Chaired by Laura op de Beke
In changeable times, seasons can feel like dependable coordinates for dividing up the year and setting order to annual cycles, providing reference points to tell the passing of the time and coordinate our activities. Seasons have come to be institutionalised temporal patterns and symbol systems, as ubiquitous and taken-for-granted as language, and held in place by history, culture, routines and norms, and science. Some seasonal frameworks – like the four-season model of spring, summer, autumn, winter – have become prominent and spread globally, displacing other ways of thinking about seasons to the extent that they are seen as natural or universal categories. This panel problematises such a totalising understanding of seasons, arguing that it minimises the cultural origins of seasonal categories, glosses over the contestedness of these categories, and precludes a meaningful analysis of the myriad ways in which seasonal patterns change each day. Whose seasons prevail is a political question of who has the power to set them. Talks on this panel encourage people to reconsider seasons as polyrhythmic and undergoing constant renewal. They make visible the multiple ‘seasons’ that are concurrently playing out, the different ways in which rhythms are configured and reconfigured into meaningful seasonal patterns and acted on. Talks give accounts of encounters between different seasonal patterns – how they clash or sync or run in parallel – and how seasonality is renegotiated or recalibrated through these encounters
Scott Bremer: Practicing the beekeeping season in Western Norway
This paper is about how a group of beekeepers in Western Norway are maintaining and changing the bee season through their individual and shared practices, in the face of climatic and other changes. We present empirical research conducted in 2022 with a group of beekeepers from around Bergen, Norway. We found that beekeepers have divergent understandings of the bee season that can sync or clash, but also share common reference points that enable the coordination. As beekeepers perceive changes in the environment, they are adjusting the bundles of practices that define their year.
Bio: Scott Bremer is a senior researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities at the University of Bergen, and research associate at NORCE Climate. He has a background in environmental governance, with a focus on the science-policy-society interface. Bremer's current work focuses on climate adaptation governance, with a focus on how science and other knowledge systems are used to support adaptive decisions and actions in institutions, with case studies in Africa, New Zealand and Norway. His current interests are to uncover the often-overlooked influence of cultures on seasonal patterns of thought and action.
Laura op de Beke: Dark Seasonality in Gaming Rhythms
In his book Gaming Rhythms (2011), Apperly draws on rhythmanalysis to demonstrate that games and game genres have rhythms, and that the same goes for the digital game ecology as a whole. In my article, I discuss these rhythms in light of the planet’s changing weather patterns as a result of the climate crisis. First, I sketch an image of the videogame industry as polyrhythmic and explain how it is beholden to rhythms set to the pacing of hardware and console development. Then, I look at videogames themselves and an emerging trend called dark seasonality, describing the thematization of unseasonal and dangerous weather.
Bio: Laura op de Beke is a doctoral fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. She is a scholar of games and gaming, with her research looking at temporal affects associated with what she calls "Anthropocene temporalities" in video games in order to understand a new structure of feeling particular to these times, characterized by a sense of protracted crisis, anxiety over the future, apocalypticism as well as techno-futuristic hope. She is active in leading work of the Oslo School for the Environmental Humanities.
Wanxian Zhang (Zoom): The [Uncertain] Four Seasons
This presentation will introduce the case of the [Uncertain] Four Seasons, a global project that recomposed Vivaldi’s famous work ‘The Four Seasons’ to reflect the potential impacts of climate change. By utilizing computer modeling and data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), including soil moisture content, precipitation, sea surface temperature, and air temperature, the project generates unique compositions for specific locations, depicting the consequences of the climate crisis. This innovative form of knowledge production aims to bridge the gap between scientific metrics and embodied, emotional ways of understanding.
Bio: Wanxian Zhang is pursuing a master's degree in Development, Environment, and Cultural Change at the Center for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. She has a background in anthropology and science and technology studies. Currently, she is researching the seed system of small-scale farmers in Southwest China, focusing on knowledge exchange within informal seed networks. Her research interests center on agroecology, agrobiodiversity conservation, and climate adaptation in agriculture.