Emmelina Eriksson

About me

I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Service Studies, located at Lund University’s campus Helsingborg. I have a background in Service Management and a Master’s in Sustainable Service Management, also from LU. Before starting my doctoral studies, I worked as a research assistant in the international research project DISCo - Digital Infrastructure for Sustainable Consumption, and I continue to contribute to this project alongside my PhD research. The project explores how more sustainable consumption can be enabled through digital technologies.

About my research

My PhD research explores sustainable consumption from the consumer perspective, with a particular focus on consumption reduction as a response to the urgent sustainability crises we are currently facing. By focusing on sufficiency-oriented consumption, I aim to understand how we can shift from the present growth-driven paradigm and dominant consumer culture toward reducing resource use, living within planetary boundaries, and promoting socio-ecological justice.

Empirically, my research examines how Swedish consumers, as part of an affluent society, enact sufficiency-oriented practices in their everyday lives, particularly in the areas of food, mobility, and housing. I aim to understand the conditions under which sufficiency practices become integrated into households, the challenges consumers face, and how they navigate the tension between sufficiency practices and the surrounding consumerist culture. Additionally, I am interested in exploring how enacting sufficiency relates to consumers' sense of well-being and their visions of a future with less resource use. My research seeks to understand how and when sufficiency-oriented practices can become normalized, and thus how we can transition to more sustainable levels of consumption in affluent societies, while living well within both social and planetary boundaries.