Ethnographies of Outer Space: Situating Postplanetary Futures
16. Sep - 18. Sep
What does it mean to think at the edges of the planetary? This international conference brings together scholars of outer space to dicuss the postplanetary across academic papers, multimodal, artistic and audiovisual formats at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Kunstraum and Scala Cinema.
As space becomes an increasingly contested site of extraction, speculation and governance, the need for critical frameworks adequate to the emerging challenges of postplanetary futures is growing. This international conference brings together scholars from the social sciences, arts, engineering, and international space law to think, research and act at the edges of the planetary.
The concept of the postplanetary encompasses the entanglement of Earth's political and ecological systems with extraterrestrial processes in a threefold way: as a critical lens for interrogating how relations between Earth and space are being reconfigured; as a temporal horizon opened by the Anthropocene, considering climate degradation, mass extinction and speculative futures beyond this planet; and as a conceptual move beyond Earth as a self-evident frame for politics, ecology, and community.
Key thematic concerns include emerging extractive economies and their political implications; infrastructures of space practice across their full life cycles, including maintenance, decay, and repair; the governance and legal regimes shaping access to and control of outer space; and the colonial and geopolitical legacies that postplanetary imaginaries both inherit and rework. The conference foregrounds situated, grounded knowledge production, challenging dominant narratives and conventional distinctions between Earth and outer space, surface and volume, proximity and distance.
Bringing together academic papers alongside multimodal, practice-based, and artistic formats – including installations, performances, and film – the conference offers a trans-disciplinary space for exchange.
The conference is hosted by the research project “Ruins in Space, Sustainability and outer space imaginaries” of KSA Climate Futures in Digital Cultures (Embracing Transformation) led by Prof. Dr. Anna Lisa Ramella, and her team, Suzanne Schaaf, Rosa Areal M., Lotte Brauer and Kiera Scherer.
Program
Wednesday 16 September
12.00 Registration
13.00 – 13.30 Welcome & Opening Remarks
Anna Lisa Ramella, Suzanne Schaaf, Rosa Areal M. (Leuphana U Lüneburg)
13:30 – 15:00 : Panel 1: Narrating | Curating | Enacting
David (Jeeva) Jeevendrampillai (U Manchester): Curating Earth, curating world
Tara B. M. Smith (U Leicester): Lives Beyond Revelation: Cosmic Conduits and Alien Anthropologists in Spiritualism and Science Fiction
Felipe Cervera (UCLA): Terraformance
Hannah Schmalstich (U Vienna): IRIS-ing in and out: Narrating and performing the bounds of Europe through the IRIS2 satellite constellation
15:00 – 15:30 Coffee
15:30 – 17:00 Panel 2: Imagining | Speculating
Veronika Nowak (Vienna): Imagining Cislunar Futures: A City on the Moon and its Postplanetary Society
Ingrid M. Tolstad, Aina Landsverk Hagen (U Oslo): The speculative space of feminist imaginaries: A science fiction literature intervention towards post-patriarchal ways of organizing society
Jan Beek, Céline Molter, Konstanze N’Guessan (U Mainz): Learning anthropology from our colleagues in speculative outer space
Jake Jansen (U of Texas, San Antonio): Planetary Life Support: Extraterrestrial Anticipation and the Governance of Hostile Environments
17:15 – 18:15 Workshops
Ralo Mayer (Vienna)
Space Acts: A multimodal arts-based approach to meteorites and space mining as un·Earthing
Stelios Lekakis (Ionian U, Corfu)
A Fanfare at the Edge of the World: Object Stories, Heritage Loss
18:30 Reception, Lecture & Exhibition (Kunstraum)
Michael Hirschbichler (HafenCity U Hamburg)
Contaminated Cosmologies: Red River – Red Planet
Thursday 17 September
09:00 – 10:30 Panel 3: Making | Practicing
Feng Schöneweiß (MPIWG Berlin): Lunar Anthropocene with Chinese Characteristics
Pepijn Deroo (U Vienna): The spacecraft behind the screen: modelling as a meaning-making practice in space engineering
Helene Sorgner (U Vienna): “A taxi at the price of a bus ride”: Imagining and constructing the market for future European launchers
Natalie Treviño (Open University, Milton Keynes): Luna Roots: Practices of Everyday resistance to Lunar Colonialism
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee
11:00 – 12:30 Panel 4: Re|Learning
Matjaz Vidmar (U Edinburgh): The (Place-)Making of Transplanetary Ecology
Aaron Parkhurst (University College London): Let the Dancer Fly: Sweat Helmets, Skinsuits, Vibrations and Boundaries in 0g
Lauren Reid (U Leicester): Lobster Eyes and Petripods: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Estrangement in Space Research
Daniel Irrgang (Leuphana U Lüneburg): Cosmic Rays
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
13.30 – 15:00 Panel 5: Un|Knowing
Laura Bullon-Cassis (Graduate Institute Geneva): Accessing the Planet: UN Big Tech Partnerships and the Postplanetary Politics of Climate Adaptation
Anna Szolucha (Jagellonian U, Krakow): The Monsoon and the Magnet: Tactical Accuracy at the Trivandrum Observatory
Brad Tabas (Institut Polytechnique, Paris): The Constitution, and Constitutive Difficulties, of the Postplanetary Episteme
Judith Lange (TU Berlin): Refiguring the Planetary through satellite constellations: Relational spatialities of the infrastructuring of orbital spaces
15:00 – 15.30 Coffee
15.30 – 16.30 Walk and talk
16.30 – 18.30 Panel 6: Audiovisual contributions (SCALA cinema)
Bethany Rigby (Goldsmiths, London): Surface Imaginaries
Sitraka Rakotoniaina (Central St. Martins, London): When Terrain Becomes Ground
Matthias de Groof (U Antwerp): Tantalum: Space colonization from the Congolese mine to Mars
Angelo Vermeulen (Delft U), Diego Maranan (U Philippines), Pieter Steyaert (U Copenhagen), Karine Van Doninck (U Bruxelles) and SEADS: Cultural Immortality and the Alien Other: A Video Essay on Space Settlement Imaginaries
7.30 Dinner
Friday 18 September
9:00 – 10:30 Panel 7: Re|Framing
Julia Bradley (U Exeter): A Gendered Analysis of Artemis II
Eleanor S. Armstrong (U Leicester): Misogyny and Space Research: A View from the Epstein Files
Anne W. Johnson (U Mexico City): Cosmic Diplomacy in the Ruins of the Planetary: The Autonomous International Space Agency as Postplanetary Critique
Anna Bark Persson (Uppsala): Straightening the Post-Planetary Future? Towards a Conceptualization of Space as Queer
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee
11:00 – 12:30 Panel 8: Governing | Postplanetary Politics
Diliara Valeeva (U Amsterdam): For all humanity–or for those who can pay? Moral geographies of outer space exploration
Réka Patrícia Gál (TU Munich): Clocked in Space: Skylab and the Labour Politics of Communication in Orbit
Annika Pohl Harrisson (U Southern Denmark): Bordering More Than Space: UAP and Postplanetary Imaginaries
Christina Zschieschang (Bielefeld U): The Role of the Future in World Politics: A Study on the Case of Deep Space Exploration Politics
12.30 – 14:00 ECR focused Lunch
14:00 – 16:00 Business meeting SSOS network (Social Studies of Outer Space)
Registration
Please register here if you would like to attend: https://forms.office.com/e/T9fUF1qCMZ