Theory in Action

October 16-17, 2025

Tagungszentrum Schmerlenbach

Building on the inspiring discussions in former "methodological workshops and particular the first “Theory in Action" workshop in 2023, when the various subprojects came together to discuss key terms and concepts around "worldmaking", the "Worldmaking" project organized another workshop in an attempt to re-perspectivize approaches and concepts of ongoing research and publication projects from an explicitly inter- and transdisciplinary stance. The workshop started from the assumption that processes of worldmaking, be they local or global in scale, in structuring and framing experientialities, expectations and systems of knowledge, take place at the interface of several symbolic systems, media and aesthetic practices. In order to tease out the potential of transdisciplinary exchange, the participants used a reading-in-conjunction approach by offering an extract of a primary source that could then be looked at from different disciplinary angles with their respective theoretical frames and methodological toolkits.

The workshop opened with a keynote input by narratologist Roy Sommer on “Narrative and Scalability: A Dynamic Approach”, in which he discussed possibilities and dangers of framing and breaking through ready-made frames in particular in discourses on migration.

The workshop further comprised three main foci:

It discussed negotiations of space and social coherence in contemporary urban dwelling and handicraft practices: Narratives of community and belonging are generated both in a very material sense and in the linguistic and symbolic narratives surrounding and reflecting on them.

Negotiations of space, however, do not only involve human actors, but need to be reconsidered from a multispecies perspective. The second focus thus lay on historical and contemporary reshapings and re-imaginations of space through legal and political measures, gardening practices and artistic and literary rewritings of the city.

The third thematic focus shifted from the city to the Sino-Burmese borderlands and considered the roles of different actors in shaping and imagining this space and its identity narratives from a more global perspective.

The different strands of the interdisciplinary discussions were taken together in a roundtable discussion on challenges and successful applications of different concepts beyond disciplinary boundaries.