Autorentext

Juan Francisco Salazar is an interdisciplinary researcher and documentary filmmaker. He is a Professor of Communications, Media, and Environment at Western Sydney University, Australia.

Alice Gorman is an archaeologist and heritage consultant. She is an Associate Professor at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.

Klappentext

This book offers a state-of-the-art overview of contemporary social and cultural research on outer space. With over thirty contributors, it explores the question of why and how to study outer space and provides scholars, practitioners and upper-level students with novel perspectives and critical interventions on a wide range of debates.

Zusammenfassung

The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space offers state-of-the-art overview of contemporary social and cultural research on outer space. International in scope, the thirty-eight contributions by over fifty leading researchers and artists across a variety of disciplines and fields of knowledge, present a range of debates and pose key questions about the crafting of futures in relation to outer space. The Handbook is a call to attend more carefully to engagements with outer space, empirically, affectively, and theoretically, while characterizing current research practices and outlining future research agendas. This recalibration opens profound questions of intersectional politics, race, equity, and environmental justice around the contested topics of space exploration and life off-Earth. Among the many themes included in the volume are the various infrastructures, networks and systems that enable and sustain space exploration; space heritage; the ethics of outer space; social and environmental justice; fundamental debates about life in outer space as it pertains to both astrobiology and SETI; the study of scientific communities; the human body and consciousness; Indigenous astronomical systems of Knowledge; contemporary space art; and ongoing critical interventions to overcome the legacies of colonialism and dismantle hegemonic narratives of outer space.

Inhalt

1. Social Studies of Outer Space: Pluriversal Articulations Part 1: Fields 2. Trilogie Terrestre 3. Refielding in More-Than-Terran Spaces 4. Space and Time Through Material Culture: An Account of Space Archaeology 5. Anthropology and Contemporary Space Exploration, with a Note on Hopi Ladders 6. Planetary Ethnography in a "SpaceX Village": History, Borders, and the Work of "Beyond" 7. The Spaces of Outer Space 8. Sociological Approaches to Outer Space 9. Space Ethics 10. Other Worlds, Other Views: Contemporary Artists and Space Exploration Part 2: Intersections and Interventions 11. As Above, So Below: Space and Race in the Space Race 12. A Chronopolitics of Outer Space: A Poetics of Tomorrowing 13. Feminist Approaches to Outer Space: Engagements with Technology, Labour, and Environment 14. The Iconography of the Astronaut as a Critical Enquiry of Space Law 15. Diversity in Space 16. Mare Incognito: Live Performance Art Linking Sleep with the Cosmos through Radio Waves Part 3: Colonial Histories and Decolonial Futures 17. Celestial Relations with and as Miliyawuy, the Milky Way, the River of Stars **18. Coloniality and the Cosmos 19. Safeguarding Indigenous Sky Rights from Colonial Exploitation 20. Anishinaabeg in Space 21. Earthless Astronomy, Landless Datasets, and the Mining of the Future 22. Reconstellating Astroenvironmentalism: Borders, Parks, and Other Cosmic Imaginaries 23. Divergent Extraterrestrial Worlds: Navigating Cosmo-practices on Two Mountaintops in Thailand Part 4: Objects, Infrastructures, Networks, and Systems 24. Glitch in Space 25. Preparing for the "Internet Apocalypse": Data Centres and the Space Weather Threat 26. Space Infrastructures and Networks of Control and Care 27. Mexico Dreams of Satellites 28. Space Codes: The Astronaut and the Architect Part 5: Cultures in Orbit/Life in Space 29. Cosmic Waters 30. Unearthing Biosphere 2, Biosphere 2 as Un·Earthing 31. Living and Working in "The Great Outdoors": Astronautics as Everyday Work in NASA's Skylab Programme 32. Adapting to Space: The International Space Station Archaeological Project 33. An Ethnography of an Extra-terrestrial Society: The International Space Station 34. Plant Biologists and the International Space Station: Institutionalising a Scientific Community 35. Whiteboards, Dancing, Origami, Debate: The Importance of Practical Wisdom for Astrophysicists and Instrument Scientists 36. Understanding the Question of Whether to Message Extraterrestrial Intelligence 37. Astrobiology and the Immanence of Life amidst Uncertainty 38. A Post-Geocentric Gravitography of Human Culture