Expert Hearing for the UNESCO World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology (COMEST)

May 23, 2024 | Talks

Last week, we had an incredible two days of presentations, discussions, and collaboration about all things Social Studies of Outer Space (SSOS) from a wide range of academic fields. The symposium brought together interdisciplinary perspectives including the social sciences, humanities, engineering, and the arts to explore how outer space is governed, imagined, understood and made meaningful.

Panel topics included:

  • Aesthetics and Materialities
  • Gendering the Second Space Age
  • Artistic Interventions
  • Infrastructural Relations
  • Extra-terrestrial Perspectives
  • Space and Power
  • Futures and Strategies

We opened the symposium with a specially designed speculative foresight workshop—a playful exercise to spark future-oriented thinking throughout the event. Together, we explored how the futures of outer space might be imagined, shaped, and researched in a speculative Ethnographies of Outer Space Symposium set in the year 2050. We look forward to sharing the resulting imaginary abstracts soon!

Thank you to all of our participants and discussants for their ideas and their lively conversations! The symposium showed how, more than ever, outer space is a domain that both demands and enables many different kinds of ethnographic approaches. It was our true privilege to host the symposium here in Vienna and continue the interdisciplinary exchange that the SSOS network facilitates for eight years now. See the final schedule and participants here.