Swimming Camels

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow Kevin Grecksch has recently been awarded British Academy seed funding for a project on ‘Reflecting about ‘Swimming camels’ on the North-East Coast of England: Knowledge, translation and global challenges.’ This scoping activity, which I will undertake with three colleagues, will answer the question whether it is possible to build a conversation about global phenomena such as development, migration, climate change, that involves the way in which local communities understand, interpret and experience these phenomena? This research is an interdisciplinary collaboration spanning four disciplines in Humanities (Sociolinguistics, Translation Studies) and Social Science (Development Studies, Socio-Legal Studies) to consider the feasibility of a translation-based framework that can respond in an adaptive way to global challenges in a variety of contexts, such as disaster, migration, climate emergency, in which the global south and north intersect. We are considering case studies from our respective contexts from the Global South and North bringing together our expertise utilising a transdisciplinary lens of translation. We intend translation as a process that bridges gaps between languages (interlingual), within the same language (intralingual) and between different systems of symbols and beliefs (intersemiotic): translation as a methodology to co-create useful knowledge.