Spring Conference 2021

Entitled "Measuring the World against the Body: Materialities and Meanings of Magnification and Miniaturisation in Religious Communication in Antiquity and Modernity" this year's spring conference will deal with enlarged and miniaturised objects, things, concepts in socio-religious practices.
Even if human agents are not the measure of all things, their bodies and their bodily dimensions often are. Whether life-, over-, or under-sized, the human body and its parts and dimensions impacts on the ways we conceive of, interact with and relate to nature and the ways in which we construct and re-construct the man-made environment, that is to say how we relate to the world. Up- or down-scaling, monumentalisation or miniaturisation as strategies in anthropogenic “products” employed in religious rituals allow for increases in attractiveness, astonishment or deterrence, for reaching further out of or deeper into the world. As Hartmut Rosa puts it aptly (2019, 47): “Any elementary analysis of the ways in which human beings come to relate to the world, experience and perceive it, act and orient themselves within it, cannot but begin with the body”. This starting point will be developed by adding the notion of scale in this conference.
Taking its cue from Rosa’s new sociological theory of resonant self-world relations and its extra emphasis on our bodily relationships, this conference aims to engage closely, and from a number of different disciplinary angles, with the agents and forces that drive phenomena of magnification and miniaturisation in antiquity and modernity.

The conference is in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and the Center of Excellence Urbnet of the University of Aarhus. It will take place as online event between the 24th and 26th February 2021.

For the call of papers see here