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Conference Announcement
Theme: Scales of Knowledge
Subtitle: Zooming In and Zooming Out
Type: 7th Annual Conference
Institution: Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global
Context", Heidelberg University
Location: Heidelberg (Germany)
Date: 7.–9.10.2015
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Scales are fundamental for all cultural and historical research,
including transcultural studies. The map of a whole country does not
show the same places as the map of single city; a camera can zoom in
seconds from a vast landscape to the image of a single bird perched
on a tree-branch; an assemblage of large numbers of people into a
single institution has radically different implications than the
actions of scattered individuals; accumulations of big data lead to
questions that would be impossible to answer with smaller samples;
and conceptual lenses like “culture,” “stratosphere,” or “hospital”
enable insights that have little in common with those emerging from
studies focusing on the trajectories of a lone person, a single atom,
or a particular medical practice. Such examples reveal how, on the
one hand, different research objects require different scales of
investigation, and on the other, how the various scales of human
activity produce disparate effects.
Whether conceived as an ontological assumption about the “real”
dimensions of social and natural phenomena, a methodological means to
observe different aspects of the same object, or a focus used by
human actors to organize their experience of the world, scales have
been widely discussed in a wide array of disciplines. But despite the
centrality of the topic, and the extensive debates that have taken
place around it in recent decades, transcultural studies have not
paid much attention to the multitude of issues arising from notion of
“scale”. Many key oppositions in the vocabulary of transculturality –
such as “global” and “local,” “micro” and “macro,” “national” and
“transnational,” and so on – work with unexamined dualistic
assumptions and fail to recognize the (potentially infinite) number
of scales that are employed by human subjects in their various
activities, or that might be used for research.
To address this lacuna, the panels of the conference will address
such questions as: How do we use scales in our own work? What kinds
of scale are implicitly exported from culture to culture along with
scientific techniques, institutional forms, or intellectual
paradigms? Are there “mis-matches” between such imported scales and
local scales associated with similar techniques, forms, and
paradigms? In other words, what contribution can an explicit focus on
“scale” make to transcultural studies? And what contribution can
transcultural studies make to notions of “scale”?
Conference Programme
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
17:30 Welcome
17:45 Keynote Speech
Scaling and Multi-Sited Research by George Marcus
(UCI) 19:00 Reception
Thursday, October 8, 2015
08:30 Registration & Coffee
09:30 Morning Session I
National, Local and Global Scales in the Study of Modern
East Asia
11:00 Coffee Break
11:30 Morning Session II
“Global" vs. "Local" Scales: A Misleading Distinction?
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Afternoon Session I
Zooming in and out: Scale and Literary Strategies of
Focalization in a Transcultural Perspective
Whose Election Is It Anyway? Demarcating Electoral Fields
Reading Machine::Machine Reading – From World to Text and Back
15:30 Coffee Break
16:00 Afternoon Session II
Measuring Melancholic Minds: Competing Paradigms of the
Normal and the Pathological
Megachurches: Scales of Observation and Knowledge Production
Inside and Outside Ancient Times: A Modern View on Ancient
Cultures?
Friday, October 9, 2015
08:30 Registration & Coffee
09:30 Morning Session III
Scales of Environmental Knowledge I: Technologies,
Representations and Power
11:00 Coffee Break
11:30 Morning Session IV
Scales of Environmental Knowledge II: Waterscapes and Their
Boundaries
13:00 Lunch
13:30 Afternoon Session III
Scales of Observation and History of Science
The Bodies of Women, the Letters of Men: Explaining
Reproduction in Ancient Mesopotamia, Medieval England, and
Medieval Japan
Balancing the Scales: Digital Humanities Tools for Research
and Teaching
15:00 Coffee Break
15:30 Concluding Round Table
For further information on the conference, please visit our website
at: http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/annualconference
Please register for the conference by filling in the online form:
http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/en/newsevents/events/annual-conference/archive/annual-conference-2015/registration.html
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