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a trial, the unexpected beings necessary for an entity to exist’ (Latour 2011, p.799). Latour is

thus interested in how the local is networked and therefore the global is less relevant. From

this starting point the Coles eco tin is made possible via a series of local socio-technical and

material networks, which connect distant places – Maldives, Thailand, a Sydney Coles

supermarket. For my topic, the notion of assemblage is more helpful. And so another way of

addressing the methodological/theoretical challenge of studying the surface, is by

understanding following as a kind of assemblic ethnography (Zigon 2015). Assemblic

ethnography adds a theoretical framing of assemblage to the practice of following: it is

ethnographic research within and across the multiple sites and things of a sustainability

assemblage. It involves attuning to the biocultural collaborations, to how dispersed and

diverse components assemble, and to what that assembling generates. It means paying

attention to the conditions of possibility and of limitation. ‘As method, assemblic

ethnography chases and traces a situation through its continual process of assembling across

different global scales and its temporally differential localization in diverse places’ (Zigon

2015, p. 515). Thus the kind of ethnographic research I am suggesting does not simply move

from one site to the next, or from one part of a commodity chain to the next (like Cook et. al.

advocate), but rather moves along diverse assemblic relations and local manifestations. It

follows assemblages that make possible an entity like the Coles eco tin.

To understand better the significance of researching assemblages we need to

understand the usefulness of the concept of assemblage. George Marcus and Erkan Saka

suggest that assemblage is used in analysis and writing to address the ‘modernist problem of

the heterogeneous within the ephemeral, while preserving some concept of the structural so

embedded in the enterprise of social science research’ (2006, p. 102). Such a tension between

heterogeneity and structure is certainly present in analyses such as mine, which are global in

scope, yet take interest in and are informed by particular local situations and ethnographic

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