This Wednesday, the 5th of May from 1pm to 3pm, we are glad to welcome Dr Michelle Bastian from the University of Edinburgh who will give a lecture entitled The time that ‘destroys humanity’: clocks and continental philosophy.
The event will take place through Teams. If you are interested in participating, please contact Dr Frank Ruda to register.
Here the abstract of the talk:
Continental philosophy has been a key source for thinking through the implications of clock-time. In this talk I revisit Bergson and Heidegger’s works in order to argue that we should be more cautious about their claims for clocks. Demonstrating that they fundamentally misconstrue the nature of clock-time, I argue that far from presenting a steady, repeatable, unending time, we instead find malleability, nonlinearity and adaptability as central to what clock-time is. Even so I also recover opportunities for thinking clock-time otherwise from both philosopher’s accounts. I frame these questions within the broader problem of how we might tell time in a time of climate breakdown.
Michelle Bastian is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Her work crosses critical time studies and environmental humanities, with a focus on the role of time in human and more-than-human communities. She is Editor-in-Chief for Time & Society (SAGE) and a co-editor of a number of collections including, The Social Life of Time (Time & Society), Field Philosophy and Other Experiments (Parallax) and Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (Routledge). Michelle has recent publications in Environmental Humanities, GeoHumanities, and New Formations.