Event Rationale: Unpacking the Heuristics and Methodologies of Scale:

This workshop examines the heuristics, epistemologies and practices of scale across various scholarly disciplines.

Scale-making structures how power is exercised, how knowledge is produced, and how values are assigned. However, despite ongoing theoretical interventions, anthropology and other disciplines continue to grapple with entrenched scalar distinctions—between micro and macro, local and global, grassroots and quantitative, or individual agency and structural forces. 

Rather than treating scale as a stable analytic category, this workshop invites participants to explore how scales are actively made, institutionalized, and contested across different domains of social life and disciplinary practice. By focusing on analytical and methodological approaches to scale, we aim to move beyond fixed scalar imaginaries and interrogate how people navigate, manipulate, and challenge the scalar logics that shape our worlds. 

Why Scale? Why Now? 

Scalar metaphors and distinctions pervade academic and public discourse, yet their implications are often taken for granted. Consider the persistent framing of political economy as a “macro” concern and face-to-face interaction as a “micro” phenomenon. Or the way researchers continue to divide academic labour according to their ideas of scale (Strathern 2004), with scholars viewing other disciplines as either myopic or over-simplified/totalising. These disciplinary habits reflect deeper epistemological and ethico-political consequences, shaping what kinds of knowledge are valued and what is overlooked within their fields. Given that anthropology is an endeavour that questions both what is particular to the people we study and at the same time what is shared by humanity as a whole, it is fitting that we dig into what scale actually means to us. There are important intellectual motivations for scaling between levels in anthropology and social/behavioural disciplines more broadly. 

While there have been recent attempts in anthropology to integrate the granular within larger processes – to see like a state (Scott 1998) or see like an oil company (Ferguson 2005), to enact like a corporation (Welker 2014) or think like a climate (Knox 2020) – integrating disciplinary traditions and datasets has been less common. Tropes of “scaling up” or “jumping scales” raise questions about whether they genuinely disrupt scalar divides or, paradoxically, reify them. Moreover, scholars such as Anna Tsing have begun to challenge the hierarchical ideas that underpin scale, cautioning that the pursuit of “scalability” often erases difference and flattens complexity.  And what about those who want to scale down? Scholarly fields that work at large-, broad- or high-scales, such as remote sensing research, are beginning to ask whether certain spatial oriented scales should in fact be understood as socially dependent (or generated) phenomena and are asking that we recognize and reveal the strong connectivity between scales. Others are deploying cartographies to understand social life on a topological scale while retaining the messiness of ethics, conflicts, and opinions.  

But this theme is now an urgent one to address. As contemporary social worlds become increasingly interconnected yet fragmented, and as we see an increased rationalisation or legitimisation of “scaling up” (think economies of growth), understanding who benefits from certain scalar arrangements, and what forms of power and exclusion they produce is becoming ever more crucial.  

With this in mind, this workshop has been motivated by interdisciplinary discussions in which we ask: 

• How do scales define and determine our research practices and contexts? 

• How are local communities affected by global economic forces and vice versa? 

• How do social movements and political processes unfold across different scales? 

• How can an attention to scale help us to explore the complexities of social life or major global challenges? 

• How can we inform social policies and interventions by addressing different scales?  

• How can a mindfulness of scale bolster a decolonising agenda? 

Through critical engagement with these issues, we aim to push the analysis of scale beyond its familiar tensions and toward new conceptual and methodological horizons. The workshop will foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on the processes and politics of scale and in so doing will deepen our understanding of scale but also equip us with conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing and integrating various scales within our research.  

Key Themes and Questions 

Scalar regimes and scale-making

Scale-making is fundamental to how social actors position themselves, draw distinctions, and orient their actions in space and time. It structures hierarchies and connects or divides spaces and times. By critically examining this theme, we encourage participants to consider the following questions: 

• How are communities constituted through particular scalar arrangements?  

• How do different scales interact and shape each other, and how are these scales socially constructed and contested? 

• What happens when people challenge dominant scalar logics? How do social movements, indigenous groups, and other actors produce counter-scalar projects? 

The politics of scale

Institutions play a crucial role in shaping and naturalizing scalar perspectives. As Jane Guyer suggests, scale is not only comparative but also value-laden, determining how different phenomena are assessed and prioritized. Markets, for instance, are often scaled as circuits of elite goods and people, rendering other economic practices invisible or marginal. By critically examining this theme, we encourage participants to consider the following questions: 

• What political and policy implication emerge when categories of scale are deployed (e.g., small-scale societies, large-scale extraction)? 

• How do scalar distinctions shape policy, governance, and economic decision-making? 

• How do different scalar projects reinforce one another, producing durable hierarchies of knowledge, authority, and value?  

Scalar Pragmatics

Multiscalar analysis does not mean merely “scaling up” or aggregating data across different levels of empirical reality. Rather, it requires understanding how different scales interact, conflict, or co-exist in dissonant ways. For example, climate change manifests differently at different scales (ground-level versus global metrics). Similarly, economic practices such as cattle ranching and soy farming appear distinct at the local level but interconnect within larger global supply chains. By critically examining this theme, we encourage participants to consider the following questions: 

• How do different domains—politics, economy, environment, and knowledge production—mobilize scale in distinctive but interrelated ways?  

• What alternative scalar perspectives might help us rethink social, political, and economic structures? 

• How do inter-scalar connections emerge, and what are the implications of moving across, rather than simply up or down, scales?  

• How can multi-scalar governance frameworks help us to better tackle contemporary global issues? 

Rethinking methodologies of scale

In an age where interdisciplinarity approaches to big problems such as climate change are more crucial than ever, scholars continue to struggle to provide genuine solutions to scale-variation challenges or provide genuine multi- or inter-scalar approaches to research. By critically examining this theme, we encourage participants to consider the following questions: 

• How do we effectively combine and integrate elements of our research undertaken or analysed at different scales? 

• How can physical realities of environmental processes inform and clarify socially constructed scales?  

• How can we engage in radical interdisciplinary practices that integrate multiple scalar practices and ways of knowing without subordinating one to another? 

• How does the rhetoric of “capturing the general” through quantification shape the authority of different knowledge systems?  

References

Ferguson, J., 2005. Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global Capital in Neoliberal Africa. American Anthropologist 107, 377–382.

Guyer, J.I., 2004. Marginal gains: monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa, The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 

Knox, H., 2020. Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change. Duke University Press.

Scott, J.C., 1998. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, Yale agrarian studies. Yale University Press, New Haven. 

Strathern, M., 2004. Partial connections, Updated edition. ed, ASAO special publications. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek Lanham New York Toronto Oxford. 

Tsing, A.L., 2012. On Nonscalability. Common Knowledge 18, 505–524.

Welker, M., 2014. Enacting the corporation: an American mining firm in post-authoritarian Indonesia. University of California Press, Berkeley.