We are delighted to invite scholars from all disciplines to contribute to the forthcoming edited volume with Routledge: Translating Ruins: Mutable Grounds, Mediated Encounters, and Mobile Precarities.
In an era of climate crisis, extractivism, war, forced displacement, migration, and rapid urban change, ruins have become pervasive. Contemporary ruin scholarship has moved beyond the aesthetic of Ruinenlust (‘ruin lust’) to recognise ruins as critical thresholds that illuminate entanglements of pasts, presents, and futures (López Galviz et al., 2017). This edited volume examines how translational practices – broadly conceived as complex semiotic practices that are materially grounded and embedded in sociohistorical, ethical and creative relations – engage with historical and contemporary ruins, and how such practices shape the reconstruction, reinterpretation, remembrance and governance of contested ruin-sites, wider processes of ruination, and forms of ruin-related heritage.
We invite critical and practice-based contributions that engage with the complexities of translating ruins. We especially welcome proposals from Translation Studies, Critical Heritage Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Memory Studies, Urban Studies, Cultural Geography, Art History and Visual Culture, and related fields.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- The transformation of ruins into museums, monuments, heritage sites, and immersive multimedia formats.
- The redevelopment or repurposing of ruins into green spaces, public facilities, cultural infrastructures, or commercial complexes – spaces that may themselves enter new cycles of decay and renewal.
- Multilingual and multimodal interpreting and translation practices within ruin-related museums, heritage sites, communities, or institutional settings.
- Activist or community-based translation practices, or artistic interventions in sites of historical or ongoing ruination.
- Intermedial and multimodal representations and translations of ruins and ruin narratives across diverse platforms and formats, including social media, blogs, travel vlogs, livestreams, and digital archives.
- The translation and resignification of ruin-related textual fragments, archival materials, photographs, and other material remnants.
- The translation of narratives that foreground the material presence and historical specificity of ruins, and the lived experience of those who built, inhabited, or survived ruins.
- The transposition of ruin objects to new sites and interpretive contexts (e.g., travelling exhibitions, diasporic archives).
Submission details:
Please submit a proposal of up to 300 words as a single Word document (.doc or .docx) to translatingruins@gmail.com with the subject line: “[Your Name] – Chapter Proposal”.
The Word document should include:
- A provisional chapter title
- An abstract (maximum 300 words, excluding references) and up to five keywords
- A short biographical note (maximum 150 words), including your affiliation and contact details
- A brief statement indicating whether the proposed chapter will include any line illustrations, photographs, or tables, and whether colour reproduction will be required
The deadline for abstract submission is 23 February 2026. Full chapters are due 30 September 2026.
Contact Information
Yaqi Xi (yaqi.xi@warwick.ac.uk), University of Warwick, UK.
Shaoyu Yang (shaoyu.yang@warwick.ac.uk), University of Warwick, UK.
Contact Email
translatingruins@gmail.com
Attachments
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