Short Abstract

Ruins materialise tensions between decay and renewal, loss and endurance. This panel explores how ruination reveals and reshapes polarised temporalities, inviting reflection on the social, political, and material afterlives of decay in a fragmented world.

Long Abstract

Ruins are powerful actors of the polarised temporalities of our age. They embody collisions between past and future, decay and renewal, endurance and disappearance. In the ruins of cities, industries, and landscapes, we encounter the material traces of fragmentation—yet also inviting for care, reflection, and re-imagined relations.

This panel explores ruins as sites of both polarisation and potential. Ruination is rarely neutral: it exposes contested values, unequal power, and competing visions of progress or belonging. At the same time, ruins can foster unexpected solidarities and generative sensibilities that resist binary thinking. They invite us to dwell in a state of instability, where endings and beginnings coexist. The state of ruin represents not only degradation and disintegration, but also an opening to the future in the form of new, often unexpected possibilities; the afterlife of ruins is not only a more or less defective sequel to what used to be, but also a field of new re-appropriations and re-use by human as well as non-human actors.

Aligned with the EASA 2026 theme Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World, this panel asks how the study of ruins—material, affective, and temporal—can illuminate contemporary processes of division while also suggesting ways of moving beyond them. We invite anthropological, ethnographic, geographical, theoretical, and creative contributions that address heritage, memory, and decay.

By approaching ruination as a dynamic and relational process, the panel aims to reveal how anthropology can engage with the transformative potential that emerges from entangled ruins in a contemporary world.

Suggested Keywords

Ruins and Ruination, Temporalities, Memory and Heritage, Materiality and Decay, Anthropocene, Entanglement , Afterlife of Ruins

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