Dr Michelle Bastian

Job title:

Senior Lecturer in Theory, Culture and Environment

michelle.bastian@ed.ac.uk
+44 (0)131 651 5779

Office:

Level 1, Room 303B The Maltings, Minto House

Office hours:

In Semester One 2026, I am available on Wednesdays 11am-1pm for ad hoc meetings. Please contact me to book a slot.

Research Output:

Edinburgh Research Explorer link

Biography

Time, and the way it shapes our societies, has been at the centre of my research since 2005. I explore how time privileges some communities, while oppressing many more. A key question for me is how changing times can change worlds. I am suspicious of charismatic time concepts like long-term, slow, and deep time, and have argued for more pluralistic understandings of how we can address social and environmental problems via a temporal lens.

My work combines perspectives from continental philosophy, time studies, environmental humanities, art and design, and global histories of time-keeping. Currently, I'm working on two main projects, a monograph on creative horology called Dear Time: How to Make Clocks We Could Love, and a field philosophy of seasonal timing (phenology) addressing the ways that ecosystem timekeeping is shifting with climate breakdown.

I enjoy drawing out the implications of time across a wide range of topics, with academic publications in venues ranging from fashion journals to astrophysics conference proceedings, and much inbetween. Building the community of time scholars has been central to my career, including developing the international Temporal Belongings network and acting as the Editor in Chief for Time & Society (SAGE) from 2018 – 2025. With Larissa Pschetz leading, I have contributed to the development of Temporal Design, an approach that highlights the role of design in shaping the time of our lives.

Interdiscplinary methodology has been another focus, including as editor of collections like Field Philosophy and Other Experiments (Parallax) and Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (Routledge). I am interested in participatory approaches, inclusive facilitation methods (including online conferencing), field methods in the humanities, and citizen science.

I completed my PhD in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, and was a Research Associate at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, University of Manchester, before taking up my current role in Edinburgh. During this time I have had additional roles such as Professor II at the University of Oslo with the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities from 2021-2024, and in 2021-2022 I was a Mid-Career Fellow supported by the Independent Social Research Foundation. My research has been funded by the AHRC, the British Academy, the ISRF, the Wellcome Trust, the Research Council of Norway, University of Oslo, Sydney Environment Institute, University of Bergen, Aarhus University Research Foundation and NERC. My most recent project is part of British Academy's Global Convening Programme: The Time(s) of a Just Transition.

Current PhD Students (in addition to those listed below):

Adam Frank (Philosophy, U of Dundee) Living Attentively Amidst Biodiversity Loss: An Exploration of Description and Normativity in Vinciane Despret's Philosophical Ethology. Supported by a Carnegie PhD Scholarship

Links:

Research interests

Environmental Humanities
Time Studies
Clock and non-clock timekeeping
Extinction and multispecies studies
Ecological and geological approaches to time

Teaching

Michelle contributes to a range of programmes within ESALA, teaching courses focused on theory, environmental humanities, time studies, and more-than-human methods, as well as acting as a dissertation supervisor for final year projects. She also acts as mentor for the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network PhD Lab.

Links

Edinburgh Environmental Humanities PhD Lab

Research

My research focuses on two main areas:

1. Philosophy of social time and social aspects of time-keeping

My work seeks to open up new interdisciplinary conversations between philosophy, the social sciences and design. Building on my training in feminist, environmental and continental philosophy, my research has drawn on social scientific work on social time to rethink key philosophical questions around the politics of time and the construction of communities. These approaches often challenge the way that time, and time-reckoning tools, have been treated by philosophers. I also explore new avenues for philosophical enquiry, including engagements with designers and field-based research approaches.

2. Concepts and methods for supporting more-than-human communities

Extending my work on the relationship between time and communities to the issue of more-than-human communities, I seek to bring critical time studies into conversation with environmental humanities to explore how social concepts of time are involved in the construction of nature as outside of culture and everyday human concerns. In particular I have argued for expanding the scope of relationships we look to when ‘telling time’. A further key aspect of this work has been again to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues, including my work on more-than-human participatory research, which brings human-focused participatory research methods into conversation with multi-species research methods. More recently, I have been funded by the ISRF to collaborate across phenology (the scientific study of life-cycle timing in plants and animals) and environmental humanities.