Description
As space becomes an increasingly contested site of extraction, speculation and governance, the need for critical frameworks adequate to the emerging challenges of postplanetary futures is growing. This international conference brings together scholars from the social sciences, arts, engineering, and international space law to think, research and act at the edges of the planetary.The concept of the postplanetary encompasses the entanglement of Earth's political and ecological systems with extraterrestrial processes in a threefold way: as a critical lens for interrogating how relations between Earth and space are being reconfigured; as a temporal horizon opened by the Anthropocene, considering climate degradation, mass extinction and speculative futures beyond this planet; and as a conceptual move beyond Earth as a self-evident frame for politics, ecology, and community.
Key thematic concerns include emerging extractive economies and their political implications; infrastructures of space practice across their full life cycles, including maintenance, decay, and repair; the governance and legal regimes shaping access to and control of outer space; and the colonial and geopolitical legacies that postplanetary imaginaries both inherit and rework. The conference foregrounds situated, grounded knowledge production, challenging dominant narratives and conventional distinctions between Earth and outer space, surface and volume, proximity and distance.
Bringing together academic papers alongside multimodal, practice-based, and artistic formats – including installations, performances, and film – the conference offers a trans-disciplinary space for exchange. It is hosted by the Junior Professorship for Methods of Cultural Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Anna Lisa Ramella, and her team, Suzanne Schaaf, Rosa Areal M., Lotte Brauer, and Kiera Scherer.
| Period | 16.09.2026 → 18.09.2026 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |