Douglas, Lee; Joyce, Aimée and Buchczyk, Magdalena, eds. 2025. Counter-Cartographies of Trace: Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Approaches Across Disciplines. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. ISBN 9783689242695 [Edited Book] (Forthcoming)

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Abstract or Description

This pioneering transdisciplinary volume brings together visual culture studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, curatorial studies, art and museum practice. The collection offers a roadmap for a new, critical approach to researching the traces of multiple forms of violence—from the political to the economic, from the social to the environmental—in academic and professional settings. The volume is a crucial intervention at a time when trace and tracing has become common analytical categories across a range of disciplines and institutions, but one which is often simplified in its application. This volume fills a critical gap in the humanities, social sciences, and arts by developing rigorous, generative counter-mapping practices that rethink conceptual, methodological and ethical approaches to tracing.
This book applies the trace to the project of mapping, opening up an anti-colonial and speculative process of counter-mapping. The authors approach counter-mapping as a methodological and epistemological challenge that does not simply unearth, recuperate, or make evident unrecognized or silenced histories, but rather as a practice through which such gaps and voids can be generative sites for reimagining and enacting other social worlds. Together, they argue that such counter-mapping allows us to engage some of the greatest challenges we face—climate crisis, social and political disruption, decolonization, and technological growth—from an invigorating ethical standpoint that does not simply replace old knowledge with new alternative ways of knowing. Instead, counter-mapping makes room for the speculative and the incomplete. It allows us to discover what it might be like, look like, indeed, feel like to navigate social worlds made heavy with absence and erasure.

While there has been a growing interest in trace and tracing as analytical categories, the work has been disparate with limited interdisciplinary exchange. This book emerges from the TRACTS research network, which brings together international scholars and practitioners working on trace. Three years of conceptual and methodological collaboration have revealed the dire need for experimental and cross-disciplinary approaches to trace as a method and a form of analysis. Experimental work moves us away from a simplistic approach to trace as a gap or silence and emphasizes what is at stake in correcting an approach that elides nuance while simultaneously distancing opposing narratives. In a contemporary context marked by a resurgence in racist, authoritarian, and exclusionary practices, this is urgently needed. This volume sees trace as an ambiguous and spectral entity that allows us to embrace its potential for unsettling knowledge and reimagining and enacting other social worlds.

By highlighting the interplay between history, society and the environment, the book intervenes in interdisciplinary debates on the methodological, conceptual and ethical challenges of trace. It will be essential reading for researchers and students interested in issues of memory and history, climate change and technology, as well as artists, educators, policymakers and activists. Importantly, the volume includes non-textual experiments, as well as, research-informed chapters.

Item Type:	Edited Book
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Anthropology Anthropology > Centre for Visual Anthropology (CVA)
Date:	7 April 2025
Item ID:	38570
Date Deposited:	10 Mar 2025 17:07
Last Modified:	10 Mar 2025 17:07
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38570

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