By Felix Mallin | Comparison – or the mental faculty of distinction – is one of the most fundamental ingredients of autonomous life. It aids us in the quotidian tasks of decoding language, emotions, or smells, as well as in making sense of the society and world around us.
In October 2020, the five-year research project “Refugees and Revolution in the Atlantic World (1770s–1820s)” started. The project will undertake a systematic exploration of the period as an age of...
By Markus Heckel | In my field of research, which combines Economics and Japanese Studies (trained at the University of Bonn), it soon became clear that eventually I would have to deal with cross-country comparisons.
In October 2020, the five-year research project “Lebanon’s Art World at Home and Abroad: Trajectories of artists and artworks in/from Lebanon since 1943” will begin. The project will investigate the...
By Shaun Lin | As a geographer, comparative research is central to my training. In particular analysing the similarities and differences in spatial transformations (both visible and structural) in two or more places.
It is in the eighteenth century that Russian political language was born. The digital project “The Corpus of Russian Translations of Social and Political Works of the Eighteenth Century” coordinated...
By Jennifer Evans and Swen Steinberg | “We are all in this together” is not simply the solidarity slogan of our new reality in times of Covid-19. In May 2020, it became a starting point for a group of scholars teaching at North American universities
By Nora Kottmann | While studying political science at Heidelberg University’s South Asia Institute, I was always told to refrain from making comparisons if and when I would become a researcher. Comparative research, it was said, is an extremely complex research methodology
By Simon Rowedder | If we remember that those we study are also studying us as well as themselves, and that they are all engaged in the human exercise of understanding the play of cultural difference and similarity, we may be able to contribute to making comparison the fruitful, congenial, and open-ended conversation that the discipline’s ethical as well as intellectual commitments demand.
By James D Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger | How and why do we compare in the social sciences and humanities? These are enduring questions. On 2nd and 3rd December 2019, a group of scholars affiliated with the Max Weber Research Group at the National University of Singapore and researchers from the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) met at the DIJ in Tokyo to compare notes on comparisons.
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
ISSN: 2199-2134
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