Page 55 - KATE_JOHNSTON_2017

neoliberal ideology, as sufficient explanatory frameworks (Hawkins et al. 2015, p. xvi).

Another reason for framing sustainability as an assemblage is to explore the relationship

between an assemblage and the communities implicated in its maintenance. On the topic of

sustainable aquaculture certification, Elizabeth Havice and Alistair Iles use the concept of

sustainability assemblage, suggesting that assemblages involve the:

...relationships and connections among producers, consumers, investors, markets,
and certifiers built around the pursuit of sustainability. The rules underlying such
assemblages aim to define which producers and practices are and are not
sustainable, to enrol people and production sites within their assemblage. (2015, p.
27)

Assemblage ‘allows us to conceptualise how persons and objects that are geographically,

socioeconomically, and culturally distributed get caught up in shared conditions that

significantly affect their possible ways of being-in-the-world’ (Zigon 2015, p. 502). This

suggests that ‘the abstractability, mobility and power of global forms [like sustainability]

make them fateful to human life’ (Collier 2006, p. 400). In a way this turns the familiar neo-

liberal mantra of sustainability debates – think global, act local – on its head and asks, what

are the local impacts of thinking globally?

Following a Sustainability Assemblage: Sites and Materials

Practices of rendering tuna sustainable/unsustainable offer an opportunity to explore the local

impacts of thinking globally and to consider the shared conditions of sustainability in which

dispersed persons and objects are caught up. For the purpose of my research, this involved

paying attention to diverse agents of a sustainability assemblage, and tuning into moments of

assembling sociotechnical, discursive, organisational and material components. Empirically,

this started in a Coles supermarket with a tin of responsibly fished tuna. From this encounter I

visited other supermarkets to observe the rapid emergence of pole and line skipjack, and

43