| dc.description.abstract | This thesis is the result of six months of fieldwork on Maui, Hawai'i, where I have attended to and participated in a variety of hetereogeneous marine conservation practices. I have analyzed marine conservation regulations such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and those of the state of Hawai i, asking how they enact dolphins, whales, humans, and natures and how their enactments differ from those of other practices – for example, those that trangress these regulations. As a volunteer at a Natural Area Reserve, I have explored how its network of materials, volunteers, and visitors enact a specific nature, and how that nature is not a stable reality, but a contingent, shifting one which can be contested. Through repeated engagements with the Hawai'i Wildlife Fund, I have looked at multispecies entanglements between turtles and humans, asking how the HWF s various practices enact different relationships, different turtles, and different natures. Here, I inquire into the role of prediction as a way of knowing, and knowing as a mode of domestication – both of turtles and of humans. Throughout this thesis, my focus is on the relationships that these practices create and renegotiate, and the natures that they enact. | eng |