ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|114 pages
Fields
chapter 6|13 pages
Planetary Ethnography in a “SpaceX Village”
part II|77 pages
Intersections and Interventions
chapter 13|14 pages
Feminist Approaches to Outer Space
chapter 16|15 pages
Mare Incognito
part III|93 pages
Colonial Histories and Decolonial Futures
chapter 22|14 pages
Reconstellating Astroenvironmentalism
chapter 23|13 pages
Divergent Extraterrestrial Worlds
part IV|54 pages
Objects, Infrastructures, Networks, and Systems
chapter 25|15 pages
Preparing for the “Internet Apocalypse”
part V|130 pages
Cultures in Orbit/Life in Space