Outer Space Futures Otherwise (Juan Francisco Salazar)

16. Jun

The Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) invites you to the upcoming Climate Futures Talk by Juan Francisco Salazar (Western Sydney University).

  • Tuesday, June 16 / 2 – 4 pm / C40.530
  • Registration is not necessary.
  • The event will be held in a hybrid format. If you’d like to join online, please contact us at cdcforum@leuphana.de to receive the login credentials.

In context of increasingly conflicting visions for human futures in outer space a polysemic understanding is urgent to note the intricately entangled vertical political ecology that traverses from Earth’s inner core and mantle, through and across Earth’s oceans and surfaces, up into lower Earth orbit, further on to the Moon, and into deep space. In bringing to the fore the urgency of questioning how the hegemonic formations of outer space might be broken apart and be given new meanings and political directions, this lecture queries those frameworks that reproduce ongoing historical harms from the exploitation of people and nature on Earth. The presentation follows from the screening and workshop to call for new forms for imagining and enacting space futures otherwise. Understanding outer space as method is also a provocation to highlight the violence of colonialism and racism that still envelops so much work on and in space. 

Juan Francisco Salazar is Director (Interim) of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University in Australia where is Professor of Media and Environment and past Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2020-2024). His latest books are the co-edited collection Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space (Routledge 2023); the co-authored book Antarctic Cities: From Gateways to Global Custodians (University of Nebraska Press,2026) and the authored book Space Futures Otherwise (forthcoming with Routledge). His latest film is Cosmographies (2025) a collaboration with artist Victoria Hunt and produced in collaboration with the Indigenous Lickanantay Community of Toconao in Chile.

An event organised in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Culture and the research area Climate Futures in Digital Cultures  [EN link to ET website: https://www.leuphana.de/en/portals/embracing-transformation/key-subject-areas.html