Descripción del proyecto
La convivencia de distintas nacionalidades en el espacio
La Estación Espacial Internacional (ISS) es un centro humano único en el espacio. En su construcción participaron cinco agencias espaciales de quince países y se precisó diez años y treinta misiones para montarla. Con un tamaño similar al de un campo de fútbol, se encuentra en una órbita situada a 400 kilómetros de la Tierra y sirve como centro de pruebas y presentación de tecnologías nuevas. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos Ethno-ISS propone un estudio comparativo etnográfico plurilocal de la ISS. Al ser una cooperación entre Canadá, Europa, Japón, Rusia y los Estados Unidos, la ISS ofrece información de un valor incalculable sobre cuestiones fundamentales para las ciencias sociales. Por ejemplo, cómo afecta la microgravedad a nuestro entendimiento de la cultura material y la socialización en un entorno de cooperación internacional.
Objetivo
The International Space Station (ISS) is arguably the oldest extra-terrestrial society in low earth orbit. To date this radical new form of human habitation and society has not been the object of systematic and comparative ethnographic inquiry. This project aims to correct this and proposes a comparative and multi-sited ethnography of the ISS among the contributors to its modular architecture: The Russian Federation, The United States of America, The European Union and Japan. The ISS offers invaluable insights into fundamental questions at the heart of the social sciences. The most obvious is the effect of micro gravity on our understandings of material culture and sociality. To date material culture has only been theorised in terms of Earth’s gravity. This project affords the opportunity to critically re-examine our terrestrially based theories. Related to this are the distinctive political aesthetics in this setting and its innovative dimensions of ‘worlding’ (Heidegger) and the materialities entailed therein. These relate to wider notions: the nature of transcendence in both anthropological, material and metaphysical terms as well as broader issues concerning territoriality and the expansion of the human and habitability and general understandings of materiality. Methodologically the project focuses on the quotidian and material dimensions of the ISS and its bodily and material techniques, re-examining traditional empirical assumptions within the innovative conditions of the new polymedia environments in which the ISS is situated. More importantly the project situates the respective Mission Controls and their wider communities as co-terminous with the ISS site, examining it as highly complex nexus of inhabitation encompassing both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial realms in a novel configuration and thereby provide the first ever integrative and comparative study of this unprecedented form of human society and the material conditions of its emergent ‘worlding’.
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitución de acogida
WC1E 6BT London
Reino Unido