Practicing Collection Ethics toolkit

We are thrilled to announce the official launch of the TRACTS COST Action's Practicing Collection Ethics toolkit. The toolkit aims to go beyond formal guidelines and codes of ethics. By posing questions and illustrating them with real-world examples, it serves as catalyst for reflection on ethical dilemmas for curators and other museum and archive professionals. Contributors of case studies included: Diego Ballestero, Víctor Barros, Hana Curak, […]

Care and repair: Ungendering Memory and Museum Practices

GENDER EQUALITY: UNGENDERING MEMORY AND MUSEUM PRACTICES Museum collections have emerged from the need to organise and categorise the world, attempting to bring together incompatible and diverse practices and memories into a coherentnarrative. The binary axis of female/male, which is assumed as natural, helps to perpetuatepatriarchal values and marginalise people whose gender identity does not fit into this binary.Gender categorisation is fundamental […]

Programme for Training School: Unearthing Traces of European Conflicts: Materiality, Memory, & Technology

Photo Credit: Laura Muñoz-Encinar 26 - 28 September 2023, Santiago de Compostela, Spain 26 September 2023 9:30h Welcome Forensic Archaeology Laboratory Trainers: Laura Muñoz-Encinar (INCIPIT CSIC); Zahira Aragüete-Toribio (University of Neuchâtel) 10:00- 11:00h Module 1: Forensic Archaeology 11.00h-11:30h Coffee break 11:30-13:30h Module 1: Forensic Archaeology 13:30-15:00h Break 15:00- 17:00h Module 2: Ethnography of objects 17:00-17:30h […]

Unearthing Traces of European Conflicts: Materiality, Memory, & Technology

This international training school aims to analyse the material traces of conflict and their impact in the present through the conceptual lens of different disciplines: Archaeology, Forensic Sciences, Social Anthropology and Memory Studies.

Responsible Future(s): Using Emergent Technologies For Sustainable Growth

How to track and trace responsibly? How to make technologies of tracking and tracing ethical and sustainable? Hybrid WG 4 Meeting Dates: 30 June – 1 July 2023 Venue: University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science, Department of Geography, Ilica 242, HR-10000 Zagreb Following on from the capacity building of WG4 and the promotion of commonalities identified at the exploratory workshop in Exeter […]

From the Archive to the Atlas

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne June 1-2, 2023 Climate Change Working Group [Image: Le rebrousse-poll, nº 6-7, 1978. Archive Contestataires] Archives are spaces of conflict where history and memory are constantly disputed. They tend to reproduce the political and cultural power of modernity. Yet, since the 1970s they have been largely challenged by post-structuralist critics, feminism, queer theory […]

Archival Memories: Image, Sequence, Knowledge

A multimodal photo essay training school at ReCNTR, University of Leiden, June 8-9, 2023. What? This two-day multimodal photo essay workshop will bring together a maximum of 10 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are using photography as an integral part of their research practice. Drawing on theories and methods from the field of anthropology, visual studies, and geography, as well as from other […]

Management Committee Meeting 2023 in Cracow, Poland

TRACTS MC meeting this year took place at Ethnographic Museum in Kraków on the 8th of March. Participants discussed plans, decided about details of futures events and working plans. Afternoon all group inspired by artist Eliza Proszczuk took part in joint embroidery of a tablecloth talking about traces of sisterhood. Participants of Management Committee voted for change on the position of Science […]

Publishing Futures meeting

We are pleased to announce the forthcoming meeting to discuss the TRACTS publishing futures. The online meeting will take place online on the 8th of March during the afternoon session of the MC meeting in Cracow. The participants will discuss the plans for the book series envisioned as the Action's legacy. During the meeting, three interdisciplinary and international academic publishers […]

Minutes - Working Group 5 Internal Meeting in Malta, 20/21 Jan 2023

Meeting in Malta (The meeting agenda can be found at Malta 20/21 Jan 2023) Summary of proceedings of formal meetings held as arranged at St Martin's Institute, Malta (SMI) with thanks to Mr Charles Theuma (Principal) and the IT/catering support team at SMI, and to COST for financial support that made the meeting possible. While the agenda advanced in the meeting invitation was broadly covered, the sequence of […]

Traces of Inequality – Tracing Hidden Rural History

Our last TRACTS Year 1 meeting is taking place on 10-11 October 2022 in the Ethnographic Museum in Cracow, Poland. The WG2 workshop focuses on various approaches to tracing visual and non-visual aspects of a landscape. The group explores a range of topics related to landscape tracking. Participants follow the paths of the landscape with short presentations outlining innovative, experimental […]

WG4 Training School on Technology Policy – Capacity Building for Advancing Interdisciplinary Inquiry

9 - 10 December 2022 in Ancona, Italy Following WG4's Exeter workshop in June, we have the pleasure to bring the group's first Training School to Ancona – a port city steeped in a history of applying science and technology in policy and governance. Trainers and trainees will benefit from this rare opportunity to learn from technology professionals who have extensive experience bringing […]

Tracing Temporalities, Unearthing Archives workshop

What are the ethical challenges of tracing temporalities and researching collections in museums and earth archives? We are delighted to invite you to the hybrid TRACTS workshop of WG2 and WG3. WHEN: 27 - 28 April 2023 WHERE: Berlin and Potsdam ABOUT THE WORKSHOP: Collections are sites for preserving traces of the past for the future. Acquired, cared for, and interpreted in museums and archives, […]

Traces of Sisterhood- publication

We are delighted to present the first TRACTS edited volume on Traces of Sisterhood. It draws on the network activities within WG2 on Traces and Social Justice, highlighting experimental visual, scientific and artistic approaches to gender, social justice and traces. It explores a range of conceptual insights on traces and sisterhood developed during the interdisciplinary conversations during a workshop at the Academy of Fine […]

Roundtable - "Restitution: Or, how (to begin) to repair a broken world"

Peripheral Memories, Transnational Mobilities: Decolonial Approaches to Visual & Material Traces of Empire WG2 Meeting: Traces and Social Justice in Lisbon As part of the WG2 meeting, we are organising a public panel discussion on the theme of reparation. Please join on 30th September at 18:30 (WEST) online. The colonial project used violence, both overtly and covertly, to reorganize and control social life. […]

MC Meeting 2022 - "Dictatorship, Revolution, Decolonization: Traces of the Past in Contemporary Portugal"

Friday, April 1, 2022 – Saturday, April 2, 2022 Locations: IHC-NOVA/Colégio Almada Negreiros, Museu do Aljube – Resistência e Liberdade In this inaugural meeting, members of our network’s Management Committee discussed and shared methodological, ethical, and theoretical approaches to understanding and analyzing the concept of the trace across multiple disciplines, particularly history, anthropology, migration studies, museum studies, and areas of […]

Traces of Sisterhood exhibition

We are delighted to inform you that the TRACTS associate exhibition on Traces of Sisterhood is currently held at the Galeria Salon Academii in Warsaw. On show until 16 September 2022, Traces of Sisterhood exhibition focuses on contemporary art that incorporates fabric/cloth as a form of artistic gesture of sisterhood.

Traces of inequality: Tracing hidden rural history

This event consists of an online WG2 Working Group Meeting and a hybrid workshop about visual & material traces of Resistance hidden in the landscape. It focuses on serfdom crosses – almost forgotten monuments of peasant freedom across Eastern Europe.

Tracing (climate) crisis, visualizing change

WG1 and WG3 Meeting “Tracing (climate) crisis, visualizing change: Reimagining & activating a counter-atlas of the trace”

WG1 Meeting - "Peripheral memories and transnational mobilities"

WG1 Meeting “Peripheral memories and transnational mobilities: Decolonial approaches to the material and visual traces of empire”

Radical Heritage: Tracing Resistance in (Post)Socialist Europe

WG2 Meeting. The workshop will gather early to mid-career researchers of different disciplinary backgrounds to present and discuss ongoing work on tracing the materiality of modern warfare and social struggles, from the Second World War to the present.

Tracing and dwelling in post-anthropocentric landscapes

WG3 Training School. How do we trace environmental destruction and its social impacts within a landscape? The training school will take place in an area impacted by long term exploitation by military and mining operations including underground mining and in-situ leaching of uranium.

Technologies and traces of memories

This workshop will kick off the activities of WG4 on traces and technology. It will include interdisciplinary presentations exploring the interplay between memory practices and technological advances.

Traces of sisterhood workshop

The workshop 'Traces of Sisterhood' is a three-day meeting initiating a long-term project on tracing sisterhood as a form of social organisation. It will explore the meanings of this concept, the ways in which it manifests itself, and how it can generate new forms of practice in the local communities and globally.