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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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Recent Rights of Nature litigation and AI bioacoustics claim to amplify nonhuman voices through legal personhood and machine translation. How do care practices risk silencing alterity by concentrating interpretive power, revealing care itself as sovereign control over cross-species communication?
Paper long abstract
Recent developments in Rights of Nature litigation and AI-powered bioacoustics promise new possibilities for interspecies communication. Legal personhood grants rivers agency through human guardians; "digital conservationists" propose translating whale songs into English using machine learning. Both claim to care for nonhuman voices by making them legible within human systems. Yet translation is never neutral care work. Drawing on Serres, Luhmann, and cultural techniques theory, this paper examines how legal and technological media simultaneously enable and constrain ethical interspecies relations. AI translation platforms perform care while concentrating interpretive authority, risking what they purport to remedy: the silencing of nonhuman alterity. Understanding these techniques as pharmacological, that is, as simultaneously remedy and poison, reveals care itself as a sovereign practice determining who speaks, for whom, and how vulnerability becomes politically legible across species boundaries.
Paper short abstract
This study examines how more-than-human rights are assembled in environmental law through legal protection of species’ procreation. Posthuman legalities may prefigure sustainable more-than-human democracy; for others, they may be seen as threatening core mechanisms of such political systems.
Paper long abstract
This study examines how more-than-human rights are assembled in Swedish environmental law through the legal protection of species’ procreation. It asks which assemblages of procreative relations shape legal decisions and how they complicate the modern binary of legal subject and mere object. Drawing on court decisions from 2013–2024, the study traces institutional practices in which activist citizen science produces data that inform courts’ assessments of procreative conditions. Four overlapping assemblages of procreation emerge. First, assemblages of the unseen emphasise habitat and relational potentials rather than observable (or non-observable) acts of procreation. Second, opportunity and place situate procreation within ecological contexts: it occurs not only at sites but through temporal and relational conditions and interactions. Third, movements through hybrid landscapes foreground species’ mobility across fragmented and technologically mediated terrains (e.g., dams, turbines, roads). Fourth, compensatory landscapes treat procreation as a complex set of relations that can be recreated through relocation or safeguarded through compensatory zoning. While modern law largely remains grounded in a human-centred framework, jurisdictional and procedural contingencies, forest activism, and unexpected uses of species data can create ecological openings for threatened species to survive. These openings point toward relational legal understandings in which landscapes participate in recognising more-than-human legal subjectivity and rights through interspecies relations, rather than treating organisms or species as isolated units. Such inter species legalities may prefigure a necessary and sustainable form of more-than-human representative democracy in the Anthropocene; for others, they may be seen as threatening core anthropocentric mechanisms of modern political systems.
Paper short abstract
This paper offers a historical analysis of hydrophones and contact microphones across military, scientific, and artistic use cases to map technosocial conditions of power and politics as embedded within the technologies of sonic transduction and related listening techniques.
Paper long abstract
Listening to an acoustic environment is a co-constitutive experience shaped by one’s personal sonic sensitives and the technologies that extend or augment one’s capabilities of listening within diverse soundscapes (i.e. oceans, soil). Examining a history of contact microphones and hydrophones, this work will critically investigate vibratory sonic translation and techniques of listening in artistic, militaristic, and scientific practice. By attending to the technological development of these tools as shaped by complex social and cultural lineages, this work will critique these technologies as entangled with surveillant histories and military control. This paper asks: How have hydrophones been mobilized historically through military efforts, artistic practice, and scientific analysis to render audible ecological changes, promote sustainability efforts, and/or enact surveillance? Examining the role of the listener in this assemblage of transduction, I ask how is listening taught through particular techniques of engagement? Framing this work through media archaeology (Natale, 2012; Zielinski, 2006), I reflect on the relationship between aquatic and piezoelectric sound technologies and listening techniques in militaristic (Shiga, 2013; Wilson, 1920), scientific (Bakker, 2022; Helmreich, 2009), cultural (Sterne, 2003), and creative (Jue, 2020) use cases. I weave these mediated histories with artistic ethnography and interviews with artists, whose diverse uses of hydrophones and contact microphones reflect possibilities for sonic understanding in ecoacoustic research, scientific intervention, and multi-sensorial relations. With a critical lens towards re-orienting power, this work challenges mediated immersion, questions extractive logics of these tools, and considers both real and speculative futures for sonic transduction.
Paper short abstract
In Sweden’s production forests, the protected orchid Goodyera repens translates forest ecologies into politically actionable evidence. The orchid’s rhizomatic relations translate plant rights into legal force, troubling human exceptionalism and reading for disturbance-and-care in modern assemblages.
Paper long abstract
In Sweden’s vast production forests, the protected orchid Goodyera repens emerges as a small but unruly nonhuman holobiont whose multispecies power seemingly travels through databases, courts, certification schemes, and property regimes. The political charisma of this inconspicuous orchid (“Knärot” in Swedish) stands out in the Fenno-Scandinavian countries forest policy discourse. Feared and loathed by the conservative parties, (and by large Scandinavian deforestation companies) – for how reported sightings of this orchid might hinder clear-cutting, this small plant has become a beacon of biodiversity activism and a nonhuman figure of resistance to deforestation and diminishing biodiversity. This presentation tells a case story of how plant rights – pursued via the national species observation system “Artportalen” (in Swedish) and national environmental law – both disturb and fortify anthropocentric modern institutions such as science, law and democracy. Against human-exceptionalist binaries, G. repens becomes politically powerful in legal decision-making through its rhizomatic relations with fungi, insects, forest ecologies, environmental activists, a citizen science database, and government agencies. Seeking escape routes from the plantation modernity that favor human culture over nonhuman nature regardless of co-dependencies, the presentation follows the orchid’s distributed, dividual identities and rhizomatic journey across present-day Swedish forest politics. It also shows how situated more-than-human research can read for disturbance and care across legal assemblages that are themselves profoundly modern.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how the ecological and climate crisis reshapes law and sovereignty. It argues that the classical liberal state faces a legitimacy crisis and must move beyond property-centered frameworks toward ecological security, redefining the rule of law within ecological limits.
Paper long abstract
The ecological crisis of the Anthropocene fundamentally challenges the ontological foundations and the concept of sovereignty upon which modern state theory is built. This study examines the legitimacy crisis of the property-oriented and passive “neutral arbiter” role of the classical liberal state in the face of transboundary environmental destruction and planetary risk. Reinterpreting Locke’s property-centered state, Hobbes’s security-oriented Leviathan, and Rousseau’s general will through an ecological lens, the paper highlights the need for conceptual transformations such as the “Eco-Leviathan” and the “Ecological General Will.” Drawing on recent advisory opinions and evolving jurisprudence, it argues that the state’s duty to protect has expanded from a domestic positive obligation into a global erga omnes responsibility grounded in intergenerational legitimacy and ecological stewardship. The analysis demonstrates that ecological degradation destabilizes traditional sovereignty by exposing its territorial limits and its anthropocentric bias. Ultimately, the study contends that the raison d’être of the state is undergoing a mandatory paradigm shift from property security toward ecological security, requiring the rule of law to be redefined within planetary boundaries and principles of ecological justice.