Climate change temporalities: Narratives, representations and practices

A digital conference on humanistic approaches to climate change
University of Bergen, Norway,  August 11–13, 2021.

When we think about climate change, what first springs to mind is probably carbon emissions, extreme weather, draughts, floods, and melting icebergs. But climate change is just as much about time and timescales, pace and acceleration: Climate scientists incorporate lessons from the geological past in modeling possible future climates, politicians are coping with questions of how to make future societies resilient, and environmentalists are calling for immediate action.

Climate change challenges established human understandings of time. Macro-scales such as geological time and historical time become entangled, but just as important is the way changes in climate affect everyday life reasoning, based in personal experiences and immediacy. Climate change also interferes with family life, turning hopes and dreams for the future of “our children” into fear and worries.

This conference will approach how the wide range of more or less entangled temporalities of a changing climate are narrated, represented or expressed through performances and practices. We welcome papers discussing temporalities of climate change both from a historical and a contemporary perspective.

The conference is part of the project “The Future is Now: Temporality and Exemplarity in Climate Change Discourses” and is funded by the Research Council of Norway.

Confirmed keynotes are:

Michelle Bastian is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, and an editor-in-chief of Time & Society (SAGE).

Kjersti Fløttum , Professor of French, University of Bergen, and the head of the LINGCLIM research group (Linguistic Representations of Climate Change Discourse and Their Individual and Collective Interpretations).