Future Spaces of Power: The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces
This collection focuses on the cultural, global, political, and social narratives of future space(s).
We suggest that critiques of narratives and discourses about digital and virtual spaces,
artificial intelligence, space exploration, and even the colonization of space and planets can
provide needed insights about global futures, especially as they inform how we ought to and who
ought to live in the present with environmental destruction, information capitalism,
neoliberalism, and the remaining infrastructures of colonialism. The works here complicate the
cultural logic of systemic futures that are outside of dominant political imaginaries, including
images and narratives of new spatial politics. It critically engages with alternative visions that
encourage us to live with and escape from the systemic conditions of neoliberalism and late
capitalism, and it considers what these alternative visions might do or fail to do in combating
anti-democratic futures, environmental degradation, and new forms of imperialism.
Potential paper topics might include narratives and discourses around corporate, individual, and
outer space such as, Big Tech’s rocket launches, Russia and US relations on the ISS, the potential
colonization of Mars, or the tracking of multi-galaxy telescopes. Additional paper topics could
include virtual and cyberspaces, including the development of the metaverse, issues of
information technology, and artificial intelligence, as well as explorations from science fiction
and its subgenres including Afrofuturism, indigenous futures, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic
fiction, ecofiction, feminist science fiction, etc.
Ultimately, within the subjects of future space(s), this collection seeks to question
how neoliberalism preserves the status quo, including creating the conditions of late
capitalism, as well as imperialism and white supremacy. Further, how does neoliberalism work
across different cultures to push down potential radical alternatives?
Methodological approaches to explore these questions and topics may include: discourse,
literary, visual, narrative, and textual analysis; ethnographic work; digital ethnography;
pedagogical analysis; problematizing; diagnoses; theoretical analysis; Foucaldian genealogy;
historical analysis; or poiesis.
Keywords: neoliberalism; metaverse; outer space; virtual space; cyberspace; simulation;
science fiction
Abstracts of approximately 300 words should be submitted to: calphin1@vt.edu;
emckagen@vt.edu; and sward@tusculum.edu by July 31, 2023. Final chapters should be between
6,000-8,000 words.
Editors:
Caroline G. Alphin, PhD
Instructor of Political Science
Instructor of English
E. Leigh McKagen, PhD
Virginia Tech
Instructor, History and Political Science
Shelby E. Ward, PhD
Tusculum University
Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies