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- Convenors:
-
Roger Norum
(University of Oulu)
Anna Lisa Ramella (University of Cologne)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Deeper Histories, Diverse Sources, Different Narratives
- Location:
- Room 8
- Sessions:
- Thursday 22 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
We consider cross-cultural mobilities of the environments and explorations of outer space. Papers address relations between earthly natures and expansion practices on/above Earth, showing how planetary challenges are revealed via desires and actions for transitioning life on Earth to life beyond it.
Long Abstract:
Histories of both the environment and of mobility have typically focused on narratives of life on Earth. Only recently has scholarly attention in the humanities and social sciences turned to considering pasts, presents and futures beyond our planet. While missions into space have preoccupied humans for over half a century, they primarily become notable through major achievements, such as the moon landing. The NASA Rover Perseverance Mars landing in 2020 did much to galvanize ideas about venturing further into our galaxy – largely to more fully examine the universe in response to present-day planetary emergencies, sometimes understood as a vehicle for transitioning our societies to exoplanets. Notions of moving beyond Earth do not just have implications for (political) cohabitation on our planet; they are also deeply intertwined with histories of human expansion, colonization and terraforming in different spaces on Earth itself. This complexity merits examining visions of both earthly and extraterrestrial multispecies environments that are cross-cultural in nature. Indeed, while stories and histories of space’s environment are integrally linked to colonization, imaginations of other inhabited worlds are inherently culturally specific and contextual. This panel invites scholars from the environmental humanities, anthropology and beyond to consider mobilities of space and its exploration across distinct cultural contexts. Papers attend to relations between earthly environments and human practices of expansion on/above Earth as a means of understanding how contemporary planetary challenges can be revealed through desires and actions that seek to transition life on Earth to life beyond it.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 22 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
The Nazi regime funded the construction of two cultures of observation and collection in nocturnal Berlin, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial. This paper examines the intersection of arrest culture and astronomical research under a dictatorship that sought to exploit and expand into the night sky.
Paper long abstract:
The secret state police in Nazi Berlin [the Gestapo] exploited the urban night to launch home invasions because operating under darkness minimized the likelihood of encountering resistance. Assembling lists of ‘political opponents,’ including but not limited to German Jews, communists, and homosexuals, they planned to apprehend victims in the midst of slumber, caught unaware and unable to evade detention and deportation. Darkness formed the foundation for the practice of systematically collecting innocents and served as a means to keep the extent of state surveillance and terror hidden from the wider public through reduced visibility.
At the same time that the regime was intertwining its arrest culture with a planetary cycle, it was funding research at astronomical observatories in Berlin to surveil, collect, and catalogue celestial phenomena as part of its program of space exploration. While the regime weaponized the night sky to consolidate power on Earth, so too did it “look up” with the megalomanic ambition of transforming the solar system into a future sphere of influence, of integrating it into an envisioned empire. This paper juxtaposes nocturnal cultures of observation and collection in the city in order to assess the regime’s ambitions in occupying, regulating, and expanding its authority into darkness. Examining the ways in which a political fanaticism simultaneously sought to destroy domestic and atmospheric barriers by financing night shifts at state agencies, it demonstrates that, under Nazism, the imagined idea of ‘total power’ was by no means limited to the terrestrial.
Paper short abstract:
Taking museums as a point of departure, I probe the entanglements of inorganic matter, societal debates about coloniality, and mining for space travel. Through museum ethnography, my research explores the colonial logics permeate relationships between outer and earthbound space.
Paper long abstract:
Belgium’s ‘Africa Museum’ – the natural history and ethnographic museum built by King Leopold the II for propagandist purposes – was refurbished in 2019. The costly renewals wrestled with contemporary conversations about the decolonization of heritage sites and resonated with wider political debates about the country’s colonial past and aspirations for a more just future.
Yet this renovation, and the related conversations about coloniality, eluded the ‘mineral cabinet’ room. Here, stones and ores are displayed in antique curiosity cupboards under a century-old ceiling adorned with depictions of fertile African lands. Next to an imposing piece of Malachite (a mineral form of copper), a newly installed interactive digital map charters the location of contemporary ore mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It signals that the South-Eastern part of the DRC holds essential minerals for future technologies, including tantalum , a staple resource for the aerospace industry.
Taking the Africa Museum’s mineral cabinet as a point of departure, I probe the entanglements of inorganic matter, political debates about Belgian coloniality, and mining for space travel. Through museum ethnography, and by thinking about rocks as objects that connect intra and extra-terrestrial interests and travels, my research aims to explore how imperial logics permeate relationships between outer and earthbound space. From this vantage point, I explore how the temporalities of change that buttress decolonial calls for more justice relate to futurities that are embroiled in logics of space conquest and mining.
Paper short abstract:
B2 had two aims: better understanding of Earth’s life-support capacity, and its application to bioregenerative, off-planet inhabitation. This paper analyzes emergent tensions between Ecological, Earth Systems, and Engineering approaches to constructing Cabin Ecologies, and B2’s surprising outcomes.
Paper long abstract:
Biosphere 2’s “Human Experiment” [B2] was the most comprehensive synthetic, bioregenerative, long-duration, life-support enclosure experiment ever conducted. Conceived and produced by a diverse group of interdisciplinary designers, its building envelope was designed to be materially closed but energetically open, operating similarly to Earth’s gravitational well. Its enclosure, more than two orders of magnitude tighter than the space shuttle, required the invention of synthetic environments, uniquely engineered eco-technologies, and design processes. B2 needed a robust probabilistic design approach, one capable of producing a successful bioregenerative ‘synthetic laboratory’ environment that not only accounted for all the parameters necessary to sustain life, but that simultaneously incorporated means to address the indeterminacy inherent in living systems, and the inevitable interpretive flexibility required for successful on-the-fly technological adaptations. Inspired by Ecological Systems Theory [EST] Diagramming, the Biospherians developed their own generative and representational design approach comprised of bubbles, arrows, and the accounting of stocks and flows between them, which facilitated the quantification of biogeochemical transformations, that simultaneously functioned as a Rosetta Stone for communication among experts across the diverse, and siloed, disciplines and knowledge systems required to produce B2. This paper unpacks tensions, and unintended consequences, of how the Biospherians accomplished their design, leveraging Ecological, Earth Systems, and Engineering approaches. It then analyzes emergent outcomes of living inside the “Human Experiment” which included significant troubleshooting of their life-supporting environment, and some of the surprising environmental outcomes which hold significant value for future long-duration, life-supporting, bioregenerative, off-planet exploration and inhabitation.
Paper short abstract:
The representation of the Earth, the exploration of its most remote places and the idea of the environment are elements that are intertwined in the history of geographical thought and its visual mobilities. This paper reconstructs three of the most fundamental moments in its most recent development.
Paper long abstract:
Space exploration in the 20th century made it possible to collect a vast amount of visual material depicting the Earth floating in space. This new perspective is widely regarded as a key factor in raising awareness of the finiteness of the planet's resources and consequently, in setting limits to economic development in relation to environmental issues. This was only a part of a longer process in geographical thought, which began at the end of the 18th century, with the shift of the representation of the Earth as a sphere in space from the visual imagery of astronomy to geological representations: this process would later include at least two other fundamental steps. Starting from some examples taken from ongoing research, the first part of this paper sets out to show how the exploration of hot deserts, linked to colonization projects of the mid-19th century, contributed to the imagination and representation of the Earth as seen from space in Western scientific illustrations. The second part looks at the role of the exploration of cold deserts (the poles) and its representation at the beginning of the 20th century, seen as a fundamental push towards desiring to explore outer space and other planets. The last part contains a summary of the visual mobilities which have criss-crossed along the various paths taken to explore the environments of our planet, culminating in the desire to go beyond it.