- Convenors:
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Magdalena Buchczyk
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Aimee Joyce (St Andrews University)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
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Lee Douglas
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel asks how working with and through traces might open new possibilities for inquiry within—and beyond—a polarised world. We invite contributions to explore the experimental possibilities of trace, unlocking its capacity to open new conceptual, imaginative, and relational horizons.
Long Abstract
Over the past decade, diverse actors—ranging from scholars to far-right politicians and environmental and decolonial activists—have engaged with traces of violent histories, mobilising them to advance divergent, at times contradictory, futures. This panel asks how working with and through traces might open new possibilities and perspectives for collective inquiry within—and beyond—a polarised world.
Traces take many forms, move across scales, and can be activated for different political and social projects. This panel argues that we need to envision traces not just as evidence or as counter-histories. Rather, we need to conceive of trace as an open-ended analytic, a tool through which anthropological inquiry engages the conditions of polarisation, and as an experimental device for imagining possibilities beyond it. Here, we imagine trace as substance: a means of capturing the elusive complexities of these engagements, where the boundaries between event and structure blur and dissolve. Substance possesses certain qualities while remaining inherently undefinable. It can signify an essence—something intangible—or a physical, concrete, and palpable object-like phenomenon. Trace can be the substance in which an imprint appears. Substances can also hold absences, voids, or things unsaid. Traces sediment in infrastructures, bodies, and landscapes; they flicker in memory and inflect social atmospheres. Trace as substance invites us to confront its contradictions: part essence, part object, and always mercurial in the places, sites, and temporalities it inhabits.
This panel brings together scholars, artists, practitioners, and activists who engage in inventive, radical, and experimental approaches. We invite panellists to explore the creative potential and experimental possibilities of trace—its mercurial qualities, its power to unsettle and disorient, and its ethical and political ambiguities. We welcome contributions that treat trace as both method and provocation, and that take seriously its capacity to open new conceptual, imaginative, and relational horizons.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper explores colonial violence in ethnographic collections through an Indigenous, affective lens, presenting traces as active substances that shape coeval, relational worlds and open pathways for decolonial engagements beyond polarization.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on collaborative research with Maasai communities in northern Tanzania and on collections held at the Berlin Ethnological Museum, this paper examines traces of colonial violence in ethnographic collections from an Indigenous, affect-centered perspective. Rather than treating traces as static or inert, we denaturalize the concept by foregrounding Maasai epistemologies and ontologies, in which traces are understood as active presences reverberating across time, space, and relational worlds.
When confronted with colonially appropriated belongings, Maasai interlocutors experienced embodied discomfort, fear, and grief. These belongings were framed as ing’weni—dangerous entities infused with iloikop, understood as both the trace and the substance of violence left behind by murdered ancestors. At the same time, violations of moral and relational norms provoke eng’oki: the lingering effects of ethical transgressions in interactions with people, other living beings, and situations in the world. Eng’oki “hangs in the air,” manifesting as misfortune, illness, or ecological disruption.
Within this framework, traces act as substances through which colonialism persists, shaping everyday life, social and natural environments, and cosmopolitical encounters between formerly colonized communities and former colonizers. They render colonial violence coeval, destabilizing linear temporalities and complicating contemporary debates on restitution, decolonial collaboration, and reconciliation. At the same time, Maasai world-ordering practices articulate relational pathways toward restoring balance and togetherness across human and more-than-human domains.
Positioning colonial objects as experimental devices for pluriversal anthropological inquiry, this paper treats traces as a means to open new relational and imaginative possibilities for engaging with colonial violence in the present and beyond polarized futures.
Paper short abstract
This paper argues that hair’s ontological misalignment—neither human nor object—requires the hair to be intraceable. Intraceable wig enables misrecognition and trespass through eradicating Asian identity, resurrecting "Brazilian" from hair and disrupts the postcolonial racial order.
Paper long abstract
Traceability is often treated as a moral good-an instrument through which responsibility, transparency and recognition are secured. This paper approaches traceability instead as a risk produced by materials that refuse stable classification. Focusing on human-hair trade, I examine why hair can, and will, become intraceable to be industrialised and commodified.
China produces the majority of human-hair wigs for global Black consumer markets. Brazilian hair is the most valued category for its strength, bounce and sheen, yet it is not from Brazil. So-called Brazilian hair is the blend of heterogenous hair from donors across Asia, sanitised through chemical-washing, heating and styling. Dirt and cells are removed, alongside race and identity, making hair intraceable. Yet Brazilian hair sells. Mediating through repeated narration of “Brazilian” hair, manufacturers, traders and consumers are allowed to be irrecognisable, acquire potency of trespassing/hacking across racial boundaries.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in African wig shop and factories in China, I argue that the intraceability echoes on hair’s ontological misalignment: hair is neither human nor object, yet it persistently carries the demand to be traced to a person. This unstable position makes it possible and profitable to be displaced and misrecognised, through which Asian women are killed so that Brazilian women can resurrect, not as representational figures, but as material condition that sells. This unstable position also deems hair intraceable in order to function as an object, yet it can never cease to be traced. It must be somebody’s hair, even if that somebody must be produced repeatedly.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores Buddhist material culture as trace-substance in contested landscapes, examining how traces accumulate, erode and endure beyond polarized mobilizations that seek to claim them for divergent futures
Paper long abstract
This paper explores Buddhist material culture as trace-substance in contested landscapes, examining how traces accumulate, erode and endure beyond polarized mobilizations that seek to claim them for divergent futures. Through colonial archives and contemporary commemorations of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas, and ethnographic engagement with rock-cut Buddha’s and “mini Bamiyans” in Muslim-majority Kashmir, I develop trace an experimental analytic for understanding accommodation rather than appropriation.
In 19th century travelogues the Bamiyan Buddhas appeared as “colossal idols,” successively re-named through an accretive archive of myths, stories, speculations and wonder (ajaib). This metonymic imbrication created conditions for assimilating strange objects into landscapes, causing them to simultaneously erode and endure – a process I conceptualize as trace-substance of shifting meanings, neither fully present nor absent, neither heritage nor cult object nor ruin. Shifting analytical gaze from their spectacular destruction (the 2001 iconoclasm) to prolonged, heterogeneous entanglements reveals how traces operate as mercurial presences that resist definitive claims. Taking cues from this archival analysis, the paper then explores implications for understanding Buddhist material culture – including rock cut Buddhas and “mini Bamiyans” in Kashmir – that move beyond Hindu nationalist archaeology, Islamic identity politics or secular heritage preservation. Here, trace becomes both method and provocation for attending to how communities live with rather than mobilize traces for particular futures. I argue that trace-as-substance – possessing material presence while holding absences – offers resources for anthropological inquiry that dwells with rather than resolves contradiction, revealing relational horizons where “strange objects” erode and endure simultaneously.
Paper short abstract
My contribution frames disaster traces of memory as failed futures that materialize when and because they are made to disappear, looking at how polarizations between remembering and forgetting forge not just occlusions, but new, and potentially transformative paths ahead.
Paper long abstract
The Tohoku region, in northeastern Japan, has long been exposed to recurrent natural disasters, most notably the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. Fifteen years later, communities in coastal Tohoku have seemingly recovered, but traces linger: not just ruins and remains, but traces of the desired futures that never were and never manifested, encapsulated as much in the remains as well as in the violence of top-down post-disaster management and reconstruction practices. My paper investigates trace as an analytic to frame memory and heritage in post-disaster Tohoku through the lense of Derrida’s hauntology, defining traces as remains of memories not just as simple mourning over lost pasts, but over lost futures, and “endings that are not over”, too. It points to failed futures, that existed in imagination but never manifested, and that, however, continue to exert force on people, both through practices of remembering and of active forgetting (McClintock, 2009). Engaging trace as both material and beyond the trace-object itself, as an excess of meaning that carries affective as well as metaphorical power. Such perspective recognises that the living present is not as dense and structured as we think, and neither are our concepts, labels and ontologies. My contribution aims at looking at disaster traces through heritage, memory, forgettings, and bottom-up practices as failed futures that materialize when (and because) they are made to disappear, looking at how polarizations between remembering and forgetting forge not just occlusions, but new, and potentially transformative paths ahead.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on research with mothers whose sons were forcibly disappeared in the Baixada Fluminense region in Brazil, this contribution discusses epistemological and ethical challenges involved in researching traces of violence that are implicated in the very conditions they index.
Paper long abstract
Traces of violence can be approached as imprints that index past events. Interrogating prevalent accounts of traces’ epistemic affordances, this intervention considers the challenges posed when traces themselves actualise violence and terror. To do so, we draw on research and activism with mothers whose sons were forcibly disappeared in the Baixada Fluminense region west of Rio de Janeiro. Since the late-20th century, the region has been a major hotspot of enforced disappearance, as territorial contestations systematically exploit and victimise poor and black populations. The mothers we accompany are systematically negated public accountability and suffer from long-term sequaelae. At the same time, the spaces they live in are shaped by intricate traces emerging from violence, obfuscation and intimidation. Engaging with these traces, we argue, poses challenges at epistemological and ethical levels. Not only are they inherently hard to read, they can also have profoundly immobilising, disorienting and terrorising effects, thus deepening conditions of silence and abandonment. Paradoxically, we argue, such traces sometimes acquire significance precisely in moments of silence and confusion among family members and neighbours with complex entanglements with different armed groups. Getting confused and getting lost make the inaudible and the invisible return through failures, distortions and diseases. At the same time, we consider art therapy sessions that forge collective ways of knowing otherwise, thus activating submerged capacities to remember and persist. Our contribution, then, fathoms careful ways of engaging traces amid entrenched conditions of terror, conditions intensified by the very traces that as anthropologist we seek to redeem.
Paper short abstract
Having “trace” as an analytical invitation, this paper reflects on the difficulties of describing memory through "ethnographic objects" across Mapuche life cycles. Thinking with decomposition and circulation, it remains with the tensions that permanence and its grammars produce for living relations.
Paper long abstract
Beginning with “trace” as analytical invitation, this paper reflects on the difficulties of describing memory through "ethnographic objects" while remaining committed to Mapuche life cycles. Rather than treating collections as residues of past events or as vessels of inherited or recontextualised meaning, the paper attends to how these material forms continue to participate in living relations that do rest as evidence, remains, or representations, yet operate memory differently.
Drawing on long-term collaborative work with Mapuche authorities and repatriation practitioners, the paper engages with mogen (living beings within Mapuche land) and wiñomapugetual (becoming land again) to explore memory as a material process enacted through transformation, decomposition, and redistribution.
Approached in this way, conservation and permanence introduce a persistent tension. By seeking to stabilise matter in time, they interrupt the life cycles through which memory takes place, producing forms of suspension that are neither simply loss nor continuity. The encounter between permanence and circulation signals a historical formation that has partially dislodged Mapuche land. The paper does not aim to resolve this tension or move concepts away from this ethical impasse. Instead, it remains with the friction that emerges when heritage permanence encounters land-based relations in which undoing, decay, and recomposition are ethical commitments. Staying with this difficulty allows trace to appear not as a category to be secured, but as a moment of hesitation—an opening for anthropological description to linger with forms of memory that endure not by remaining, but by becoming beyond description.
Paper short abstract
Through analysis of recurring narratives of building a playground, the study uncovers underlying relational dynamics among Palestinian builders, international donors, and Israeli ICA, and raises ethical questions about the trace evidence in ethnographic research within such contested contexts.
Paper long abstract
Studying Palestinian planning practices in the West Bank, Palestine, required long-term oversight of the development of planning proposals for communities in Area C. However, staying in the occupied territories was neither feasible under Israeli administrative control nor the best way to understand the administrative life of Palestinian spatial planning proposals. Between 2017 and 2020, I arrived in the West Bank as a tourist and returned 7 times.
With each return, I observed that Palestinian planners’ stories about their past and present projects varied. Many narratives included omissions that I could access through the layering of ethnographic anecdotes recorded during my repeated visits. Over time, I gained the ability to map the archives, anecdotes, and fragments of participant observation.
In the paper, I explore the playground anecdote that reappeared in many settings: in the offices of a Palestinian planning NGO, the offices of EU officials in Jerusalem, the offices of MDLF, a project implementation body in Ramallah, and in conversations with ACTED officers in Ramallah.
My instinct to record and write about the unusual and uncanny reappearance of the same phrase, “We Build a Playground”, led to uncovering uncomfortable relational dynamics among Palestinian builders, the donor community, and the Israeli Civil Administration.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as broadly described by Palestinian scholars, has little space for spatial strategies that would not be appropriated and converted into modes of oppression by Israel. I reveal what a trace in such an ethnographic context could uncover and ask whether it should be ethically pursued.
Paper short abstract
Employing trace as a methodology, this paper follows Kodak's toxic legacy by engaging visually, chemically, and materially with contaminated ecologies. Foraging plants and transforming them into photochemistry, it traces how ecologies archive, witness, and make visible Kodak contamination.
Paper long abstract
At its industrial height, Kodak’s photographic empire depended on vast chemical infrastructures with enduring toxic legacies in the landscapes and waterways of Rochester, New York, unceded territory of the Onöndowa'ga: (Seneca Nation). This paper responds to Ariella Azoulay’s call to interrogate the violences implicit in our vision practices. It shifts attention from photographic images to the toxic material relations that make photography possible. Conceptualising photography not as an image-object but as assemblages of chemical, ecological, and social relations, this paper traces how Kodak-contaminated ecologies register and witness chemical violence in delayed and dispersed ways.
Drawing on foraging as an ethnographic method and experimental analogue photography as research practice, the project transforms plants growing in Kodak-contaminated ecologies into low-toxic photo-chemistries. These plant-chemistries are used to process photographs of sites touched by Kodak pollution, extending photographic indexicality beyond visual content to consider what photographs point to through their very materiality.
Methodologically, foraging for photo-chemistry proposes a low-toxic, multimodal approach that confronts photography’s toxic histories while reimagining it as a practice of ecological relation and political attention in Anthropocene worlds.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how traces are represented, celebrated or belittled in defining the future of La Hague, a peninsula where cherished natural landscapes coexist with nuclear infrastructures. The research project includes ethnography, "futuring" workshops and an artistic project on cartographies.
Paper long abstract
La Hague, a cherished peninsula in Normandy, boasts a panoply of natural landscapes, of great interest to local conservation workers and inhabitants affectively tied to the area. Traces of this natural and cultural history dot the area and seemingly compete for a regional identity amid a controversial industrial announcement which would prolong La Hague’s reputation as a nuclearized space. Indeed, in the so-called centre of the peninsula lies a vast nuclear fuel reprocessing site built in the 1960s, and recently officially marked out for potential extension and upgrading. In this context, this paper takes up the invitation of the TRACE and presents findings from a comparative research project focusing on landscapes, nuclear realities and futures, taking as one of its sites of interest La Hague. I draw on twelve months of ethnographic research in the area to explore which kind of traces are identified, represented, celebrated or pushed aside in forming the geographical and affective outlines of the peninsula – and what the stakes of such representations are for future possibilities.
I will complement my ethnographic data with local futuring workshops focused on imagining La Hague’s landscapes in 2125 and carried out as part of the research project, as well a collaboration with the local artist Anna Lejemmetel, with an exhibition planned in March 2026. The artistic project aims to explore the intimate and generative powers of the cartographic method, to unsettle its scientific format and interrogate how traces are found and potentially aggregated into a whole, and by whom.
Paper short abstract
Radon spa bathtubs in the Ore Mountains serve as containers of the invisible. As traces of radioactive water and uranium extraction, they reveal how care, leisure, hard miners work and violence intertwined – and how unseen substances persist and continue to shape the region’s identity.
Paper long abstract
This paper considers bathtubs used in radon spa treatments as objects for thinking with trace, materiality, and invisibility. Across the Ore Mountains (CZ/DE) – a cross-border mining region shaped by centuries of extraction and twentieth-century uranium mining – these bathtubs appear in spa facilities, museums, exhibitions, and public sites.
The bathtubs serve as containers for the invisible. They hold the transformation of mine wastewater, infused with radioactive radon, into spa water. Radon spas translated an uncertain and invisible radioactive material into therapeutic practice. Bathtubs mediate this translation by domesticating radon-infused water, materialising an ambivalent relationship to radioactivity that is simultaneously feared and therapeutically employed.
At the same time, during the second half of the twentieth century, spa environments obscured the violent infrastructures that enabled such treatments, including forced labour, environmental contamination, and displacement linked to uranium mining.
Drawing on theories of trace, material memory, and object biographies, we treat bathtubs as loci where absence and presence intersect. Exhibited bathtubs no longer contain radioactive material, yet remain shaped by it–marked by a substance that was only ever sensed indirectly, through instruments like Geiger counters and bodily symptoms.
By experimentally following bathtubs across borders and curatorial regimes in Bohemia and Saxony, the paper reveals complex entanglements of mines and spas, waste and value, harm and cure, visibility and invisibility. Attending to these containers of the invisible opens a radical analytical possibility: to rethink transitions not through visible remediation alone, but through the lingering traces of substances and histories that resist full containment.
Paper short abstract
Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in coastal Central Mozambique, this paper explores the potential of thinking with and through high-water marks by tracing how they exceed and extend into multiple, possible lifelines.
Paper long abstract
In many coastal towns and villages of Central Mozambique, walls display high-water marks—mnemonics of massive floods left by tropical cyclones’ heavy rains and storm surge. Inside a family house near the ruins of the former colonial Companhia do Buzi, hand-drawn dashes multiply below and above the flood lines—inscriptions that register the changing heights of its dwellers in relation to shifting thresholds of life-threatening water. Government officials and nongovernmental workers frequently invoke high-water traces—not only as tangible evidence to legitimise displacement and justify resettlement, but also as a basis for drafting emergency evacuation routes and preparedness protocols. High-water traces are further (in)visibly impressed—into trees and plants, into redrawn shorelines and riverbanks, and into what is absent (e.g. bare stilt posts from houses that once stood).
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the potential of thinking with and through high-water marks across affects and effects, scales and actors. It traces how such marks exceed and extend into multiple, often conflicting “lifelines” that unfold long after the water recedes, as a way to interrogate what presents and futures they make appear possible.