Sessions
Reading Groups RGs
Biweekly discussions of protocol literature. Each session takes one or two readings from the library and works through them together, usually with a guest.
5 recordings: #14 25 Sept 2026 · #12 15 Apr 2026 · #8 17 Dec 2025
Diagram Jams DJams
Collaborative diagramming sessions: drawing research processes together, and arguing about how to represent agents, objects and the knowledge moving between them.
Projects
Ongoing
Protocol Literature Collection
Our shared reading list, kept as a public Zotero group: protocol practice across domains, from the life sciences and biomedicine to distributed networks and indigenous rights.
Browse the library →
Protocollage
Assembling heterogeneous case studies out of ethnographic fieldwork artifacts. Next step: logging case studies directly on this site, from a template built on the metadata schema we maintain.
Metadata schema (draft) →
Conference Crashing
Members turn up at symposia and conference sessions, alone or in groups, to bring protocol questions into other fields' rooms.
Most recently: Symposium 'The Life of Protocols in the Life Sciences', ISHPSSB 2025, Porto.
Where we have turned up →
Forming
SIG: Standardization & Variability in Biosciences
A special interest group on standardization in the scientific practices, mostly the empirical and experimental ones: how standards hold together, and what varies underneath them anyway.
SIG: Integral Protocol Theory
A special interest group working towards an empirically-based transdisciplinary philosophy of protocolization
SIG: Ethnography of the “Boring”
Taking up Susan Leigh Star's provocation to study boring things, and working out the methods for it — somewhere between archival and documentary research and ethnomethodology.
SIG: The Procedural Mind
Where the micro-sociology of practice meets cognitive science and psychology: what following a procedure does to, and asks of, a mind.
Protocol Studies Concept Cartography
Mapping the conceptual space of protocol studies: definitions, characterisations, examples and the routes between ideas. Modelled on Concept Cartography, which grew out of a reading group on epistemic diversity and whose cartographers include two Protocollege members.