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.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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