I am a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. I am based in the Edinburgh School of Art, where I teach courses on Environmental Humanities, Critical Time Studies and Architectural Theory.
I work in the areas of critical time studies and environmental humanities, with a particular focus on the relationship between time and belonging. I completed my 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 my current role at the University Edinburgh. From August 2021 I will be an ISRF Mid-Career Fellow, working on a new project around phenology, time and field philosophy.
My research is focused on two main areas:
1. Philosophy of social time and social aspects of time-keeping
My work seeks to open up new interdisciplinary conversations between philosophy, the social sciences and design. Building on my areas of expertise within feminist, environmental and continental philosophy, my research has argued that a deeper engagement with social time is necessary to respond to key philosophical questions around the politics of time and the construction of communities. I have demonstrated that such an engagement results in profound challenges to the way that time, and time-reckoning tools, have been treated by philosophers. Moreover my work opens new avenues for exploring philosophical methods, including engagements with designers and field-based research approaches.
I work in the areas of critical time studies and environmental humanities, with a particular focus on the relationship between time and belonging. I completed my 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 my current role at the University Edinburgh. From August 2021 I will be an ISRF Mid-Career Fellow, working on a new project around phenology, time and field philosophy.
My research is focused on two main areas:
1. Philosophy of social time and social aspects of time-keeping
My work seeks to open up new interdisciplinary conversations between philosophy, the social sciences and design. Building on my areas of expertise within feminist, environmental and continental philosophy, my research has argued that a deeper engagement with social time is necessary to respond to key philosophical questions around the politics of time and the construction of communities. I have demonstrated that such an engagement results in profound challenges to the way that time, and time-reckoning tools, have been treated by philosophers. Moreover my work opens new avenues for exploring philosophical methods, including engagements with designers and field-based research approaches.
2. Concepts and methods for supporting more-than-human communities
Extending my work on the relationship between time and communities to the issue of more-than-human communities I seek to bring critical time studies into conversation with environmental humanities to explore how social concepts of time are involved in the construction of nature as outside of culture and everyday human concerns. In particular I have argued for expanding the scope of relationships we look to when ‘telling time’. A further key aspect of this work has been again to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues, most clearly exemplified in my work on more-than-human participatory research, which brings human-focused participatory research methods into conversation with multi-species research methods.
Since 2013 I have 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.
I am an editor of five collections including The Social Life of Time (Time & Society), Field Philosophy and Other Experiments (Parallax, 2019), and Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (Routledge, 2016). Since 2019 I have been an Editor-in-Chief for the journal Time & Society (SAGE).
I am the founder and convenor of the Temporal Belongings Network, member of the steering committee for the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network, member of the Extinction Studies Working Group and co-founder of the Transition Research Network which I cordinated from 2011-2017.
Extending my work on the relationship between time and communities to the issue of more-than-human communities I seek to bring critical time studies into conversation with environmental humanities to explore how social concepts of time are involved in the construction of nature as outside of culture and everyday human concerns. In particular I have argued for expanding the scope of relationships we look to when ‘telling time’. A further key aspect of this work has been again to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues, most clearly exemplified in my work on more-than-human participatory research, which brings human-focused participatory research methods into conversation with multi-species research methods.
Since 2013 I have 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.
I am an editor of five collections including The Social Life of Time (Time & Society), Field Philosophy and Other Experiments (Parallax, 2019), and Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds (Routledge, 2016). Since 2019 I have been an Editor-in-Chief for the journal Time & Society (SAGE).
I am the founder and convenor of the Temporal Belongings Network, member of the steering committee for the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network, member of the Extinction Studies Working Group and co-founder of the Transition Research Network which I cordinated from 2011-2017.
