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This volume brings together border deaths and the concept of traces, developing tracemaking as a critical lens for reckoning with border violence. The contributions show how tracemaking encompasses both the interpretive work that constitutes a trace and the deliberate production of traces, including memorials. Families, activists, artists, journalists and researchers find, create, and preserve traces of lives lost at borders, countering silence and erasure in dominant frameworks. Tracing deaths in rivers, forests, seas, and detention centers across the Mediterranean, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Franco-Italian and Polish-Belarusian borders, the volume attends to both local specificities and transnational dynamics. It shows how evidence is constructed, the dead commemorated, memories contested, and new forms of witnessing emerge.
- Developing tracemaking as a theoretical and political concept for memory and border studies
- Traces as evidence and testimony: how border deaths are identified, documented, commemorated, and contested
- Embodied, ethnographic research informed by feminist and abolitionist perspectives
Marijana Hameršak is a research advisor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb. Her research spans the history and theory of literature, the history of reading and books, folklore studies, and migration and border studies. She has authored several books and co-edited volumes, journal special issues, and online platforms, most recently the platform e-ERIM (2022–2025) and the volume Keywords of the Balkan Route (2026). She was principal investigator for the ERIM project (2020–2024).
Sanja Horvatinčić is a research associate at the Institute of Art History, Zagreb, and an honorary fellow at Durham University. A specialist in Yugoslav memorial architecture and critical heritage studies, she connects art history, archaeology, and memory studies using digital and community-based methods. She has led projects on wartime legacies in Southeast Europe and West Africa, and co-edited Shaping Revolutionary Memory (2023). As a TRACTS Working Group leader, she has co-organized workshops on traces, social justice, and border deaths.