Academic staff profile Dr Michelle Bastian

​Michelle is the course organiser of postgraduate seminars on Topics in Environmental Humanities and Time, Place, Belonging: understanding time in society. 

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.