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production and representation is valuable to my analysis of the environmental conflicts of my

case studies - tinned tuna and the tonnara - and to understanding the productive capacities of

sustainability.

Across the thesis I argue that it is crucial to ask, which groups have the power to

define the term and terms of sustainability and which groups have the power to define

culture? These questions make sense when we remember that discourse works to form the

rules and truths, as well as the framing and scope of possible ways of understanding, relating

to and speaking about situations, objects and terms. Stuart Hall reminds us:

The question of whether a discourse is true or false is less important than whether
it is effective. When it is effective – organising and regulating relations of power...
it is called “a regime of truth”. (Hall 2007, p. 58)

Sustainability is an effective discourse, which contemporarily frames and delimits tuna and

the tonnara. Of course discourse does not only exist in the realm of ideas and language but in

everyday practice and objects. While the notion of ‘discursive practice’ (Hall 2007, p. 56) is

helpful to locate meaning making in everyday practices, I draw on Tony Bennett and Patrick

Joyce (2010) who bring the work of Foucault closer to a material semiotic approach of Actor

Network Theory (ANT). By arguing that the social is always performed through the material,

they highlight the false separation of environmental and socio-cultural realms (Bennett &

Joyce 2010, p. 4). What emerges is the absurdity of framing the social as context in an

environmental problem. Each in their own way Val Plumwood, Lesley Head and Elspeth

Probyn have theorised biocultural communities as a way to understand human/plant or

human/animal relationships. For me, the term biocultural allows me to think of environmental

problems and responses to those problems as defined through human/fish relationships,

which are materially, discursively and politically faceted. As I will expand below, my starting

point in researching the biocultural and accounting for the material, semiotic and the

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