TRACTS: Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice: Traces and Climate Change

Traces incite powerful forms of action and imagination in the present, but also signal, enable, or hinder emergent futures. This future-making capacity of traces play a vital role in the field of environmental humanities. Climate change, for example, is detectable through traces.

This project uses the concept of tracing in relation to studies of the Anthropocene, geographies of extinction, and anticipated and lived environmental futures. Studies on the onset of ecological collapse often focus on traces of lost biodiversity and natural disasters within the landscape. Yet climate change also poses a huge challenge to the idea of trace, as many of the extreme climate events we faced currently are unprecedented. Thinking in terms of footprints and traces is a practice of learning to think like a climate and part of the increasing demand to develop creative ways to take climate change seriously. Explorations of human-environmental relations through traces pose new questions about the interplay between climate change and knowledge practices, materials, technologies, or sociocultural phenomena.