumption at the nexus of practices: Disruption, connections and everyday practice geographies. Full text in Research Archive
• Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Hansen, Arve; Heidenreich, Sara Lena Brigitte; Næss, Robert; Solbu, Gisle & Heyse, Cornelius (2024). Transitions in tension: Understanding sustainability engagements across socio-economic backgrounds. Full text in Research Archive
• Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Hansen, Arve; Heidenreich, Sara Lena Brigitte; Næss, Robert; Solbu, Gisle & Heyse, Cornelius (2024). Transitions in tension: Understanding sustainability engagements across socio-economic backgrounds. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2024). Frobruk og berekraftig endring: Vekst, val og fastlåste (u)vanar. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Development and geographies of middle-classness: Insights from Vietnam. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Consumer Socialism and Vietnam's New Middle Classes. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Consumption and societal transformation: Capitalist development and everyday practices. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Consumption, sustainability, and health. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). The stubbornness of meaty routines: Meat consumption and reduction in Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn & Hansen, Arve (2023). Why overconsumption must be understood as a societal challenge. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Intervju om ny president i Vietnam. [Radio]. Nrk nyhetsmorgen. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Efstathiou, Sophia & Volden, Johannes (2023). Transforming Society Podcast: Towards plantification by normalising less meat-intensive diets. [Radio]. Transforming Society. Bristol University Press . Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Haanæs, Øystein Rygg (2023). Ekspertintervju: Kjøttvaner er vonde å vende. [Journal]. Energi og klima. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Ording, Oda (2023). Avdekket veggis-gåte: - Overraskende. [Journal]. Dagbladet. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Fastlåste mat(u)vanar: Kan vi endre kjøtforbruket? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Paneldiskusjon om nordmenn sitt forbruk og artstap. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Fem kjappe til Asia-eksperten. Full text in Research Archive
• Kristoffersen, Mina Fosse & Hansen, Arve (2023). No pork, no life? Exploring the practices and negotiations of meat reducers in South Korea. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Replacing meat in contemporary Vietnam: Foodways, materials, and provisioning systems. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Sundet, Øyvind; Volden, Johannes & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). Friday tacos and outdoor barbeques: Re-configuring ‘institutionalized meals’ towards meat reduction in Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Korsnes, Marius; Hansen, Arve; Sundet, Øyvind; Volden, Johannes & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). The Circulation of Meat: How contemporary food practices reproduce the demand for meat in Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Kvifor er det så vanskeleg å redusere kjøtforbruket? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Kva skal til for å endre kjøtforbruket? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). Meat consumption and reduction in Norwegian households. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2023). Confronting sustainability crises: Towards a critical geography of sustainable consumption. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Sundet, Øyvind; Volden, Johannes & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2023). Hvorfor er det så vanskelig å spise mindre kjøtt? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). The geographies of everyday meat consumption in Norway: Stubborn food practices and meat-intensive foodscapes. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2022). Negotiating sustainable consumption in everyday life: Projects, practices and provision. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2022). The power of the pølse: Foodscapes, convenience food and everyday geographies of meat consumption and reduction in Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). National development and contested (de)meatification in Vietnam and Norway. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn; Volden, Johannes & Sundet, Øyvind (2022). Kjøttskam eller ribbeglede? Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Hvordan utvikler kjøttforbruket i verden seg? Hvilken rolle vil kjøttet ha i fremtidens matsystem? Hvorfor er det så vanskelig å spise mindre kjøtt? Kan kjøtt bli laget av planter? Vil vi spise melorm istedenfor kjøttdeig i fremtidens fredagstaco? Bli med på en samtale om kjøttproduksjon, kjøttspising, og kjøttkutt i Norge og verden Samtalen vil bli ledet av fire forskere i prosjektet Meatigation – Mitigating climate change through meat https://meatigation.no/

• Brauteset, Bjørn & Hansen, Arve (2022). Towards a Green China. [Internet]. https://newbooksnetwork.com/towards-a-green-china. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). Food transformations and (un)sustainable diets: Taking consumption seriously in development research. EADI Blog. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). (Un)sustainable consumption and everyday life. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). How meat consumption has changed in Vietnam. [Radio]. Tra Da Chats. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Helland, Gudrun Cecilie Eikemo; Jakobsen, Jostein; Mohamed, Lobna; Roalkvam, Sidsel & Sandåker, Anne-Line [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2022). Skal vi spare oss til fant? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). Forbruk - den store elefanten i bærekraftsrommet. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). Researching sustainable consumption in Vietnam and Norway: Consumers, political economy and everyday practices. Full text in Research Archive
• Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn & Hansen, Arve (2022). Å uffe seg over høyt forbruk fører ikke til endring. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2022). Meat consumption and reduction in Norway: Social sites, materials, agency. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2022). Household consumption and the net-zero society: The cases of Norway and Vietnam. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2022). Negotiating sustainable consumption in everyday life: Projects, practices and provision. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Pitkänen, Outi & Nguyen, Binh (2021). Feeding a tourist boom: Food and sustainable development in Hoi An. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve; Korsnes, Marius; Sundet, Øyvind; Volden, Johannes R. & Wethal, Ulrikke Bryn (2021). Holdningsendring alene gir ikke kjøttkutt. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2021). Pandemic disruptions and everyday life: Consumption and sustainability during (and after) Covid-19. Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2021). Forbruk og endringer i hverdagslivet - på hvilke måter har nedstengingen forsterket eller endret husholdningers rutiner og vaner? Full text in Research Archive
• Hansen, Arve (2021). Nedstenginga fekk mange til å revurdere eige forbruk. Full text in Research Archive
• Greene, Mary; Hansen, Arve; Hoolohan, Claire; Süssbauer, Elisabeth & Domaneschi, Lorenzo (2021). Consumption and shifting temporalities of daily life during disruption: Undoing and reassembling household practice during COVID-19. Full text in Research Archive
• Liao, Karen Anne S.; Erdal, Marta Bivand; Hansen, Arve; Abraham, Anu & Fitzmaurice, Maisie (2024). Middle Classes, Moving and Staying in Hanoi. Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). ISSN 9788234306099. Full text in Research Archive

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