| Month | Event | Location | Call for Paper |
| February | Symposium: Symposium on Traces and Technology | Cornwall, UK | Past. |
| April | Working Group Meeting: Connecting Lines – Tracing climate change and social justice from the perspective of historically deprivileged communities | Ljubljana, Slovenia | Deadline // March 12th 2024 |
| Management Committee & Working Group Meeting: TRACTS Annual Meeting | Prague, Czechia | Invitation only. | |
| Working Group Meeting: (Counter) Cartographies – Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Approaches to the Trace across Disciplines | Palermo, Italy | Past | |
| June | Co-Organised Working Group Meeting: Traces of Extinction, species loss, solastalgia and semiotics of recovery | Tartu, Estonia | Available Below |
| Working Group Meeting: Ecologies of Movement – Retracing & Rethinking Empire & Resistance | Madrid, Spain | Deadline // March 22nd 2024 | |
| July | Working Group Meeting: Dissemination and Science Communication | Porto, Portugal | Invitation only. |
| August | Call for Papers: Special Issue of the International Journal of Ethics and Systems | Online | Deadline // September 15th 2024 |
| September | Working Group Meeting: Tracing border deaths, technology and social justice | Zagreb, Croatia | September 19th/20th 2024 |
February/ CORNWALL, UK/ Symposium on Traces and Technology
Feb 22-24th, 2024
This Working Group Symposium is designed to consolidate training in Ancona on inclusive technology policy (multi-sensorial traces) and Zagreb’s output (Toolkit and journal special issue), this Symposium combines a Working Group Meeting and an advanced writing workshop to move forward the proposed journal special issue. The event will draw on local expertise on tracing technologies of the past (particularly the traces of the British Telecomms (BT) infrastructures, including the satellite antenna (receiver) in Goonhilly), and traces of extractive mining across Cornwall.
The Symposium also explores how these traces of the past are also a way to trace a potential future. The satellite antenna site in Goonhilly is now repurposed to support ESA and NASA’s moon mission, the clay pit near St Austell was transformed into The Eden Project. Participants will discuss the challenges and potential of technologically-driven regeneration in levelling-up regions, regions that have a historic past of over-reliance on specific technological developments.
This event provides a potential to evaluate the impact of EU cohesion/development funding, and can be highly policy-relevant. The symposium will ask participants to develop an advanced outline and paper introduction and abstract for a journal special issue.
Please send an abstract of 350-400 words to tracts@st-andrews.ac.uk by January 15th 2024. Queries can be directed to tracts@st-andrews.ac.uk
April/ PRAGUE, CZECHIA/ TRACTS Annual Meeting & Ethics Editorial Meeting
4th-5th April 2024
The annual in-person MC meeting will be held in Charles University, Prague. The meeting will address the organizational and networking needs of the network, as well as more immersive experiences that will introduce MC members to current debates about the trace among researchers in Central and East Europe. The MC meeting will have 2 octopus events. On the first day there will be a Core Group Meeting. On the second there will be a WG 1 meeting, where there will be a discussion about the different concepts of Tract the Action is currently dealing with and an editorial meeting about the special issue on Trace and Ethics.
The MC meeting will develop a concrete plan for outputs and events in the final 2 years of the Action. The meeting will include a report from the current WG leaders and Core Group members, and grant co-ordinators. The final day of the meeting will include an optional series of workshops for members keen to meet and discuss future smaller collaborative projects and the future directions and sustainability of the research agenda.
April/ PALERMO, ITALY/ (Counter) Cartographies – Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Approaches to the Trace across Disciplines
11th-12th April 2024
April/ LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA/ Connecting Lines – Tracing climate change and social justice from the perspective of historically deprivileged communities
25th – 26th April 2024
This is a collaborative WG2 and WG3 meeting. The meeting is an invitation to build understandings of the connections between traces of climate change and social justice via a two-day event. Talking about climate issues is, in many ways talking about social issues, produced within this episteme. Structures that perpetrate(d) violence using and refining technology press(ed) upon communities and individuals with a relative lack of political and economic power — be that gender, race, class, and other debilitating personal circumstances — the most burning manifestations of deprivation occurring at the intersection of the aforementioned personal circumstances. This meeting builds on discussions started during the Action meeting Traces of Sisterhood in Warsaw in 2022. The meeting specifically brings together, academics, artists, and NGO workers. It continues on form the work that demonstrated how artistic expression and traces of sisterhood in traditional and contemporary tapestry and grass-root artistic feminist activist practices, can engage practitioners to develop and communicate creative and impactful research.
Call for Papers issued to TRACTS members.
The deadline for submitting an abstract of 200 words (maximum), a biography of 100 words (maximum) is March 12th 2024.
Proposals and short bios can be submitted here.
June/ MADRID, SPAIN/ Ecologies of Movement: Retracing & Rethinking Empire & Resistance
13th -14th June 2024
This collabrative WG2 and WG3 meeting allows the implementation of exchanges between concepts previously worked on in this Action from the point of view of circulation. In both the past and present, colonial and imperial systems have generated sets of practices that give way to and condition the circulation of people, ideas, technologies, images and objects. The implicit violence of these forms of movement has also generated specific traces that connect categories such as economic development, cultural heritage, ecology or colonial history, bringing to light new epistemic realities such as the plantationcene or the identification of material practices within imperial ways of life. As such, the idea of circulation activates a working methodology that requires cross-disciplinary exchange and collective learning. This seminar aims to critically reflect on a series of topics related to, colonial ecology, imperial memory, the circulation of people, objects, artefacts, images and ideas, as well as their concrete and current implications for how colonialism and its legacies should be critically approached to this day around the world
Call for Papers issued to TRACTS members.
June/ TARTU, ESTONIA/ Traces of Extinction, species loss, solastalgia and semiotics of recovery
July/ PORTO,PORTUGAL/ Dissemination and Science Communication
17th July 2024
This is a WG5 meeting. The meeting is focused on dissemination and science communication
Call for Papers: Special Issue of the International Journal of Ethics and Systems
15th September 2024
The TRACTS COST Action is creating this special issue in collaboration with the journals. The call is open to everyone, and the rules for submissions are described on the website of the journal. We are inviting members of this COST action and other colleagues with an interest in the topics of the action, to propose an abstract. Selected abstracts will be invited to hand in full papers as contributions for the review and selection process in an edition of the International Journal of Ethics and Systems to be published in 2025.
Call for papers can be download here. Queries can be directed to David Bevan dbevan@stmartins.ed
September/ZAGREB, CROATIA/ Tracing border deaths, technology and social justice
20th – 21st September 2024
This is a collabrative WG2 and WG4 meeting. The meeting is focused on bringing together ongoing, activist, artists and academic perspectives on the border deaths, related primarily to the European border regime, through the concepts of traces and from the intertwined perspectives of technology and social justice. Starting with the idea to investigate possibilities of expanding current discussions about border deaths and traces beyond well-established and prolific forensics and related approaches, this workshop will address connections of border deaths, technology and social justice in relation to:
- destruction of traces (lethal outcomes of hiding ones migratory traces, destruction and disappearance of human bodies in migratory context, unmarked graves of deceased migrants, necroviolence as form of hiding the traces etc.)
- production of traces (surveillance technologies as generators of border deaths, forms of counter-memorialisation and grief activism, activist uses of statistics or statactivism practices and documenting border deaths through various lists, table, maps, etc.).
The meeting addresses various Action objectives such as:
- identifies and connects currently disjointed monodisciplinary projects on traces related to the migrant crisis;
- extends and clusters existing research connections into what can become a reflexive and engaged approach to traces of European irregularized migration regime,
- will develop interdisciplinary ethical reflexivity to address the challenges posed by the legacies of traces in the context of colonialism and mass violence (WG2), and technological development (WG4) in Europe and globally;
- The meeting will integrate and create dialogue between diverse theoretical and methodological approaches.
- develops knowledge transfers beyond discrete scholarly communities.
- creates and solidifies knowledge exchanges between different expertise groups at various career stages and sectors;
- ensures that the insights generated in the network are mobilized in ways that promote and communicate novel scientific perspectives on traces and tracing and make this information available in innovative formats to suit the specific needs of end users and institutions.
Call for Papers coming soon