The CRESC organises regular seminars held by their researchers. It is open to interested staff from the University of Manchester, and on request to interested members of the public. The seminar is followed by a pot lunch which gives opportunity to network.

The next seminar will feature Michelle Bastian and discuss the the following:

Fatally Confused about Time: Climate Change and Non-Performativity

Bill McKibben has recently argued that one of the reasons why humans have failed to adequately respond to climate change has been because we are ‘fatally confused about time’. That is, in continuing to tell the time as if it were moving steadily into the infinite future, we are implicitly assuming that  nature will continue to provide a relatively stable and predictable background. In order to explore this fatal confusion, this working paper will pick up on the question of the performative, as it has been discussed by Jacques Derrida, in order to develop at understanding of ‘telling the time’ as a performative speech act. In order to understand the specificities of this speech act in the context of climate change, I will also draw on Sara Ahmed’s account of the non-performativity of anti-racism statements in order to explore the ways in which statements about time may actually be articulated precisely in order to avoid the need to act in a timely fashion. I will then make a number of exploratory suggestions for how time might be performed differently.