From November 23rd the students of the master’s degree course Communication Strategies and Techniques of the University of Siena will also have to try their hand at understanding the communication mechanisms of plants and animals: the university, the first in Italy, has in fact activated the Multispecies Communication Laboratory, mandatory for first-year students.
The course will be dedicated precisely to the signals that plants, animals and ecosystems exchange and to the ways in which human beings observe, translate and describe them, we read on the University of Siena website. This is the first teaching on communication between non-human living beings in a degree course in communication among Italian universities.
What we share with non-human living creatures is not corporeality (…) but the fact that we all live with and through signs – explains Tiziano Bonini, communication sociologist and coordinator of the laboratory – In a burning planet, realizing that we human beings are not exceptional, that is, attributing meaning is not an exclusive quality of human beings, becomes a professional and civil competence for those who do environmental communication, scientific journalism or public policies. It also means accepting a downsizing: we are a communicating species among many others, and perhaps not even the most attentive
It has long been known that animals communicate with each other and also try to make themselves understood outside their species. Lately, scientists have also demonstrated some mechanisms of communication between plants.
And only very recently have scientists been looking for ways to communicate with other living beings: in 2021, for example, a research group led byUniversity of California (USA) recorded the sounds emitted by an adult female humpback whale over 38 years old, known as Twain, in south-east Alaska and using a computer algorithm, managed to “understand” its meaning, managing to “converse” for 20 minutes via an underwater speaker.
Now a university course will finally be dedicated to all this: the program will cross the chemistry of plant communication, marine bioacoustics, the semiotics of multispecies imaginaries and the more-than-human design.
All this should remind us that we are not the only species that inhabits planet Earth, and not necessarily the most intelligent, nor the most evolved in the strict sense.
