The workshop title is: Communicating Seasons: Texts, Cultures & Climates

Information in more detail may be found here: https://projects.au.dk/seasonal-journalism/workshop-2025

Admissions for the workshop are closed.

The workshop brings together people working with seasonality and communication from within various research disciplines. It is the hope that the workshop will stimulate new ways of thinking and communicating about climate change. Based on such dialogues, we are planning an anthology entitled Communicating Seasons to be published (hopefully) by Bloomsbury.

Invited speakers and abstracts for their talks are:

Michelle Bastian (University of Edinburgh): Narrating disaster through the spectre of ecological mismatches in time

The problem of phenological mismatch -- when birds arrive too early for peak caterpillar season, or pollinators arrive out of synch with their flowering companions – often provides a disaster narrative for journalistic explorations of climate breakdown. In this paper I will explore the match-mismatch hypothesis, as it is described by conservation ecologists, and the debates around the idea that the world’s ecologies are dangerously falling out of synch. Taking a sceptical look at the lure of these types of declensionist narratives of ecological time, I question particularly the ideologies of ordered and synchronous time that appear to underpin them.

Sarah Dimick (UC Berkeley Journalism): Keeping Time

Until recently, the seasons have been a stale subject in literary criticism, associated with sentimental nature writing and the earliest wave of ecocriticism. But as climate change intensifies, seasonality is increasingly at the forefront of struggles for environmental justice. Drawing on films, short stories, and essays about maple sugaring in a warming world, SarahDimick argues that the struggle to keep time—especially by Indigenous, trans, and Black writers and organizers— reinvigorates the politics of repetition and demands fresh theories of rhythm.

Mark Shapiro (Northwestern University): Ecology as Evidence: Thinking Like a Phenologist to Get to the Big Climate Story

The interplay between disruptions in the atmosphere wrought by greenhouse gases and the whipsawing impacts experienced on Earth have prompted deeper understanding of ecological systems, and the interconnections that enable survival and resilience. Identifying those patterns and their vulnerabilities to disruption is key to understanding and communicating the impacts of climate change and possible responses. Organisms from humans to plants to the smallest micro-organisms rely on those predictable patterns. Schapiro will address how starting small, at the ecological level, can be the fuel for compelling story-telling.

Linden Ashcroft (School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne): Noticing climate change through seasonal shifts: an Australian climate science perspective

As a climate researcher, I am most often asked for media comment when something strange happens with our weather. An unseasonably hot day, a very cold night, or a really stormy afternoon. Questions about these events used to be the realm of weather forecasters, but as we continue to heat the planet, people now want to know more about the future context. Not just ‘why is this crazy weather happening?’, but ‘is it going to happen more in the future’? In this talk I will explore how this focus on climate change occurs during transitional seasons in Australia, a country known for its extreme weather events. Using weather observations and media reports, I will examine what people are asking about our seasons, and how climate science is able (or unable) to answer the questions being asked.