Two months after the ‘truce’ between Hamas and the Israeli government, the debris of Gaza continues to confront us (and every day new wars and new disasters add to the pile). In this issue we propose to treat it as a historiographical node, focusing not so much on the phenomenon of urban destruction itself as on its first and most immediate product: the debris of the city and its buildings (Gissen 2009). What does it mean, and what does it entail, to raze a city, a neighbourhood, or an apartment block to the ground? What status should be attributed to destroyed sites, and what roles and functions can their remains assume over time? Should they be considered only in negative terms – as the outcome of a process of annihilation, a heap of inert if not harmful waste – or can they instead be understood as sites dense with potential, where processes of recovery, renewal, and resemantization often take root? How, and under what conditions, do the remains of disaster enter reconstruction projects? Who decides how they are managed, according to what logics, and with what urban, political, and symbolic implications? How does the fate of debris shape the transmission of collective memory and the elaboration of mourning? To what extent can the urbicides so characteristic of the last century offer conceptual tools to scholars of earlier periods? And conversely, to what degree can past experiences help us understand the dynamics of the present and address the questions raised by the traumas that continue to multiply around us?

Terms and deadlines
Authors are invited to submit an abstract (max 1,000 words/7,000 characters) together with a concise bibliography, 5 keywords and a short CV to direzione.srsagmail.com (please indicate in the subject line: Call 20 - Debris). If the proposal is accepted, the author will be
asked to write a text of 20,000-50,000 characters (3,000-7,500 words), including spaces and footnotes, accompanied by 10-12 images, carefully following the journal’s guidelines. The texts will be double-blind peer-reviewed and the final decision on each publication will be
made by the Editor-in-Chief, who may also seek the advice of other experts.

• Deadline for abstract submission: May 3, 2026
• Notification of abstract acceptance or refusal: May 10, 2026
• Deadline for paper submission: September 27, 2026

You can download the full CFP in PDF format here:
https://www.aistarch.org/debris-macerie-n-20-2026/
You can read more about the journal here:
https://serena.sharepress.it/srsa/issue/archive
For info:
redazione.srsagmail.com