Event Details

End: March 1, 2015
More Info: http://go.nbm.org/site/Calendar/78240649?view=Detail&id=118581

In an era of simultaneous globalization and digitization, of anthropogenic climate change and nanotechnology, questions of scale, size, and magnitude have become especially urgent, and such questions are currently of great interest to scholars and readers in a number of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

We seek essays that address issues of scale, size, or magnitude from a wide range of cultural, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives. Comparative and interdisciplinary work is invited and encouraged. Our goal is to foster conversations among thinkers, topics, and fields that might not usually be brought into contact with one another, as well as to explore new theoretical, artistic, and political implications of the problem of scale.

Please submit a 300–500 word abstract, contact information, and a brief bio or CV to both Michael Tavel Clarke (mcla@ucalgary.ca) and David Wittenberg (david-wittenberg@uiowa.edu).

Abstracts are due March 1, 2015. Completed essays will be due in July 2015 with the goal of a Fall 2015 or Winter 2016 publication date.

For more information: https://www.facebook.com/sizeandscale

Possible topics and areas of interest include: size and scale in

• history and historiography (“big history,” the Anthropocene, long time)
• literary and artistic form, aesthetics, and analysis (minimalism, maximalism, miniaturization, gigantism, epic form, close/distant reading)
• film and aesthetics (special effects, screen size/format, protocinema, viewpoint)
• theories or practices of the sublime
• theories of gender and/or sexuality
• theories and/or representations of the body (disability studies, fatness studies, stature studies)
• cultural studies (quantification, population studies, localism/regionalism/globalism)
• environmentalism, ecocritism, and sustainability studies
• science fiction (shrinking/growing, long timelines, megastructures)
• technology (digitization, nanotechnology, gene technology, big data)
• architecture and urban planning (megastructuralism/metabolism, “bigness,” the tiny house)
• economics (growth, downsizing and smart decline, economies of scale, “too big to fail”)
• representation and media (scalar effects, ideologies of scale)
• philosophy (object oriented ontology, cybernetics, actor-network theory)
• geography and cartography
• erotica (macrophilia, microphilia, fetishism)