Klinger Publishes Review of Placing Outer Space
Julie Klinger, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently published a review of of Lisa Messeri’s Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2016).
The review, entitled “Placing Outer Space by Lisa Messeri,” appeared in the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
From the text of the review:
The recent explosion of excitement across social and print media over the seven newly discovered planets corroborates Messeri’s assessment. Journalists and commentators estimated travel times to these new worlds, freely speculated as to whether they might harbor life, and even asked whether we should “invest in a backup planet for Earth.” In my own household, we were awestruck by video artists’ renderings of these new discoveries, even though we knew they were based on immense artistic license. Amidst the excitement of finding not just other planetary bodies, but worlds, it is important to take a step back and think about what we are doing and how we are thinking about what we are doing.
A host of scholarly and trade books encouraging people to think more deeply and personally about outer space have been published in recent years. Some, including K. Maria D. Lane’s Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet (2011), Daniel Sage’s How Outer Space Made America: Geography, Organization and the Cosmic Sublime (2014), and The Palgrave Handbook of Society, Culture, and Outer Space (2017), edited by Peter Dickens and James S. Ormrod, deal seriously with the question of how we make sense of outer space through our imaginations. Among many other things, these works also show that how we imagine places in outer space then shapes the meanings and politics we ascribe to them.
Julie Klinger specializes in development, environment, and security politics in Latin America and China in comparative and global perspective. She is currently completing a book project on the global geography of rare earth prospecting and mining, with a special emphasis on the development and geopolitics of resource frontiers in Brazil, China, and Outer Space.