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specific situations – or territorialized in assemblages’ (2007, p.4). In this way ethnographic

research can focus on the labour involved in affirming and normalising big terms like

sustainability and also the specific situations within which such terms are grounded. It also

offers insight into moments of conflict and resistance. By following local/global contiguities,

we can understand better the particular manifestations and forms of a sustainability

assemblage and describe the things of that assembly and their processes of assembling, a

point I will return to shortly. Put more concretely, how a Coles eco tin in a supermarket in

Sydney and a sushi grade bluefin in the Tsukiji market exist within the shared conditions of a

sustainability assemblage and are indeed components of that wider assemblage. Through a

taste for such products we are connected ‘economically, globally, communally and

emotionally’, as Elspeth Probyn (2012, p. 65) has argued through the example of the Loch

Fyne oyster.

Researching Material Semiotic Relations

In following the Coles eco tin and the sustainability assemblage, we are also following and

describing material semiotic relations. Anthropologist Joseph Dumit approaches the study of

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objects as “implosions” (2014). Objects, according to Dumit, are made through material

semiotic relationships (2014). In the words of Donna Haraway:

Any interesting being in technoscience, like a text-book, molecule, equation,
mouse, pipette, bomb, fungus, technician, agitator, or scientist can – and often
should – be teased open to show the sticky economic, technical, political, organic,
historical, mythic, and textual threads that make up its tissues. (1996, p. 68)

The goal of an implosion project is to follow material semiotic ‘beings’ and their connections

whilst understanding one’s partiality and position. This means to explore ‘the embeddedness

of objects, facts, actions, and people in the world and the world in them’ (Dumit 2014, p.

350). Like following projects, emphasis is placed ‘on details and nonobvious connections, as

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