Mapping Spectral Traces is an international and interdisciplinary Virginia Tech Humanities Symposium that considers how difficult pasts can be researched, documented, represented, and animated in responsible and ethical ways. Held at historic, educational, and artistic venues in Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and Roanoke, the series calls on Virginia Tech faculty and students, local community members and leaders, and invited international artists and scholars to engage with a larger public to consider and develop socially engaged and creative research practices that might enable us to become witnesses of the geographies of loss that continue to structure local and global worlds. The range of events and venues, and forms of collaboration and conversation is intended to allow participants to explore multi-sensual aesthetic forms, alternative narratives, and activist topographies that delve into terrains not usually observable on Cartesian maps. International and local artists, scholars, and practitioners will consider the following questions through exhibitions, workshops, excursions, lectures, and forums.