Protocols: Devices for translating moralities, controlling knowledge, defining actors in Indigenous research, and critical ethical reflection

Protocols are devices that act to assist with ethical research behaviour in Indigenous research contexts. Protocols also attempt to play a mediating role in the power and control inherent in research. While the development of bureaucratically derived protocols is increasing, critiques and reviews of protocols have been undertaken in an ad hoc manner and in the absence of an overarching ethical framework or standard. Additionally, actors implicated in research networks - which include gatekeepers, guardians and gatecrashers - are seldom theorised. This paper sketches out a typology of research characters and the different moral positioning that each of them plays in the research game. It argues that by understanding the ways actors enact research protocols we are better able to understand what protocols are, and how they seek to build ethical research practices.