Sensing scalarity: Towards a humanistic approach to scale

Abstract

This article develops the notion of “sense of scale” to theorize the emotional, tactile, and affective (re)production of scalarity during the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic’s geographic upheavals – from personal proxemics to international travel bans – call for a return to scale that attends to its experiential qualities. Scale is continually conjured, apprehended, and (re)configured through proximal feelings and sensory encounters. After charting some conceptual foundations, subsequent sections discuss the relational transformation of the domestic, global, and urban scales under COVID-19. “Sense of scale” enables (post)humanistic theorizations of scale to take shape and also highlights the importance of scale for understanding everyday life.