Collaborative Research - Working Groups

Local Worlds

Led by: Morgan Liu (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) and Joel Wainwright (Geography)

This working group proposes to build an interdisciplinary discussion at OSU around disciplines across the humanities and social sciences that have rendered and analyzed what we refer to as the "local worlds" of human endeavor – distinct, particular forms of socio-spatial human knowledge and practice – through a variety of modes of writing, including ethnography, historiography, biography, and fiction. These local worlds are manifest in sites as diverse as everyday routines, oral narratives, official documents, images, ritual, performance, and architecture. The group will consider how to talk about and make sense of local worlds of knowledge and practice and how to think theoretically about human endeavor in a way that yields insightful, empirically-grounded scholarship on the ways of being human.

Led By: