The conference will explore scales as fundamental notion for all cultural and historical research. 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. 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.

The conference features a keynote lecture by the Anthropologist Prof. George Marcus (University of California, Irvine), who will speak about “Scaling and Multi-Sited Research”. Four morning panels will discuss “National, Local and Global Scales in the Study of Modern East Asia”, “‘Global’ vs. ‘Local’ Scales: A Misleading Distinction?”, “Scales of Environmental Knowledge I: Technologies, Representations and Power”, and “Scales of Environmental Knowledge II: Waterscapes and their Boundaries”. Nine parallel afternoon panels will be designed to present the results of the wide-ranging research carried out by scholars in the cross-regional and transdisciplinary setting of the Cluster.