The series welcomes proposals that address the epistemological, methodological, and ethical challenges arising from traces left by critical episodes of mass violence and conflict, environmental destruction and climate crisis, economic upheaval and dispossession, and rapid technological transformation. It celebrates innovative, experimental, and engaged research that explores the spectres, afterimages, and activations surrounding such traces. For Spectropia, experimentation is as much about developing alternative modes of knowledge production as it is about pursuing rigorous inquiry across the social sciences, humanities, and the arts — digital and otherwise.
The first volume in the series, Counter-Cartographies of Trace: Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Approaches Across Disciplines, emerges from the work of the TRACTS COST Action and offers a roadmap for a new field of transdisciplinary Trace Studies. Drawing on four years of collaborative, interdisciplinary research, it adopts an experimental approach to traces. In a world marked by layered forms of violence — political, economic, social, and environmental — the contributions offer a vital and timely intervention. Rather than searching for lost or silenced histories, they turn to counter-cartography: a radical practice in which gaps, absences, and fragments become powerful sites of possibility. In doing so, the authors seek to open space for speculation, incompleteness, and the imagination of new futures. What might it be like — or feel like — to move through fractured, uncertain worlds guided by traces? How might we reimagine complex social realities and contested terrains through what remains? And what new possibilities might emerge from the act of tracing?
For more information see here: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/serial/setr-b/html