Meta-Space: 50 Years of STS in Outer Space

• In Event: Science, Technology and Society in Outer Space - I

Abstract

2019 marks a half-century of extraterrestrial extensions: from the first lunar landing to a satellite-monitored globe. During this time, outer space studies has become a subspecialty conjoining the social sciences and humanities. This paper provides an overview of the topics and emergent focuses of outer space studies. It will outline the ways in which studies of social practices beyond the terrestrial container offers new takes on traditional anthropological and STS research topics, and ways in which it inaugurates new subjects and objects of study. For example, outer space studies have focused on the normative figures of the white male astronaut and technocrat, but are also offering analyses based on feminist, queer, indigenous, speculative, and other outer spatial perspectives. Although outer space is often examined as a zone of global north imperial and capital extensions, it is also becoming a site for tracking the emergence of new environmental governance regimes and new satellite-based knowledge and communication geographies. By surveying these literatures, the paper argues that space studies is a field that is only paradoxically spacious: it has been open-ended in some ways but also highly constrained in others. After describing the critical features of this paradox, the final focus of the talk will be to open dialogue with researchers seeking to center or include space in their terrestrial-based work: what can be done in outer spaces?

Author

• Valerie Olson, UC Irvine