Call for Papers

RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London, 30th August – 2nd September 2016

Geographies of Outer Space

Co-Sponsored by the Historical Geography Research Group and the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group

This session aims to explore potential for research into the geographies of outer space. There has been a small but burgeoning field of geographical enquiry into outer space (Cosgrove, 1994; MacDonald, 2007; Lane, 2011; Dunnett, 2012; Sage, 2014). Here, researchers have investigated the ways in which outer space has provided a focus for a variety of geographical modes of imagination, including whole-earth environmentalism, nationalist / imperialist visions, spaces of scientific and technological rivalry, and domestic cultures of night-sky observation. If geographers are to continue to push for nexus thinking in arts and science collaborations, then outer space presents one possible focus for this to happen.

We welcome papers that seek to engage with, build upon and challenge current thinking in the ‘geographies of outer space’. These are not limited to, but could include, engagements with the materialities and histories of spaceflight in specific national contexts, representations of outer space within (popular) cultural imaginations, considerations of how outer space relates to art and landscape, or reflections on counter-cultural engagements with outer space.

Those interested in contributing to this session should email a title and abstract to session conveners Oliver Dunnett, Queen’s University Belfast [log in to unmask] and/or Andrew Maclaren, University of Aberdeen [log in to unmask] by Friday 12^th February 2016. 

References:

• Cosgrove, D (1994) 'Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84(2): 270 – 294
• Dunnett, O (2012) 'Patrick Moore, Arthur C Clarke and “British Outer Space” in the mid-twentieth century', cultural geographies 19(4): 505-522
• Lane, K M D (2011) Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet (Chicago, University of Chicago Press)
• MacDonald, F (2007) 'Anti-Astropolitik: Outer Space and the Orbit of Geography', Progress in Human Geography 31: 592 - 615
• Sage, D (2014) How Outer Space Made America: Geography, Organization and the Cosmic Sublime(Farnham, Ashgate)