From September 16-18, Helene Sorgner, Hannah Schmalstich and Pepijn Deroo attended the annual Ethnographies of Outer Space Symposium, organized by the Social Studies of Outer Space (SSOS) Network and hosted this year by Dr. Anna Lisa Ramella at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. As always, it was wonderful to catch up with colleagues from the SSOS Network and hear about their ongoing research. We were also glad to welcome quite a few new members to the community; it’s great to see SSOS growing year after year, both in size and diversity of research topics!
Next to enjoying the nicely curated symposium programme, including a great audiovisual panel and conference exhibition, we also presented and discussed our own work. This time around, Helene presented the paper she is developing together with Hannah on the emerging launcher market in Europe as instantiated through the European Launcher Challenge. Hannah presented her thesis research on competing narratives between competition and sovereignty in the discourse surrounding the IRIS2 constellation. Pepijn also presented his thesis project, which looks into meaning-making in the modelling practices of space engineers.
Thank you again to all the participants for making this symposium such an open, engaging and friendly environment to share our work in. Thanks as well to Anna and the rest of the organizing team at Leuphana University for being such great hosts!
