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.
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
- Elisabeth Schøyen Jensen (University of Bergen) Urban Seasonalities. Supported by ERC funding.