After two inspiring meetings on spheres and forms, our third convention at GWZO Leipzig from the 5th till 7th of July 2024, will be dedicated to the problem of scale.
Like music and maps, studies of relations between culture and nature need scales which are socially produced and imply normative models (Ram 2016). Popularized first and foremost in human geography, problems of ‘scale’ and practices of ‘scaling’ have been widely discussed in such various fields as biology, ecology, architecture, engineering, and mathematics. More recently, they have gained new relevance in Anthropocene studies. Timothy Clark called the Anthropocene a symptom of a “crisis of scale” (Clark 2012, 150), a crisis that demands new conceptualizations and representations of the environment. In response, literary and cultural studies developed scale-centered approaches that allow to account for the entanglement of social, political, ecological, biological, and geological processes at multiple spatial and temporal levels (e.g., Dürbeck/Hüpkes 2022).
In ecocriticism, questions of scale have been discussed with respect to the broadening of canons, the use of digital tools, and the ability of existing narrative forms to engage with large scales of space and time, influenced by Gayatri Spivak’s and Wai-Chee Dimock’s musings on “planetarity” as distinguished from “globalization” (Heise 2019). In historiography, the differentiation of scales informs theoretical debates about time (évènement – moyenne durée – longue durée) and space (microhistory vs. macrohistory). It has been debated in various contexts, not only in environmental history (Walkind 2014), but also in the field of ‘Big History’. Thus, David Christian has suggested to examine history from the microhistorical scale of individual lives to the macrohistorical scale of cosmic history (Christian 2005). In literary and cultural studies, questions of scale figure prominently in current debates on world literature (Tanoukhi 2008) and inform works experimenting with non-anthropocentric forms of mediating voice and agency of entities such as animals or plants.
For the network meeting, we would like to go beyond questions of size:
Are scales in Russia and the Soviet Union, a space of “large-scale projects and large-scale bureaucracies” (Josephson 2013), only ever vast or small?
An approach to scale as an epistemological device of interdisciplinary humanities should allow to include competing scale concepts which mutually supplement each other. Instead of just looking at the size of scales in time and space, we plead for an ecological multidimensionality of scale. In his classic article The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology (Levin 1992), ecologist Simon A. Levin identifies the problem of relating phenomena across scales as the central problem in biology and science in general. His suggestion of “cross-scale studies” has been taken up in multiple contexts (Chave 2013). We would like to make this and other approaches productive for literary and historiographical studies.
Possible topics may include but are not limited to:
- The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in global perspective,
- Circulation, transformation, and adaptation of ecological knowledge across states and regions,
- Russian ecocriticism and world literature,
- Planetarity and ecology; mediating sense of place and sense of planet,
- Theories of scale,
- Ecological, geological, evolutionary theories of scale,
- Historical predecessors of scale ideas (e.g. scala naturae, micro- and macrocosm),
- Approaches and alternatives to concepts of scale in literary and cultural theory,
- Narrating scales,
- Narrating non-human scales of time and space,
- Scales as devices of ideology, e.g. in infrastructure and geopolitics,
- Examining scales,
- Cross-scale phenomena between the disciplines,
- Dysfunctional scales: Blurry and fuzzy states between nature and culture; Problems of (dis)proportion across disciplines and epistemologies,
- and Scales out of joint: Balance and escalation.
In addition to contributions from within our network, we invite promising PhD students or graduates to present their work at a panel for junior researchers.
Further informations about the possibilities of participation, further content and a timetable will follow.
For questions please contact network coordinators Clemens Günther or Philipp Kohl and visit our website to stay up-to-date.
"Russian Ecospheres" 