In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Lisa Messeri concludes that outer space, far from being removed from Earthly matters, offers a different scale and perspective for examining technocultural relations.
Content Index
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Antonia Walford and Donnacha Kirk explore how taking physical cosmology and the entities that populate its fringes on their own terms might prompt anthropology to rethink what and how it thinks of life.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Leah V. Aronowsky uses the history of an unrealized technology, the bioregenerative life-support system, to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of humans’ capacity to technologically master their environments.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Salazar explores world-making processes through which extreme frontiers of life are made habitable, arguing that microbial worlds are becoming part of worlding processes and projects that further these frontiers.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Jessica O’Reilly compares the paramilitary practicalities of Antarctic research station and field camp life with the visions of the Antarctic as a place of sublime wild nature, violent death, and climate disaster.
Across eleven chapters, the contributors to this edited volume survey the histories of state forestry policy in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Germany, Poland, and Great Britain from the early modern period to the present.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Istvan Praet focuses on the ultraviolet spectrum to examine how astrobiologists look at celestial bodies, planetary atmospheres, the skin, and the eye. He offers a reflection on how outer space can be apprehended from a humanities perspective.
Gisli Palsson’s afterword for the Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, concludes that outer space matters for anthropology and, likewise, anthropology matters for those concerned with space politics and space research.
In his comment on the Papal encyclical Laudato si’, Bruno Latour considers Pope Francis’s attention to the earth and the poor, and what this means for the Catholic Church.
In 1966, a stray beluga whale swimming up and down the polluted Lower Rhine caught the media’s attention in West Germany.