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.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.

Co-organised by Clemens Günther (FU Berlin), Philipp Kohl (LMU München) & Timm Schönfelder (GWZO Leipzig) 

Further information to be found on the the project's website.

The project is kindly funded by DFG.