Michelle Bastian
Some information about me
Profile
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I completed my Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in 2009. I was then a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia, before moving to the U.K. and taking up my current position at the University of Manchester.
My primary research interest is in exploring the varying modes in which communities respond to questions of diversity. My earliest work explored the problem of identity and was particularly engaged with feminist work on coalition and hybrid accounts of identity such as Donna Haraway’s and Gloria Anzaldúa's. What I found particularly interesting in this work is the way attempts to rethink community in terms of hybridity also appear to involve challenges to linear conceptions of time. I thus took up this problem in my Ph.D. thesis. I identified a failure to adequately address the political nature of 'public time' within prominent philosophical approaches to time and instead developed an interdisciplinary approach that draws on anthropology, sociology, feminist philosophy and continental philosophy.
I am fascinated by the way linear conceptions of time appear to promise a single reality or universal commensurability. I argue that this promise is problematically taken up as an implicit guide within community responses to diversity and social action. In contrast to much of the philosophical approach to time, I argue that ‘time’ needs to be read as a multi-dimensional regulatory practice that implicates time in social methods of inclusion and exclusion. I am particularly interested in how implicit 'common sense' assumptions about time can work to marginalise certain ways of living or certain modes of political action. In my work I also seek to illuminate the way conventional accounts of time are inter-weaved with less geometrical, more disjointed, hybrid accounts.
Since completing my Ph.D. I have extended the focus of my work to look at the way varying concepts of temporality and community are mobilised in the context of climate change and resource depletion. This project involves a number of case studies, with two currently underway. The first examines the concepts of time at work within the Transition movement. While the second, based on collaborative work with members of the Ecological Humanities group based in Australia, draws on work on multi-species communities and the relational nature of space and time to propose new modes of time-keeping in an age of climate change and mass extinctions.
Publications
Refereed Journal Papers
Projects
Topologies of Social ChangeTrajectories of Participation and Inequality
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On the outer edges of Liverpool ONE, a 42 acre regeneration area of the city centre, there is a Tesco Superstore. This is unremarkable in itself - you can't go very far in Liverpool without...
Topologies of Social Change
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This project investigates the difference between the time of the clock and the lived time of experience. We live in a world dominated by the time of the clock, yet many aspects of life have a...
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The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is leading the development of a new cross-Research Council research programme on Connected Communities in partnership with the EPSRC,...
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This project utilises an interdisciplinary approach to explore changing concepts of community in the context of anthropogenic climate change, resource depletion and mass...
Events
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Mon, Nov 28th 2011
A networking meeting for researchers and practitioners interested in researching the Transition Movement
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Fri, Oct 21st 2011
Drawing on the Centre’s general scepticism over epochal accounts of social change, linear accounts of causality and the passivity of methods, this one day workshop seeks to bring together CRESC researchers to explore the kinds of understandings of temporality we are utilising in our study of changing worlds.
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Mon, Jun 20th 2011 (All day) - Tue, Jun 21st 2011 (All day)
A two day interdisciplinary residential workshop exploring the interconnections between time and community.
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Tue, May 31st 2011 (All day)
A networking meeting for those conducting research reviews and scoping studies as part of the Connected Communities research programme.
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Wed, Feb 29th 2012
An open meeting of the Transition Research Network, bringing together academics and activists interested in community-led responses to climate change and resource depletion.
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Wed, May 23rd 2012 (All day)
This workshop aims to critically explore the many ways in which ideologies and practices of hope, utopianism and futurity shape communities and their interconnections.



