{"id":751,"date":"2026-10-30T12:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-30T12:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/?p=751"},"modified":"2026-10-30T12:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T12:20:12","slug":"klsresearch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/2026\/10\/30\/klsresearch\/","title":{"rendered":"Ecological Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Alexander Damianos –<\/p>\n

\"\"
Francisco de Goya, Duelo a garrotazos. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A growing number of scientists claim<\/a> we are on the verge of a \u201cGoogle Translate\u201d moment in communication between humans and some nonhuman animals. Hydrophones record whale vocalisations, AI identifies patterns in the recordings, and the click sequences particular to individual pods are analysed<\/a> to reveal what some researchers call an \u201calphabet<\/a>.\u201d If there is an alphabet, so the reasoning goes, there is language<\/em>; and language is translatable, such that the radical alterity of human relations to whales can be resolved through techno-linguistic means.<\/p>\n

Is the premise of interspecies translation itself a translation of techno-scientific expertise into normative authority? My scepticism of the normative claims to which scientific expertise are applied should not be\u00a0conflated with a dismissal of the underlying scientific research. I admire the rigour and imagination of efforts to classify whale vocalisations. But applying digital technologies does not so much answer a dormant question (do whales talk<\/em>, and what are they saying?) as alter the nature of the question in normatively significant ways<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some enthusiasts of the ready-at-hand transition from classification to the whale\u2019s day in court cite<\/a> the inclusion of First Nations communities as evidence of virtue. I am not convinced. Present legal tools inadequately reflect issues of moral and cultural significance. But it is na\u00efve to assume that legal personhood for a river or a chimpanzee, or a whale speaking in court through an AI-assisted device, is inherently virtuous. The assumed virtue of invoking \u201ccare\u201d for the more-than-human, or the inclusion of First Nations peoples, is itself a cultural artefact worthy of scrutiny. An initiative is not virtuous because<\/em> it involves an under-represented community. This suggests that the role of the Other is simply to qualify the presuppositions of the privileged party that is at liberty to solicit those communities it<\/em> classifies as under-represented in the first place.<\/p>\n

As I have argued elsewhere<\/a>, the enthusiasm for legal personhood and techno-facilitated interspecies diplomacy merits greater circumspection in light of what Elizabeth Povinelli calls the cunning of recognition<\/em><\/a>. When , a liberal, settler Australia rejoiced<\/a> at its capacity to atone for its racist geist. But this recognition, was a conceit<\/a>. Mabo<\/em>, like Te Awa Tupua<\/em>, suggests that legal systems can respond to social movements. However, acknowledging the Other may simultaneously reproduce the conditions of their silencing. Indeed, recognition may function as a technique by which to further disregard what has been recognised (as if recognition in a superficial sense, rather than attending to the underlying issues, is what is needed). Both Native Title and First Nations claims over the Whanganui River ultimately depend on \u00a0approval from the very common law system meant to secure more equitable practices of co-existence.<\/p>\n

Is the conceit of AI-assisted interspecies translation cut from a similar cloth? Does AI-assisted interspecies translation harm our capacity to acknowledge meaningful difference, and, instead, justify a further reach of anthropocentric thinking by imposing on the entire nonhuman world the fundamentally human idiom of \u201clanguage\u201d<\/a>? Do we seek to rejoice in a virtuous conclusion in advance of the messy work of recomposing the social? I do not suspect disingenuity, but rather, suspect the contagion of anxiety increasingly characteristic of academic expertise<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Academics work under growing precarity and scrutiny while increasingly expected to perform expertise in a manner compatible with the attention economy and evaluated in ways that change what counts as knowledge. The assumption that thinking is worthwhile only when useful, profitable, or captures popular attention is not the cause, but the context, of the dynamic of which premature insistence on interspecies diplomacy, brought to you by Open AI, is symptomatic. Scientists perceive a growing dissonance between what we know<\/em> and how we act<\/em>, particularly on climate change. The rhetorics of \u201cplanetary boundaries\u201d and \u201ctipping points\u201d suggest that they respond by interpreting research in ways that demonstrate its \u201cutility\u201d. I have elsewhere<\/a> called this dynamic \u201cangst.\u201d By publishing that in a journal<\/em>, inevitably participated in upholding the dynamic I describe. This is a condition that operates on and through the subjects it conditions.<\/p>\n

I am interested to explore the capacity for a therapeutics in response to this predicament. Together with a marine biologist<\/a>, a legal scholar<\/a>, a policy designer and a community arts organisation<\/a>, I have recently received funding from the Centre for Public Engagement Practice in Arts and Humanities<\/a> (CPEP) to lead a team working with coastal communities in Greece and the UK. The ambition is to constructively troll the notion of techno-facilitated translation as a singular, centralised dynamic. We will fine-tune existing neural networks to develop site-specific translation technologies between humans and their more-than-human companions. We aim to shift expectations of science as an exclusive source of certainty towards an ongoing dynamic that is refined through diversity of participation and constructive disagreement, while training ourselves in the lost martial art of listening. To paraphrase<\/a> marine biologist Luke Rendell, we have more to learn in coming to appreciate whale vocalisations as fundamentally and irreconcilably different<\/em> from human language, than we do in simply imposing the idiom of language onto that which whales are and do.<\/p>\n

The question, then, is how new media ecologies (AI, remote sensors, cloud networks) transform not just the object of observation, but the observer too. Our practical aim is to collect site-specific sets of sensory data (memories, audio recordings, videos, conversations). We will work with coastal communities in the UK to create fine-tuned translation devices that make sense<\/em> in those locations only, and for that reason<\/em>, unfold the exercise in communicating with others for what it really is: an exercise in (re)constituting collective selves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Alexander Damianos – A growing number of scientists claim we are on the verge of a \u201cGoogle Translate\u201d moment in communication between humans and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86078,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224262,157941,156491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-research","category-law-politics-and-culture","category-legal-theories-and-philosophy"],"sub_title":"Dr Alexander Damianos is lecturer in property law and environmental law at the University of Kent. ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86078"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=751"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":763,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions\/763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/countercurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}