Future Spaces of Power

The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces

Caroline Alphin, E. Leigh McKagen, Shelby E. Ward

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9798216255369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Future Spaces of Power explores political, cultural, and societal narratives of future space(s) on a global scale to complicate the cultural logic of systemic futures that exist outside the boundaries of dominant political imaginaries.

Contributors critically engage with alternative visions found in literature, film, and other cultural artifacts that encourage us to either live with or escape from the systemic conditions of neoliberalism and late capitalism and consider what these alternative visions might do – or fail to do – in combating anti-democratic futures, environmental degradation, and new forms of imperialism. Through these analyses, the volume collectively argues that anti-postmodern and postmodern readings of future spaces overlook the everyday lived experiences of certain bodies – including chronic health problems, effects from systemic racism, and other experiences of insecurity, fear, and death in the face of institutionalized violence – by disregarding differential experiences of time within different spatial contexts.

Contributors suggest that critiques of narratives occurring within and about virtual and metaspaces, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and even the colonization of outer space can provide critical insights concerning global futures and our perceptions of space and time, especially as they inform how we should live in the present amid environmental destruction, information capitalism, neoliberalism, and the remaining infrastructures of colonialism. Ultimately, this book interrogates how a variety of media shape and inform our understanding and assumptions about conceptualizations of future space(s) as it demonstrates how governmentality eliminates and regulates surplus bodies – both overtly and covertly – through the technological, spatial, discursive, and temporal management of space.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Future Spaces of Power
• Part I: Outer Spaces
• Chapter 1: (Re)Creating Home and Empire: Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Star Trek
• Chapter 2: Disimagination and Corporate Futurity: The Neoliberal Enclosure of Outer Space
• Chapter 3: From the Belt to Across the Sol: Lessons from The Expanse for Reforming the Outer Space Treaty
• Chapter 4: Cosmic Dismemberment: Decolonizing Space Exploration in Cuban Speculative Fiction
• Chapter 5: The Pedagogy of Alien Response Movies: Limitations in Liberal International Politics
• Part II: Digital Spaces
• Chapter 6: The Biopolitics of Modern Social Darwinism: A Critique of Neo-Reactionism and Its Anti-Democratic Spaces
• Chapter 7: You Reap What You Sow: Affect, Neoliberal Techno-Utopias, and Community Building in Stardew Valley
• Chapter 8: Telehealth Publics: Networked Milieus of Care Production
• Chapter 9: Kitot’sattook: Indigitalized Spaces, Time Travel, and Kinship Computing Interconnection
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors