What are the political implications and effects of efforts to expand our human awareness and presence beyond the Earth’s atmosphere?
The Outer Space Politics Project is a collaboration between Enrike van Wingerden and Darshan Vigneswaran dedicated to the development of critical theories on outer space, power, and politics. We are interested in the political, economic, and cultural factors that drive human exploration and exploitation of outer space environments and resources. We investigate the forms of technology and power being developed to place man-made infrastructures and humans in outer space, to extract value from these sorts of ventures and the resulting frameworks of power and authority these efforts engender.
This project is built by reviewing and critically examining why International Relations scholars have neglected and struggled to understand the importance of outer space and by exploring how ‘decolonial’ and ‘more-than-human’ theories can help fill this lacuna. We will develop this project by establishing networks across the social and natural sciences and into the space sector, in order to further our understanding of politics and space.