Communication, Representation and Experience

Before Space became a material resource, it was an imaginative one; even now our sense of Space, its possibilities and dangers, is inextricable from the stories we tell and have told about it. Not only do our names for the astral bodies and constellations reflect their incorporation into our mythologies, but popular narratives about Space continue to condition our attitudes towards it, with imagery from Star Wars, Aliens and 2001: A Space Odyssey informing debates about militarisation and privatisation of Space, or the use of AI in its exploration. Stories have also played a vital formative role in inspiring Space scientists and researchers. In short, we seem unable to envisage Space, its technologies and our anxieties without looking to representations of it. This strand is therefore guided by the following questions:

• How has Space been conceptualised in the past and in different nations and cultures? How might we look outward and backward to challenge and diversify our prevailing – often masculine and Western-centric – conceptions of Space? How might we recover alternative histories of Space through examining neglected materials (e.g., oral histories, non-European literatures, pulp magazines, early speculative writing by women)?
• How can we think across linguistic and geographic divides, and examine the tensions, distinctions and hegemonies between different Space cultures? Who owns or manages the systems in which narratives about Space are circulated and transmitted? How do these actors shape and drive perceptions of Space in a given culture?
• How can our knowledge and experience of Space be communicated to diverse publics in creative and factual terms? To what extent do fictional archetypes and narratives, such as dystopian or apocalyptic science-fiction, provide obstacles or opportunities when communicating this knowledge? How might such factors influence teaching Space in the classroom? How can we find new ways of representing Space that will have a transformative impact on perception? How are our narratives in dialogue with the experience of Space, and how have the realities of Space travel destabilised them?
• How can advanced digital methodologies be used to capture the ways people, platforms and power dynamics converge to mediate human interaction with Space? How do online communities engage with space-related content? How is the experience of Space encoded by museums and other heritage sites?
• How we might assert the value of the arts, humanities and social sciences in debates on Space, and move beyond seeing the disciplines as merely subsidiary to Space industry projects?

This strand will address these and other questions by combining innovative and cutting-edge approaches in digital humanities and social science with established techniques of comparative and material cultural analysis, combining creative, literary and historical methodologies. Researchers will work across social, economic, geographical and chronological boundaries, in the process benefiting from the multidisciplinary culture LCHS will foster. The strand will further draw on the potential for cross-cultural research arising from the Centre’s base in one of Britain’s first superdiverse cities.