The Annual Conference of the CrossArea e.V. is scheduled to take place from November 14th to 15th, 2025, and will be hosted by the Global and Entangled History Profile Area in cooperation with the Center for InterAmerican Studies (CIAS) and the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) at Bielefeld University. CrossArea e.V. brings together scholars from across the Area Studies and neighbouring disciplines to foster interdisciplinary exchange and strengthen comparative, transregional, and global perspectives on social, political, cultural, and environmental challenges.
Entanglements of Scale and Spheres in History: Between the Local, Regional, Global, and Planetary
The conference deals with conceptual and methodological questions of how to write global and entangled history and cross-area-studies. In particular, it will focus on the challenge to decentralise the human gaze and world-historical time of humans, to include more-than-human perspectives. This is of special importance in times in which the planet overwrites the globe(Spivak), or in a new epoch framed as the Anthropocene.
Thinking and writing about the past and present, be it from a sociological, geographical, historical, or political perspective, is undergoing a ‚planetary turn‘. This turn captures how the planet — as a humanist category and as a natural space for interactions between humans, non-humans and physical processes of the Earth — is becoming the referential dimension in which scholars think and write about global and entangled history, by asking how including landscapes, climate changes, histories of oceans and volcanoes, animals, the cosmological phenomena of space and time as well as the geobiological time of the planet change our understanding of global and crossarea flows and interconnections.
The planetary turn points us to the idea of nested systems in vast timeframes and vast distances. Building on this, we are interested in the multiscalarity of historical processes, i.e., in relational, interpenetrating processes that belong to different temporal and territorial orders but are interconnected through networked relationships and persistent leverage effects. By embracing the planetary turn, we aim to critically examine it, questioning the extent to which it actually represents a new dimension of historical understanding or merely a new label for conventional ways of looking at global interconnections, non-human actors, and their interwovenness. By doing so, we invite a discussion on the historical understanding and framing of global human and anthropogenic processes and multiscalar and multicentric approaches to global and entangled history as well as their interplay. The conference aims to foster an interdisciplinary discussion on planetary thinking, materiality, human as praxis, and related topics, as they inform these methodological considerations.
Contact
Dr. Justyna Aniceta Turkowska: justynaturkowska@me.com;
Dr Réka Krizmanics: reka.krizmanics@uni-bielefeld.de;