Since November 2020 our Joint Center for Advanced Studies has researched “Worldmaking from a Global Perspective,” actively engaging in a dialogue with colleagues from the sinophone world. The Center brings together scholarly teams from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, and Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. For the 2025 annual conference which will be the final one in this project our theme is “Scales of Worldmaking.” We take "worldmaking" to designate the process through which actors create a specific, comprehensible notion of a totality—world. This totality is both part of concrete, lived reality and a product of their specific imagination. It becomes tangible both physically and socially but also mentally and in a metaphorical sense. Worldmaking can thus take different forms and be realized through various types of action, it can take different types of material form, and it occurs on different scales – from the local and regional to the global and planetary. These are highlighted in this conference, as they can be brought to light using different disciplinary perspectives (in particular, but not limited to those of anthropology and sociology) focusing on interactions between these different scales of worldmaking.

Confirmed speakers include Dai Jinhua (Peking University), Xiang Biao (MPI Halle), Yi Lin (Xiamen University) and Ian Johnson (Berlin). The conference presents an opportunity for scholars not yet part of our network to make contributions and become part of our conversation. Therefore, we encourage scholars of all ranks who are interested in joining our conference to submit their proposals (abstract of 400-500 words) to the organizers no later than February 15, 2025: michael.malzer@uni-wuerzburg.de