220152 Kolloquium Global- und Verflechtungsgeschichte (Ko) (WiSe 2025/2026)

The Colloquium will take place as a two-day conference:

Entanglements of Scale and Spheres in History: Between the Local, Regional, Global, and Planetary

Thinking and writing about the past and present, be it from a sociological, geographical, historical, or political perspective, is undergoing a 'planetary turn'. This turn captures how the planet — as a humanist category and as a natural space for interactions between humans, non-humans and physical processes of the Earth — is becoming the referential dimension in which scholars think and write about global and entangled history, by asking how including landscapes, climate changes, histories of oceans and volcanoes, animals, the cosmological phenomena of space and time as well as the geobiological time of the planet change our understanding of global flows and interconnections.
The planetary turn points us to the idea of nested systems in vast timeframes and vast distances. Building on this, we are interested in the multiscalarity of historical processes, i.e., in relational, interpenetrating processes that belong to different temporal and territorial orders but are interconnected through networked relationships and persistent leverage effects. By embracing the planetary turn, we aim to critically examine it, questioning the extent to which it actually represents a new dimension of historical understanding or merely a new label for conventional ways of looking at global interconnections, non-human actors, and their interwovenness. By doing so, we invite a discussion on the historical understanding and framing of global human and anthropogenic processes and multiscalar and multicentric approaches to global and entangled history as well as their interplay.

Friday, 14 November 2025
13.00-14.15 Session I
Ricardo Uribe (FU Berlin): Entangled Synchrony: How to Intertwine Disconnected Times in Global History
Alina Horta (FU Berlin): Tracing expert entanglements: a proposal for the study of UNESCO’s post-war global education
Katharina Dube (Leipzig University): Producing planetary history? The anthropocene, transnational and global in the world knowledge production of German historical science

14.45-16.15 Session II
Robert Balogh (University of Ostrava): Tree Species, Sites of Research and Eurasian Entanglements during the Cold War
Josue Veiga (Bielefeld University): A planetary history of genetically modified crops in Latin America. An adjustment of scale and perspective
Yash Gupta (University of Bremen): Of Chilies in Our Blood: Intergenerational Dis/abilities and Scalar Contradictions in the Survivor Narratives of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy
Romy Köhler (Universität Bonn): Sacred Landscapes, Confession, and the Planetary Turn: Franciscan Writing in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

16:45-18.00 Session III
Round Table
Antj Flüchter, Birte Förster, Frank Grüner, Olaf Kaltmeier, Réka Krizmanics, Eleonora Rohland
moderated by Justyna Aniceta Turkowska

18.15-19.45 Session IV
Movie & Discussion
"Copper Woman: Afua Cooper Dub Poet" (2025)
presented by Willy Raussert, Bielefeld University

Saturday, 15. November 2025

09.30- 11.00 Session V
Bharti Chhibber (University of Delhi): Beyond the Individual Self: Spiritual Ecology, Planetary Consciousness, and the Ethics of Coexistence
Ezema Osinach (University of Ibadan): The Global Through the Eyes of the Local: Uwa as the Cultural Foundation of African Environmentalism
Francisco Vallejo (University of California San Diego): Entanglements of Scale and Spheres in History: Between the Local, Regional, Global, and Planetary

12.30-14.00 Session VI
Christine Hoth de Olano (University Bern): Scaling Water Worlds: The Canal del Dique and the Entanglements of Hydrosocial Landscapes in the Caribbean
Daniel Costa (LMU): Global Cinnamon: Intercolonialism and the Circulation of Knowledge in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Jean Veloso (University Bern): Geographies of accumulation of slavery and its crisis in Brazil (1870-1890)