Greenhouse Green Transitions Fellow Sarah Dimick will talk about her project.
In the fall of 2022, University of Stavanger is welcoming 12 guest researchers and artists from across the world to engage with each other and the UiS community in a semester-long exploration of the meanings of green transitions.
In this Greenhouse Green Transitions Lecture, Sarah Dimick presents the project she is working on during this fellowship in Stavanger.
Sarah Dimick is an Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University. Her research, based in Anglophone literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, focuses on literary portrayals of climate change and environmental justice.
As a Green Transition Fellow, I will focus on phenological transitions—transitions in the timing of blooming, melting, migratory arrivals, and environmental events driven by climatic conditions. As botanists, neighborhood clubs, and schoolchildren submit observations of plant and animal activity, they generate data about the pace of local climatic change, crucial information for predicting crop failures or local extinctions. However, I suggest that these observational practices also allow individuals and communities to attune themselves to the new rhythms of the anthropogenic climate. The concept of a green transition is often understood in terms of technological advances, political mobilization, or economic adjustments, but these next decades of transition also require serious emotional shifts. In this sense, repeated phenological observations begin to function as ritual. They allow observers to adjust to a warmer world not via the temporalities of crisis bur rather through the small-scale temporalities of care and close attention.
The lecture will be live streamed on Zoom. Register via Zoom to receive a link. A recording of the lecture with captioning will be available afterwards.