Gathering and Mobilizing Protocols: Relational Approaches to Animal Cosmologies

This workshop engages historians, philosophers, and practitioners to explore a spectrum of scientific and intergenerational knowledges that have historically guided the formation and function of protocols for human behavior and order. Specifically, we focus on how protocols work within contexts of promoting mutualism among humans and nonhuman beings. We explore the notion of protocol as important material and immaterial manifestations of obligations that play a role in epistemic processes. We are interested in how protocols can be studied to illuminate the spectrum of ties that run between intrafamilial knowledge, larger social groups, communities, and institutions—as well as various investigative knowledge practices. Discussion of protocol in this workshop highlights how issues such as cultural heritage reification, museum practices involving Ancestral Remains, conservation laws, and land claims have challenged these ties.

The workshop will provide a space for rethinking the history of scientific knowledge practices as histories of ways of knowing and ways of being by ethically gathering and mobilizing protocols. Participants will engage with the following questions:

(1) How do protocols serve as mnemonics for relational cosmologies and how do we know they are “at work” or in play in different communities?

(2) What are the synergies between ways of being in the world and ways of knowing the world that produce “animal cosmologies?” And how does scholarly consideration of these synergies allow for rethinking conventional or disciplined knowledge practices?

(3) How does/can a focus on cosmology through protocols help us reconstruct better histories of knowledge?

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