LIAS Conference: "From the Global to the Planetary"

Wednesday, 1 to Friday, 3 July 2026
Campus | Central Buildung Libeskind Forum

The symposium is dedicated to a recent theoretical shift in the humanities and social sciences: the movement from the global to the planetary. It takes as its starting point the observation that research approaches with a global outlook have made a crucial contribution to questioning nationalisms and Eurocentric canons, while at the same time raising new questions about the limits of global models of thought. The symposium proceeds from the assumption that the debate on the planetary offers a productive framework for renegotiating these questions.

The planetary is understood here as an epistemic orientation that foregrounds Earth systems, material entanglements, more-than-human relations, and deep time. Since understandings of the planetary are by no means uniform across and within disciplines, different positions and conceptual approaches are explicitly invited for discussion.

The symposium will center approaches from the planetary humanities and the planetary social sciences in dialogue with art history, architecture, critical museology, and the arts. The discussion will address how the objects, methods, and scales of these fields change when planetary ecologies, material and immaterial infrastructures, and long-term environmental transformations are given greater weight. What new perspectives emerge for the analysis of artistic and architectural practices? How can colonial afterlives, extractive processes, and environmental change be examined within planetary constellations? And what possibilities, but also what limits, does the turn to the planetary offer?

Particular attention is given to concepts and fields of research such as the Blue Humanities, posthumanist and more-than-human approaches, as well as debates surrounding the Anthropocene, stratigraphies, toxicity, and environmental justice from an interdisciplinary perspective.

At the same time, the symposium asks about the normative and political implications of planetary perspectives. To what extent can they contribute to a critical reflection on established orders of knowledge? What role do concepts such as epistemic violence, relational ethics, or climate and social justice play in this context? And how can global, colonial, and ecological entanglements be rethought without losing sight of on-going power asymmetries?

The symposium brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences as well as artists and architects. Its aim is to foster dialogue between different disciplinary perspectives, to sound out new research approaches, and to create a space for future collaborations across disciplinary and continental boundaries.