Living protocols: remaking worlds in the face of extinction

We are members of the Creatures Collective, a transnational group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, activists, artists, and communities who are collaborating to challenge the world-breaking violence of extinction by directly and collaboratively fostering alternatives to the dominant biodiversity-conservation paradigm. In this collection, we ask how, as co-researchers with(in) Indigenous communities, we can contribute to the remaking of relationships that foster more-than-human accountability, reciprocity, and capacities for resistance. We call these relationships living protocols - living not just in the sense that they are vitally alive, responsive, and regenerative, but also in the sense that we aim to actively live them by supporting those who enact and (re)make them. Based on collaborative research in so-called Australia, Canada, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the US, our essays seek to manifest research that is (or aims to be) collaborative, embedded in mutualistic, interpersonal, more-than-human relationships, and thus co-constitutive of the worlds those relationships sustain. By bringing these collaborations into dialogue with feminist, neomaterialist, decolonial, and Indigenous geographies, we aim to provoke discussion of how researchers across disciplines might contribute to the remaking of worlds in which plural life forms can co-exist - even in the face of transversal world-breaking.