WORKSHOP 2025

“Communicating Seasons: Texts, Cultures & Climates”.

Time: From the morning of Nov. 17 to lunch, Nov. 18, 2025.
Venue: The Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS) at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Please see the subpage Getting to Aarhus for information on travel and accommodation.

A PDF flyer for the workshop can be downloaded here.

The 1.5 day workshop aims to bring together app. 25 people working with seasonality and communication from within the environmental humanities, environmental communication, climate science, journalism research and practice, literary studies, art history and other fields to help foster discussions about the changing cultural, political and scientific significance of seasons. This will, we hope, stimulate new ways of thinking and communicating about climate change. Based on such dialogues, we aim to work towards an anthology entitled Communicating Seasons.

Confirmed speakers:

• Philosopher and senior lecturer in environmental humanities Michelle Bastian (University of Edinburgh), who has pioneered research on climate change, temporality and phenology. Bastian will speak in person about the connections between phenology, seasons and climate change.
   
• Experienced and award-winning environmental journalist Mark Schapiro, who, in addition to doing important journalistic work, teaches science and “earth journalism” at the UC Berkeley journalism school. Schapiro will speak (online) about his experiences reporting on seasonal patterns and how seasonality can be integrated into journalism education.
   
• Literary scholar and assistant professor Sarah Dimick (Northwestern University), who last year published Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia University Press). Dimick will speak (online) about forms of seasonal texts in literature.
   
• Senior lecturer in climate science Linden Ashcroft (School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne). Ashcroft will speak (online) about how seasons are worked with in climate science and how that relates to vernacular understandings of seasons.

If interested in participating either in person or online please send a short description (max 250 words) of your interests in issues linked to the intersections of seasons and communication to the organisers, Henrik Bødker (hb [AT] cc.au.dk), Sandra Simonsen (ssimonsen [AT] cc.au.dk), and to Asger Harlung (asger [AT] cc.au.dk) who handles the sign-ups. If you have any queries please do not hesitate to write us.

The final programme, details for finding the venue, and recommendations for sightseeing if you have extended your stay for that purpose, will be sent out to registered participants approximately 14 days ahead of the workshop.

Important dates:

• Deadline for expressions of interest: August 1, 2025.
• Answer from organisers: August 15, 2025
• Workshop: Nov. 17-18, 2025

The workshop is co-organised and organised by the research project Seasonal Journalism as Vernacular Phenology and co-sponsored by the research programme Environmental Media & Aesthetics and The Carlsberg Foundation. There is no participation fee.