We are thrilled to announce Spectropia: Experiments in Trace, a new book series that will stand as a cornerstone legacy of our COST Action—continuing to foster research, collaboration, and critical dialogueon trace well beyond the project’s conclusion in October 2025.
The series will be published with De Gruyter and it aims open-up new discussion about the epistemological, methodological, and ethical implications of trace and tracing. Spectropia transcends disciplinary boundaries and areas of practice, creating a space for sharp, provocative debate on the implications of trace and their reverberations. It celebrates innovative, experimental, and engaged research that address the spectres, afterimages, and activations that occur around traces left by critical episodes of mass violence and conflict, environmental destruction and climate crisis, economic upheaval and dispossession, and rapid technological development.
For Spectropia, experimentation is as much about alternative modes of knowledge production as it is about rigorous research in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts, both digital and otherwise.
For more information and how to publish in the Series, contact one of the Spectropia series editors:
Lee Douglas, Goldsmiths, University of London l.douglas@gold.ac.uk
Magdalena Buchczyk, Humboldt University Berlin magdalena.buchczyk@hu-berlin.de
Aimée Joyce, University of St. Andrews (on leave in 2025)
Counter-Cartographies of Trace
The first volume in the series, Counter-Cartographies of Trace: Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Approaches Across Disciplines, edited by Magdalena Buchczyk, Lee Douglas, and Aimee Joyce, represents the first transdisciplinary effort to articulate the emerging field of Trace Studies. Rooted in a TRACTS workshop held at the Ecomuseo Mare Memoria Viva in Palermo in April 2023, the volume brings together scholarly perspectives from across archeology, visual culture, history, anthropology, philosophy, curatorial studies, and the arts.
This cutting-edge and richly illustrated book will blend rigorous scholarly chapters with experimental, multimodal, and artistic interludes, inviting readers to engage with the concepts of trace and counter-cartography in ways that extend beyond traditional academic formats—and beyond the academy itself.
Challenging the conventions of the edited volume, Counter-Cartographies of Trace offers multiple entry points and alternative modes of reading, privileging openness, interconnection, and experimentation over disciplinary boundaries or hierarchical authorship.
This inaugural volume sets the tone for Spectropia as a whole: bold, boundary-crossing, and deeply committed to imagining new possibilities for knowledge production.
Image: Courtesy of Francisco Mondaca Molina