 Welcome from the New TRACTS Science Communications Coordinator. Hello, I am Magdalena Zych, the new TRACTS Science Communications Coordinator. I am a cultural anthropologist and the curator at the Ethnographic Museum curator in Kraków. I have just started my post as the Action’s Science and Communications Coordinator, taking over from Eliza Proszczuk. I am grateful to Eliza for all her work last year, including creating the network’s Communication and Dissemination Strategy. I look forward to working with you all (especially WG5) to help promote the great work and opportunities within TRACTS COST Action. Our second newsletter focuses on what’s been happening in Krakow, Potsdam/Berlin and Lausanne, this spring and invites you to join us at meetings in Zagreb and Santiago de Compostela. This newsletter also includes information about Short Term Scientific Mission funding and Dissemination Conference grants. These grants are intended to help us meet the objectives of our network and maximize its impact while supporting your research projects. We encourage you to apply for these opportunities – Rui Gomez Coelho (Grant Coordinator) and Tina Palaic (STSM Coordinator) look forward to your applications! Finally, this newsletter includes links to visual memories and discussions created during the TRACTS Management Committee meeting in Kraków. Alongside the detailed information in this newsletter, I recommend checking our network’s website and following us on social media (@TRACTS_Network) for updated Action news and announcements. More details about events in August and September will follow! Magdalena  Opportunities, Upcoming Events and Grants CFP: Responsible Future(s): Using Emergent Technologies For Sustainable Growth How to track and trace responsibly? How to make AI-enabled tools ethical and sustainable? Hybrid WG 4 Meeting Dates: 30 June – 1 July 2023 Venue: University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science, Department of Geography More information on the meeting can be found here.CFP: Unearthing Traces of European Conflicts: Materiality, Memory, & Technology September 26-28, 2023 Santiago de Compostela, Spain a TRACTS multimodal training school 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. The program will take place at the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council (INCIPIT CSIC) in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and is open, among others, to MA students, PhD candidates, early career researchers, technicians, memorial experts, and activists. Workshop Leaders This TRACTS workshop and training school will be facilitated by researchers, image and sound makers, and writers actively engaged in multimodal forms of knowledge production concerning mass violence sites, including from archaeological, anthropological, and historical perspectives. Laura Muñoz-Encinar INCIPIT CSIC César Parcero Oubiña INCIPIT CSIC Iñigo Sánchez Fuarros INCIPIT CSIC Zahira Aragüete-Toribio University of Neuchâtel Available Fellowships TRACTS offers several fellowships for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers based in Europe. Through a reimbursement scheme, these fellowships will cover travel and accommodation expenses. Students based locally will be eligible for local travel reimbursements. The workshop itself is free of charge. Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers outside of Europe can also participate, but their travel and accommodation will not be reimbursed. Applications/Pitches Interested participants should send a short version of their CV (2 pages maximum), a brief motivation statement about why you would like to take part in the training school, and a biography (100 words maximum) by 11pm (GMT) on Monday, June 26th. Submission Details Application documents should be submitted in one PDF file. All dossiers must be submitted by email tracts@st-andrews.ac.uk by 11pm (GMT) on Monday, June 26th with the following subject heading: UNEARTHING – First Name Last Name – Institution. We will announce the participants by the beginning of July 2023. Toolkits One of the exciting outputs we are working on over the next three years is a series of Toolkits. These toolkits emerge from the ideas and discussions that happen during Meetings and Training Schools. They are an opportunity to create actionable outputs useful for practitioners in various areas, including policy, museum curating, and education.This Grant Period the next toolkit we will be working on focuses on traces and technologies and is being produced under the guidance of Working Group 4. A first workshop and discussion will take place at the WG4 meeting in Zagreb, Croatia (30 June – 1 July 2023). All members of the COST Tracts network are invited to contribute. Please send your ideas and expressions of interest to Ivan Sulc and Nikita Chiu. Grants TRACTS COST Action has a number of different grants available to individual members of the network. Below are the details of how to apply. Short Term Scientific Mission grants Short Term Scientific Missions are exchange visits to support individual mobility, strengthen existing networks, and foster collaboration between COST Action Participants. The STSM should take place until October 1, 2023. The application must be submitted six weeks before the expected starting date. STSMs are evaluated on a first-come, first-served basis. More information on STSMs is also available by contacting the TRACTS Short Term Scientific Missions Coordinator Tina Palaić. Grants applications must clearly indicate how they relate to the aims of a specific Working Group and the aims of the Action (as found in the MoU).To find out more about STSMs, who can apply and how to apply, please click here. Dissemination Conference grant The Action offers financial support to Action members for participating in high-level conferences to present the Action, their activities, and results (oral presentation) and for developing new contacts and potential future collaborations. Inclusiveness Target Country (ITM) Conference grant This grant was created to support PhD students, PhD candidates and Young Researchers and Innovators affiliated with institutions in an Inclusiveness Target Country (ITC) or Near Neighbour Country who wish to participate in conferences organised by third parties. Grantees receive support for attending and presenting their work (poster or oral presentation) at a conference and are encouraged to network. This is a great tool to bring visibility to the work of researchers and innovators who typically lack the resources to attend international conferences. In case of any questions about the grants, get in touch with ourGrant Awarding Coordinator Rui Gomes Coelho Meetings and workshops Progress report on the TRACTS AtlasWork on the TRACTS Atlas has been taken on by a new Curatorial Collective (“CC”) convened and chaired by Magdalena Buchczyk. The CC met by Zoom on four Wednesdays in April/May. During those weeks and with the assistance of varying attendance from WG leaders and other TRACTS officers and participants, the focus of the CC was turned to the Google Docs file (“GD”), which evolved from a whiteboard Brain Dump created during the Malta meeting (January 2023). The CC solicited further contributions and refinements on content from each WG, leading to a growing number of connecting arrows that suggested where themes were inter-connecting. With assistance from Noviki, the CC has demonstrated versions of various technologies that might be used to develop the Atlas further. At the third CC meeting, we elected to use the first “Mural” board to capture the TRACTS Atlas concepts and their ranks or significance and interrelation more fully. Once this had been visualised and circulated for final tweaking by CC members, the Mural version was turned over to Noviki. It is now being transferred to a modified version of Obsidian (visualisation software), enabling some prototype options to be developed. Initial ideas on the Atlas prototype will be presented to CC by Noviki on 2 June, after which there will be a complete and open reconsideration of how to proceed with the next steps. If you would like to join the curatorial collective, please get in touch with Magda: Magdalena.buchczyk@hu-berlin.deTracing Temporalities, Unearthing Archives workshopOrganised in Berlin and Potsdam by Magdalena Buchczyk, Martin Fonck, Tina Palaic and Tomas Uson, this workshop critically explored the ethics of collections in museums and geological archives through the lens of temporality. The event focused on creating an interdisciplinary exchange between different fields of inquiry through five interdisciplinary panels:Archives as aftermaths of violenceImplicated archivesContesting conservationGeostories and temporal scalesContesting conservationUsing a range of case studies of collections and (earth) archives, participants dug into the ethics of acquisition, preservation, interpretation, use, and re-activation of this material today and explored its potential for the future. The event also included a curatorial tour of the DAOULA/sheen exhibition at the Tieranatomisches Theater, a guided tour of the layered histories of the Treptower Park and three excellent keynotes by Daniela Agostinho, Pratik Chakrabarty and Andrea Ballestero. We look forward to announcing meeting outputs in the near future, keep an eye on the Action’s website and our Twitter account!   Management Committee Meeting 2023 in Kraków, PolandThe annual TRACTS Management Committee meeting took place at the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków on the 8th of March. During the morning and afternoon sessions, Action Chair Aimee Joyce presented an overview of the Action’s activities in the first Grant Period. She led a discussion about future events, outputs and work plans with participants (in Kraków and online). In the evening, inspired by artist Eliza Proszczuk, participants took part in joint embroidery of a tablecloth talking about traces of sisterhood. A full report on the meeting can be found on the TRACTS website .   Workshop: From the Archive to the Atlas Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne June 1-2, 2023 Climate Change Working Group This month starts with an innovative event organised by Working Group 3 on Traces and Climate Change. In the context of the ecological and energy crisis, it is urgent to develop an ecosocial approach to critically analyse the archive and its technologies. This workshop aims to question where, with which intensities, and how the traces of the ecological movement are studied and disseminated at the international level. The two-day meeting intends to open a space to approach the traces of environmentalism without temporal or geographical restriction in three different, though complementary, ways. Drawing attention to the usual lack of ecological specificity of archives.Studying the structure and metabolism of archives. Providing examples of work with environmental archives from a multidisciplinary perspective, be it through the activity of activist collectives or archivists concerned with environmental memory. This event aims to share ways of working with and from the archive and to think collectively about how to make visible the traces of ecological activism in its multiple historical, social, economic and environmental entanglements historically and today. If you wish to join the event online, please get in touch with the coordinator at alberto.berzosa@cchs.csic.es Members of the Management Committee and Action Officers about them here. Announcements Call for papers: Fragments, Traces, Memories: international workshop Scholars in many disciplines have taken an interest in relics of the past, various fragments and different types of memory for years. Temporal complexity, however, is a new type of exploration, as is interest in the concept of trace. Places and landscapes have many different temporalities. In everyday life and fieldwork, we encounter fragments, traces, memories and relics of past events. These traces remain in the landscape and become part of messy, contested and variously entangled histories. Mapping temporal complexity and telling times as more-than-human temporalities may be vital to understanding the Anthropocene. Traces are condensations of histories, and due to their fragmented nature, they might signal the limits of representation. The workshop focuses on the topic of traces, fragments and memories. Some are recognised, cherished and protected, becoming part of the (official) heritage. Others pass unmentioned, unacknowledged, eventually abandoned and neglected, intentionally or unintentionally left to vanish and decay; they may be forgotten and silenced. Paying attention to landscapes and places in their temporal complexity may show that some relics are more resilient than others.Some questions to consider:How do we understand, deal with and contest fragments, traces, and memories we encounter and recognise in the landscape? In what ways can we tell their stories and histories? Where are the limits of representation when we consider the fragmented past in the present? How can we epistemologically and methodologically approach the more-than-human and nonhuman nature of the fragments and traces of the past in landscapes?Potential contributions: Case studies, methodological and theoretical considerations grounded in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, including heritage studies, memory studies, landscape and time geographies, post-humanities, anthropological tracings, phenomenology and others. Convenors: Karolína Pauknerová – Centre for Theoretical Study, Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences (CTS), Jan Frei – CTS, Petr Gibas – Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences Date: 9th – 10th October, 2023Location: Prague, Czech Republic (AKC, Husova 4a, 110 00 Prague 1)Submission: Please email an abstract of your paper (max. 250 words), your name and affiliation to: pauknerova@cts.cuni.cz. Deadline for submissions: 10th June 2023 tractsnetwork.online  TRACTS COST Action (20134) on “Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice” |