Dr Michelle Bastian is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester and from February 2013 will be a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, in the Edinburgh College of Art. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose approach draws on continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, anthropology and sociology. Her work focuses on the role of varying conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion. This includes work on human communities, particularly feminist challenges to traditional notions of community, as well as a focus on ‘more-than-human’ communities. She is particularly interesting in exploring how concepts of time and community are shifting in the context of climate change, resource depletion and mass extinctions. Currently, she is working on a variety of Arts and Humanities Research Council funded projects. This includes Memories of Mr Seel’s Garden (http://www.mrseelsgarden.org) which explores  the histories and futures of local food in Liverpool, and The Time of the Clock and the Time of Encounter (http://www.timeofencounter.org), where she is analysing political and artistic interventions into clock time.
She is the cofounder of two research networks: Temporal Belongings (http://www.temporalbelongings.org) which seeks to develop a more coordinated understanding of the interconnections between time and community and the Transition Research Network (http://www.transitionresearchnetwork.org), which supports mutually beneficial links between academic researchers and Transition Town initiatives (http://www.transitionnetwork.org).   

Website: www.cresc.ac.uk/people/michelle-bastian