A look back at the Keynote #1.
The early 21st century has seen a reinvigoration of space exploration both by private and state actors that seek to explore, exploit, settle, and own outer space and its celestial bodies.
According to scholars and scientists alike, this reinvigoration warrants labeling our time as the “Second Space Age”. Key actors of this Second Space Age have framed the exploration and colonization of outer space as not only progressive and desirable, but also as inevitable to ensure the survival of humanity in face of the multiple crises of the Anthropocene (climate change, over/underpopulation, resource scarcity etc.). Within this “astrofuturist” framework, outer space has become a utopian space that allows for a transformative posthuman experience for all of humanity, for humanity’s escape from its terrestrial limitations, for breaking with humanity’s terrestrial history, and even for human immortality. The way that outer space is a key ingredient for utopian vision of humanity’s future highlights that outer space is a cultural construct negotiated in an interplay between science, technology and culture. These “astrocultural objects”, which are central to ascribing meaning to outer space and to stirring the collective imagination, underline the cultural embeddedness both of outer space and our practices of exploring it. A critical engagement with space exploration must therefore go beyond questions of mere technological feasibility then, and instead also interrogate, for example, the prevalence of visions Mars colonization as a remedy for climate change, the politics of race/class/gender in privatized outer space, the continuities of capitalist-colonial structures in the private space industry, or the dominance of specifically US-American frontier discourses of renewal and expansion in allegedly utopian visions of humanity’s future in space.
If the exploration of outer space is to play a key role in humanity’s future beyond our planetary crises, the humanities have to play a key role in critically engaging with our visions for that future.
- Keynote by Jens Temmen (HHU Düsseldorf)
- Panel: André Füzfa (UNamur)
- Moderator: Christina Stange-Fayos (UToulouse)
- Keynote in English
Jens Temmen is an assistant professor in American Studies at Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf. He received his PhD in American Studies at the graduate school “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” at the University of Potsdam with a thesis on The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s). His second book project focuses on “North American Astroculture in the Second Space Age” and in relation to planetary discourse, a topic on which he has also published widely. He is fellow of the Young Academy of Sciences and Literature (Mainz) and co-editor of the book series Critical Futures (transcript).
Pr. André Füzfa is a theoretical astrophysicist based at the Institute for Complex Systems at the University of Namur (Belgium). He has a wide research background in cosmology, modified gravity and tests of general relativity, electromagnetic detection of gravitational waves, as well as sci-fi, inspired topics like gravitational field generators and interstellar travel. He is the supervisor of the pedagogical astronomical facility at the University of Namur and is strongly involved into science dissemination. In this direction, he has written one educative science-fiction book, and a sequel is forthcoming.
