[ecrea] Cosmographies CfP deadline 25 April 2014

Call for Papers: Cosmo-graphies: Textual and Visual Cultures of Outer Space
2-day conference, Falmouth University 24-25 July 2014
Supported by the British Interplanetary Society
 Keynote Speakers:

    * Prof. Chris Welch – Professor of Astronautics (ISU, Strasbourg), 
and Vice-President of the British Interplanetary Society
    * Prof. Philip Gross – Professor of Creative Writing (University of 
South Wales), T. S. Eliot prizewinner and author of Deep Field (2011)

Organisers:

Dr. Niamh Downing (Senior Lecturer in English and Writing); Dr. Dario 
Llinares (Senior Lecturer in Film); Dr. Sarah Arnold (Senior Lecturer in 
Film)
 In his introduction to Space Travel and Culture (2009), David Bell 
suggests that the neglect of ‘outer space’ in the humanities and social 
sciences is in part due to the negative stance towards the technological 
utopianism of the mid-twentieth-century ‘space race’, where ‘Apollo 
stands now as a future that never happened, or a history that seems not 
to connect with our present’ (4). For James Hay the emergence or 
invention of ‘outer space’ as a ‘historical, geographic, and theatrical 
stage for shaping discourse about rights and responsibilities, war and 
peace, security and risk’ is profoundly tied to the cold war era (2012: 
29). Yet even while the ‘space race’ may be understood as historically 
and culturally last century, ‘outer space’ continues to serve as a 
sphere of human technological enterprise, a battleground of political 
discourse and, a rich source of socio-cultural production.

The critical neglect of ‘outer space’ has been remedied in part by Bell, 
Denis Cosgrove, Fraser MacDonald, whose work collectively offers the 
beginnings of a ‘critical geography of outer space’ (MacDonald 593). 
MacDonald observes that ‘the last fifty years has seen the outer-Earth 
become an ordinary and accessible sphere of human endeavour, our 
presence in (and reliance on) space making it one of the enabling 
conditions for our current mode of everyday life in the west’ (593). 
Further interventions, such as Alexander Geppert’s, Imagining Outer 
Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (2012), provide a 
historiographical perspective, interrogating the ‘heterogeneous array of 
images and artifacts, media and practices that all aim to ascribe 
meaning to outer space while stirring both the individual and the 
collective imagination’ (8). A cross-disciplinary series of essays 
published in Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and 
Cultures (2012), edited by Lisa Parks and James Schwoch, along with 
Dario Llinares' study, The Astronaut: Cultural Mythology and Idealised 
Masculinity(2011) attempt to bring together geographical, historical and 
cultural/ media studies approaches to examine astro-culture.

A common aspect of these approaches is an acknowledgement of the need to 
encompass cultural, filmic, artistic, and literary engagements with 
outer space as objects of enquiry. The influence of spatial thinking on 
film and literary scholarship, demonstrated by an increasing concern 
with urban space, mobility and the proliferation of terms such as 
‘cinematic-’ or ‘literary geographies’, has rarely resulted in a turn 
towards ‘outer space’. Indeed, the arrival of ‘cyberspace’ could 
arguably be said to have had a profound effect on the cultural 
understanding and importance of ‘outer space’ in the collective 
imaginary. Visual and textual scholarship has arguably under-engaged 
with the fields of cultural geography, cultural history and cultural 
studies that are re-imagining ‘astroculture’/‘celestial space’ as part 
of what Cosgrove calls a ‘cosmography for the twenty-first century’ (35).

This 2-day conference seeks to explore the significance of ‘outer space’ 
in textual and visual culture, including literature 
(fiction/non-fiction/scientific or legal texts), film 
(cinema/documentary/youtube/television/NASA or ISS clips or broadcasts), 
digital media (games/twitter/social media), photography, material 
culture, ephemera and popular culture.

We especially welcome papers that move beyond the paradigms of 
science-fiction studies, and engage with geographical or historical 
approaches to visual or textual cultures of ‘outer space’. We invite 
papers on the following themes (but not limited to):

    * 20th century and post-millennial representations of outer space
    * Poetics/poetries of outer space
    * Non-fiction and outer space, from film documentary to the 
non-fiction novel (for example, Al Reinert’s For All Mankind, Patricio 
Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light, Oriana Fallaci’s If the Sun Dies, 
Norman Mailer’s Of A Fire on the Moon)
    * Digital games and outer space
    * Visual/textual representations of rockets, satellites, 
telescopes, the International Space Station, and other material 
technologies of outer space
    * Posthumanism – visual/textual representations of 
sentient/non-sentient life
    * Weird fictions and outer space
    *  Papers that seek to establish frameworks for a cinematic or 
literary geography of outer space
    * Papers that examine terms such as ‘cosmography’, ‘celestial 
space’, ‘astroculture’, in relation to literature, film, other 
visual/textual media
    * Visual/textual gendering of ‘outer space’
    * Governance, laws, and capital of outer space in visual/textual 
culture
    * Discourse analysis of space law, treaty, governance in technical 
literature
    * Non-western/Non-Soviet space programmes and their representation 
(for example Cristina De Middel’s Afronauts (2012) 
http://www.icp.org/support-icp/infinity-awards/cristina-de-middel)
    * Space tourism/personal space flight
    * Heritage and outer space (archaeologies of outer space, space 
debris, heritage sites, museum orbit)
    * Ecology and outer space (space as wilderness or environment, 
terraforming, pollution, waste, life, texts such as Charles Cockell’s 
Space on Earth (Palgrave 2006), Guy Laliberté 
http://www.onedrop.org/en/projects/projects-overview/GAIA.aspx

 Abstracts of 250-300 words for final presentations of 15-20 minutes 
should be sent to (cosmographies /at/ falmouth.ac.uk) by Friday 25th April 
2014. Please include name, affiliation, title of paper, and brief bio. 
Participants will be notified by Friday 2nd May.

For further information see: http://www.cosmographies.co.uk


There will be two channels for publication of selected papers from the 
conference:
 1. An edited journal issue
 2. An edited collection of essays. We have had preliminary discussions 
with a major commercial academic press and aim to have a proposal based 
on selected abstracts with publishers prior to the conference.



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