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Chairs(s):

Arun Saldanha, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of Minnesota

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Description:

What does the cosmos demand of us? What kind of “us” does the cosmos demand? More prosaically: what new forms of theory, analysis, method, and ethics are required in critical thinking for the rapidly thickening plans for human settlement of places in outer space? Since Hannah Arendt’s reservations about the transcendental possibilities conferred by the view of Earth from space during the Cold War space race, geographers, anthropologists and scholars in allied disciplines have repeatedly identified space exploration as an extension of terrestrial state power and sovereignty, the ultimate “spatial fix” for technocapitalism’s restless search for profits as well as a more ambitious or refined form of settler-colonialism and white masculinism. With the recent emergence of companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin explicitly aiming at commercial human settlements on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system, and with debates about the habitability of Earth intensifying, these practical concerns with the extraterrestrial are bound to take center stage in the coming decades. Yet the geographical attention to the specifics of space, place, scale, movement, and difference should give us pause about such easy conflation of past and future, earth and cosmos. While Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and many other entrepreneurs propose the financialization of extraterrestrial sites as utopian solutions to terrestrial problems – surface colonies on Mars, asteroid mining, artificial gravity environments in cislunar space, and so forth – the conditions of these places are already demanding recognition of forms of relationality, humanness, animacy and inanimacy, externality, exchange, and agency that exceed their terrestrial precedents and potentialities. Moreover, these places and their conditions are also each different from one another, asking for a granular attention to the utter novelty to humans of nonterrestrial locations and the spaces between them. Alien chemistries, unfamiliar gravities, poisonous atmospheres, potential new forms of evolution, unhinged scales of time and space, message latencies, orbital dynamics, unpredictable spaceflight trajectories (and more) upend the ability of either utopian or dystopian visionaries to impose any readymade strategies and concepts to elsewheres in the cosmos. On the other hand, what are we to make of the frequent assertion that the humanization of the cosmos is inevitable? Or, how does futurology force us to revisit ethical questions which were formulated for terrestrial frameworks? These papers explore the theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues raised by actual and possible space exploration and settlement that exceed seeing them as a simple reiteration of Earth’s histories. We take seriously current concerns in geography and allied disciplines around materialism, ontology, and the posthuman—and that embrace the speculative— to think from the multiple conditions of outer space to explore the dangers but also the potentialities of a humanized cosmos. In short, we ask: what might critical and decolonizing projects for outer space look like if Earth and its conditions were not its starting place?

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda