On September 25 and 26 2025, FutureSpace hosted the 4th annual Ethnographies of Outer Space Symposium. We thoroughly enjoyed 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 scholars working at the intersection of STS, SSOS, anthropology, geography, and artistic research to examine how outer space is shaped, imagined, and inhabited through social, political, and material practices. Our speakers and panellists addressed questions such as: how are future visions of human life in space constructed and communicated? What are the underlying forces, motivations, and objectives driving these endeavors? How are space technologies and infrastructures imagined, enacted, and maintained, and what kind of futures do they make (im)possible?
Through ethnographic methods and artistic engagement with the infrastructures, imaginaries, and everyday practices of space activities, the symposium interrogated how outer space entangles with lives on Earth as a site of power, struggle, care, responsibility, and possibility, especially in times of multiple planetary crises. In doing so, we explored the multidimensional relationship between imaginaries and infrastructures—between large-scale technical objects and the technoscientific communities oriented around them—and how these mediate power relations, geopolitics, and speculative futures.
The symposium was structured around the following panel topics:
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- Gendering the Second Space Age
- Infrastructural Relations
- Space and Power
- Aesthetics and Materialities
- Artistic Interventions
- Extra-terrestrial Perspectives
- 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.
