May 10-25, 2022
Responsible Documentation and Conscious Outcomes: Explorations in the Ownership of Knowledge
- Working Group
- Dept. AAK
This working group runs from May 2022 to September 2023 as part of the research project Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property. It focuses on building methods and frameworks for responsible documentation and conscious outcomes of mutual benefit to scholars and practitioners.
In response to familiar conditions of disenfranchisement of practitioner knowledge (particularly of indigenous communities and traditional craftspeople in India and Papua New Guinea), in this project we will explore the possibilities for scholars—mindful of their relationships in engaging source communities/practitioners—to produce both responsible documentation of value to academia, and ownership of knowledge for their “source communities.” Through the spectrum—from engaging with practitioners to theoretically considering practices informed by alternative ontologies—we will explore in a series of three workshops set at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) and in India how scholars can understand theory that is inherent in practice, as a formal method.
Workshop Structure
The first six days of workshops will explore taxonomies of pedagogy to build collaborative tools for research with practitioners. In a second week of activities, small groups will have meetings with sustainable market representatives, museum curators, and will engage with the concept of archives. Here, the focus will be on how non-textual knowledge÷in bodies and objects—can be owned as knowledge. In a final one-day conference, the results of the last days will be presented briefly to invited scholarly participants. The theme of the conference is ‘responsible documentation’. We hope to focus on the following outcomes.
Workshop participants will be a small set of scholars engaged on issues of responsible documentation, along with scholars and practitioners from India, Papua New Guinea, and Brazil working with craft and indigenous knowledge.
Objectives and Outcomes
The outcome will include, but not be exclusively text-based work. The working group will therefore contribute a set of methods and frameworks that speak to our ability to engage equally with our practitioner partners as knowledge partners, to explore the value of producing knowledge of value to both.
This work will be the basis of a two further experimental workshops in 2023 (in India) and 2024 (in Berlin) where we introduce these methods to practitioners, through inviting pairs of scholar/practitioners who would like to explore together.
- The working group will contribute a set of methods and frameworks that speak to our ability to engage mutually with our practitioner partners as knowledge partners, to explore the value of producing knowledge of value and ownership for both.
- To explicate a taxonomy and toolkit that might be shown to practitioners/interlocutors as examples of how academics work. Each workshop will also produce a carefully recorded and written up proceedings as a multi-authored collective document from the group.
Workshop Details
Also supported by:
PENELOPE (ERC funding HORIZON, Grant agreement no. 682711). PI: Ellen Harlizius-Klück
and
Centre for Embodied Knowledge, Hyderabad. Director: Hari Kiran Vadlamani


Contact and Registration
This event is open to invited participants only.