Final Annual Conference - "Scales of Worldmaking" - Würzburg, 12-14 June 2025
Worldmaking Annual Conference - Public Keynotes
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.
See our original call for Papers [application period has ended].
Venues:
Main Conference Venue (all sessions except keynotes, for invited guests only)Skyline Hill Center, Leightonstraße 3; 97074 Würzburg
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Public Keynotes (Thursday and Friday 18:00 s.t.; no registration required)Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Am Hubland, Seminargebäude Z6; Room 0.002
Preliminary Program:
Please note that the order of the talks and the wording of the titles may still change
June 12, Thursday
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14:15 – 14:45 |
Registration and Welcome Coffee |
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14:45 – 15:00 |
Welcome Speech |
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15:00 – 17:00
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Session I. |
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Chong Myong Im (Chonnam National University) The Transformed Chinese-ethnic Identities in Cold-War South Korea |
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Edward Wang (Rowan University) The Columbian Exchange beyond Europe: the Sweet Potato and the Making of a Globalized World |
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Sally Chengji Xing (Nankai University) Pacific Crossings: American Influence and the China Foundation as a Sponsor of Chinese Science |
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Ian Johnson (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) Not Erased: How Chinese Underground Historians are Challenging the CCP's Monopoly on History |
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17:00 – 18:00 |
Coffee Break and Walk to Campus (Building Z6 Room 0.002) |
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18:00 – 19:30 Public Talk |
Keynote Speech (I) by Xiang Biao (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology): World-remaking and the Nearby: Chinese Youths’ Experiences and Perspectives |
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20:15 |
Conference Dinner at Restaurant „Bürgerspital” |
June 13, Friday
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9:00 – 11:00
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Session II. |
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Ryanne Flock (University of Würzburg) Categories of counting: Urban housing data in China’s population censuses |
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Isabel Heger-Laube (Free University Berlin) Constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing narratives in the wake of China’s state-led rural urbanization: Worldmaking in Huaming model town |
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Michael Malzer (University of Würzburg) Global aspirations in China’s periphery: image-building and identities in the city of Yinchuan, Ningxia |
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Hannah Klepeis (University of Vienna) Worlding and Unworlding Shangri-La: Tourism, Development and the Politics of Ethnicity on the Tibetan Borderland |
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11:00 – 11:30 |
Coffee Break |
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11:30 – 13:30 |
Session III: |
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Lu Qianyu (Cambridge University) Greenising the Chinese city: Urban regeneration, ecotopia, and political favouritism in Shanghai Expo 2010 |
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| Tan Xiaohong (University of Kassel) Weeds and Wishes: Gardening the Margins in Urban China |
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| Sara Landa (Heidelberg University)
Transforming Spaces, Narrating Traces: Memory and Human-Nonhuman Interaction in Literary Cityscapes |
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Winnie Yee (University of Hong Kong) Returning the Gaze: Where Are the Animals in Chinese Urban Texts? |
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13:30 – 14:30 |
Lunch Break |
| 14:00 – 15:30 |
Session IV. |
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Matthias Schumann (Heidelberg University) Human Spaces and Beastly Places: The Regulation of Animals in Nationalist Shanghai (1927–1937) |
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Long Qilin (Shanghai Jiaotong University) A Preliminary Discussion on the Social Heterotopia Narrative of Contemporary Chinese Ecological Literature |
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Huang Dingru (Tufts University) Black Dog and Snow Leopard: Cinematic Animals and Frames of Disappearance in Contemporary China |
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Shi Xuefei (Chr. Michelsen Institute) The Molluscan Encounter: The Natural, Social, and Supernatural Imaginations of Life in the Anthropocenic Mare Sinarum |
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| 16:30 – 18:00 |
Coffee Break and Walk to Campus (Building Z6 Room 0.002) |
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18:00 – 19:30 Public Talk |
Keynote Speech (II) by Dai Jinhua (Peking University) After the Post-Revolution: Social Conditions and Cultural Specters |
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20:15 |
Dinner |
June 14, Saturday
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9:00 – 11:00
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Session V. |
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Philip Grimberg (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg) From Relics to Realities: Collecting, Antiquarianism, and the Construction of Cultural Narratives in Late Imperial China |
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Harlan Chambers (Göttingen University) A Guerrilla History of the World: Staging China in the Global Crises of the 1930s |
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Mohammed Al-Sudairi (Australian National University) Unifying (and Dividing) the Believers: The Sectarian Governance of Muslims in the People’s Republic of China |
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Janice Jeong (Simon Frazer University, Vancouver) Meccan Routes: From Heavenly Square to Heavenly Destination |
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11:00 – 11:30 |
Coffee Break |
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11:30 – 13:30 |
Session VI. |
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Li Dong (Chongqing Normal University) Lost on the Road to Prosperity: Trajectories to Drug Dealing of the Chinese Heroin Generation |
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Gil Hizi (University of Frankfurt) Convoluting moral worlds in Chinese village basketball |
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Lin Lefeng (Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University, Suzhou) Social World in the Making of the Night Food Market: A Case from a Chinese City |
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Liu Kang (Duke University) Culture vs Civilization Debates in China in Recent Years |