Science, Technology and Society in Outer Space - II

Abstract

Outer space is a domain of human experience and knowledge production that is constantly transforming how we understand life on Earth. New institutions, industries and technologies are currently changing the way Low Earth Orbit, the Moon and Mars are imagined, reached and used for scientific, economic and national interest purposes. This panel invites contributions that use STS and related approaches to investigate the complex dimensions of emerging understandings of outer space and of space on Earth. Embracing a space-inclusive STS, we invite contributions in the form of empirical studies, theoretical considerations, questions of method, artistic interventions, and experimental work that examine how outer space: is co-produced as an object of knowledge within intersecting socio-technical imaginaries; is a site for problematizing and speculating about future modes of existence on this planet; and is a platform to theorize co-emerging socio-natures from terrestrial analogue sites to planetary environments beyond Earth. The panel welcomes a range of perspectives that elucidate how STS can interrupt entrenched ideas about outer space: critical accounts on ideas, practices and infrastructures of outer space; analyses of the ways in which venture capitalism mobilizes understandings of space exploration and reshapes space as an expanded environment that can be calculated and valued; ethnographies that illuminate what a cosmopolitics of outer space might look like by paying attention to how things, organisms, devices, discourses, practices provide a sense of what’s knowable about outer space; or creative works and art-science collaborations that engage diverse audiences with space activities.

Individual Presentations

• Microbial Encounters in NASA’s Search for Life in Outer Space - Dana Burton, George Washington University

• The Russian Ecology of Leaving Earth: Magic Rites and Frontier Experiences at the Baikonur Cosmodrome - Saulesh Yessenova, University of Calgary

• Outer Space from the South: An Ecology of Practice in Africa’s Space Science Infrastructures - James Lawrence Merron, University of Basel

• Biomedical Research on the International Space Station: Knowledge Accumulation and Cross-Boundary Expertise - Paola A Castano, Cardiff University School of Social Sciences; Mark Shelhamer, Johns Hopkins University

Session Organizer

• Paola A Castano, Cardiff University School of Social Sciences