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- Convenor:
-
Alexander Damianos
(University of Kent)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel examines how law and science mediate human-nonhuman relations through translation. From the legal personhood of rivers to AI-powered whale communication, these techniques actively constitute the "nature" they purport to represent, raising questions about sovereignty, voice, and alterity.
Description
What happens when we attempt to translate across the human/nonhuman divide? This panel interrogates the cultural techniques through which law and science render the "more-than-human" world legible, governable, and articulate. From legal personhood for rivers and forests to AI-assisted decoding of whale songs, contemporary efforts to "give voice" to nature reveal more about human epistemic orderings than about nonhuman entities themselves.
How do these translational practices construct the very subjects they claim to represent? When New Zealand's Whanganui River is granted legal personhood, what forms of indigenous sovereignty are simultaneously recognized and foreclosed? When Project CETI promises "Google Translate for whales," what assumptions about language, intelligence, and communication are embedded in the algorithmic infrastructure?
This panel treats ecological translation as a technology of sovereignty: a means of ordering relations between human and nonhuman that determines what counts as nature, who may speak for it, and under what conditions their testimony becomes authoritative. The panel is interested in materialities of mediation: how hydrophones, courtrooms, machine learning algorithms, and legislative assemblies function as parasitic mediators (following Serres), introducing noise that doesn't distort communication but constitutes the possibility of novel trajectories that (re)constitute the human/nonhuman divide anew.
We welcome papers exploring: legal techniques of nonhuman representation; AI and bioacoustics in conservation; indigenous ontologies and environmental law; the politics of interspecies communication; historical genealogies of nature's voice; and critical engagements with "smart" environmental monitoring. Papers may address empirical cases, theoretical frameworks, or methodological innovations at the intersection of law, science, and environmental governance.
By foregrounding mediation over immediacy, and construction over discovery, this panel challenges fantasies of unmediated access to nature and asks what forms of human and nonhuman subjectivity emerge through practices of ecological translation.