How can phenology can help us communicate more effectively about changing climates?
Michelle Bastian works in the areas of critical time studies and environmental humanities, with a broad focus on the role of time in social processes of inclusion and exclusion. Currently her work is focused on time-keeping practices in a context of climate crisis, and developing humanities approaches to phenology, the scientific study of life-cycle timing in plants, animals and environments. She is an Associate Professor II at the University of Oslo with the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, and in 2021-2022 was a Mid-Career Fellow supported by the Independent Social Research Foundation.
She completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, and was a Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, University of Manchester, before taking up her current role in Edinburgh.
Since 2013 she has been involved in eight AHRC-funded research projects, five as principal investigator. These projects looked at time and community, local food projects, sustainable economies, temporal design and transition towns.
Her work has been published in a range of journals including Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Environmental Humanities, GeoHumanities, Parallax, Theory, Culture and Society, and New Formations.
Michelle is an editor of five collections including The Social Life of Time (Time & Society, 2020) Field Philosophy and Other Experiments (Parallax, 2019; republished in book form with Routledge in 2021) and Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (Routledge, 2016). Since 2019 she has been an Editor-in-Chief for the journal Time & Society (SAGE).
Michelle is the founder and convenor of the Temporal Belongings Network, co-convenor of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network, member of the Extinction Studies Working Group and co-founder of the Transition Research Network which she co-cordinated from 2011-2017.
About Seeds of Thought
Join us for a series of lunchtime talks with researchers, thinkers, artists, creatives, and like-minded individuals.
Throughout 2025, we invite you to a menu of fascinating ideas over lunch. Together, we’ll consider how changes, at various scales of time and space, reflect the broader ecological crisis and explore ways to engage with these shifts, both practically and imaginatively.
Coffee, tea, and water will be available, with sandwiches for pre-order at the Visitor Centre. Free for St Andrews Botanic Garden Friends Members, £3 for visitors
Please note, this talk was originally scheduled to take place on 25th June, and has been rescheduled to Wednesday 17th September due to speaker illness.
