Dr. Michelle Bastian

Michelle Bastian is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Professor II in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. Her work looks at the role of time in human and non-human environments. Currently, she is exploring seasonal timing in plants and animals and how this is changing in a time of climate breakdown.

Re-weaving shared temporalities with local ecologies

This talk draws on recent work in phenology, the scientific study of seasonal timing in ecosystems, which I have been undertaking as a form of field philosophy. Drawing on the reworlding approach to participatory design (Huybrechts et al 2022), I will discuss examples of the current infrastructures available for people to connect with their local environments through paying attention to seasonal shifts. Much of these structures come from citizen science projects, where individuals are invited to track particular trees, insects or shrubs as they respond to recurring cycles. Climate change has caused many species to shift their timing, with some beneficial outcomes, but also with concerns about temporal mismatches between species and their food sources, pollinators or damaging weather such as frosts, or storms. At the heart of this presentation will be questions about how more-than-human participatory research might be thought through a framework of ecological temporalities, and how paying attention to changing cycles can foster very different relationships to local ecologies than many other citizen science projects based on short-term periods of species identification. What happens when we translate rich experiential knowledge into the simple dates needed for our citizen science forms? How might our engagements with phenology be redesigned in order to foster more participatory approaches that work with the ways that more-than-human communities are transformed by these practices?  Finally, what could environmentally focused citizen science learn from the ways that time and temporality have been theorised with wider discussions of participatory research?