Unravelling the Global Wool Assemblage: Researching Place and Production Networks in the Global Countryside

Abstract

This article applies an assemblage reading to the contemporary global woollen industry to demonstrate how assemblage thinking has value as a methodology for generating insights into the local impact of global economic restructuring; bridging concerns with the relationality of rural places and translocal production networks. Putting assemblage into research practice, we trace the interactions and interdependencies between human and non‐human, organic and inorganic, technical and natural components of the global wool assemblage from the entry point of Newtown in mid‐Wales. In so doing, we call attention to those critical moments in this schema that may be usefully exposed or explored via the concept of assemblage. Here we consider the agency of non‐human actors, as well as the biological, technological, regulatory and marketing regimes that seek to produce wool as a globally mobile commodity. Through their enrolment in these sets of relations, Welsh farmers are exposed to the effects of spatially dispersed and contingent dynamics. Using the example of wool we develop a broad argument for using a framework of assemblage alongside other critical theories as a means of grasping how rural societies, places and communities are negotiating change in the context of globalisation.

Farming from a Process‐Relational Perspective: Making Openings for Change Visible

“…Such conceptualisations have been taken up by a range of disciplines, with specific sensibilities in response to different empirical and theoretical problems. They include non‐representational theory (Thrift ; Anderson and Harrison ), (new) materialist feminism (Barad ; Alaimo and Hekman ; Coole and Frost ; Dolphijn and van der Tuin ), feminist post‐humanism (Åsberg and Braidotti ), and assemblage theory (McFarlane ; DeLanda ; Le Heron et al ; Jones et al ). Each of these conceptual efforts are diversifying as work on them is on‐going, a continual process of rethinking the human, the nonhuman, the material, and emphasising fluidity, relations, processes.…”

“…However, the humanistic assumptions underlying these understandings have been questioned by what has been termed the ‘ontological turn’ in sociology, which among other has held to questioning the usefulness of the social/natural dichotomy and whether humans are the only ones having agency, whether human choices are primarily guided by cognitive processes, and what role unpredictability plays in the unfolding of events. The turn has triggered alternate theoretical perspectives in a number of agro‐food studies (see Goodman ; Carolan ; Le Heron et al ; Sarmiento ), arguing e.g., for a focus on difference rather than dominance (e.g., Wilson ; Beacham ), for the usefulness to understand Alternative Food Networks as multiple and emergent, as performative orderings, always in the making, rather than already constituted systemic entities (e.g., Whatmore and Thorne ; Stock et al ; Le Velly ); for taking into account more‐than‐human agency (e.g., Dwiartama and Rosin ; Phillips ; Dwiartama ), or for analysing the expansive webs of relations through assemblage theory (e.g., Jones et al ). These conceptual developments are instrumental in rethinking the significance of alternative food networks, in understanding their dynamics as unpredictable, and their nature as heterogeneous, i.e., as extending from social relations through material artefacts, to bodies, subjectivities, talk and knowledge.…”

The Complex Adaptive Region-Assemblage and Local Economies: New Perspectives for Tackling Regional Inequalities

“…The Assemblage has been growing in popularity across various aspects of regional studies over the past decade. Part of its appeal lies in its ability to explore processes of fluidity amongst the assembled and re-assembled elements of a system (Calzada, 2018), and in its examination of the complex inter-connections between things, parts and wholes (Jones, Heley and Woods, 2019). Yet there is much more that the concept is able to do.…”

‘The right hybrid for every acre’: Assembling the social worlds of corn and soy seed‐selling in conventional agricultural techniques

“…As seeds are produced, exchanged, grown, and sold the energetic relations continuously remake the agro‐ecologic assemblage. While informed by ANT’s radical, non‐dualist contributions (Goodman , p. 193) and Latour’s approach to integrating material with social worlds (, ), I adopt a more heterogeneous and less stringent kind of assembling not dissimilar from Jones et al .’s assembling of the global wool network (). The more‐than‐human worlds of agriculture, and seeing such worlds, is made possible by foregoing the assumption that only humans agentically interact with the world.…”