Social studies of outer space : pluriversal articulations

This introductory chapter offers an overview of emerging openings and challenges across cultural and social studies of outer space and the emerging interdisciplinary field of space humanities, by introducing the key topics that the diversity of contributors in the book brings together through a range of critical responses and apertures to space studies. It draws attention to the need to attend more carefully to the ways in which we craft critical engagements with outer space and with space futures, empirically, affectively, aesthetically, and theoretically. It is argued that a different set of pluriversal articulations are needed to rethink outer space in relation to current ecological and political predicaments on Earth to illustrate empirical research work, artistic experimentation, political theorisation, activism, and policymaking that counters the pervasive universalism of colonial, capitalist, and racial perspectives of outer space.