Our world’s recent events seem to be bringing some of those ‘sets of social relations’ into the open to be reckoned with. It follows, then, that we must continue to reckon with the influences maps will exert in this process.

This short essay outlines an agenda for critical social research on cosmic collisions that links emerging theories of resilience and the elemental with the substance of impacts historical and anticipated. Our aim is to call for more widespread reflection on our ‘planetary precarity’ and to position that precarity much more firmly alongside an all too often terra-bound, or discretely ‘earth-limited’ environmental politics.

The following discusses enclosure, disimagination, and Ethnofuturism to problematise futures of asteroid mining: highlighting how popular NSE discourses draw upon a Eurocentric rendition of a ‘Grand Historical Narrative’. Through this, we may begin to challenge the totalising concept of ‘humanity’ oft-invoked by asteroid mining advocates and turn a more critical lens to these purported futures and the discourses (re)created to justify them.

I wish to take a closer look at one of the more dominant and prolific architectural imaginaries that surrounds many of these future interpretations of a society in space, notably that of the dome. Specifically, I wish to use the dome as a lens through which to explore our possible relationship with extra-terrestrial living and how the social and political problems of Earth may find themselves transposed in its architecture. 

I want to use the concept of “imperial debris” (Stoler 2008) to examine rocket debris on the Kazakh steppe. Imperial debris denotes the material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities and things that result from an imperial formation, not necessarily of the capitalist hue.

Those eagerly hailing Space as a solution to a ‘post-scarcity’ world, might do well to reflect on the current state of Earth; any solution to planetary dilemmas that continues the export of capitalism and its environmental imprint off-Earth should proceed with caution. We only need reflect on the damage extraction has wrought on various Earthly frontiers- now including the deep ocean, a space about which we know so very little, to appreciate the need for care and humility.

In this essay, we explore the nexus of relations between national governments, capital and technological development involved in the opening up of new resource frontiers in outer space. While debates about off-world mining are often concerned with whether it will ‘succeed’ or not, we are more interested in what it tells us about contemporary frontier-making and what the rendering of extreme environments ever more legible to state and capitalist interests means for resource politics and struggles in the decades ahead.

In the clamor of countervailing projects and logics at work in generating contemporary urban inhabitation and operation, what constitutes viable modes of political practice able to navigate the intricate physical and social landscapes of discrepant times and strange spatial juxtapositions?

In Cairo, urbanizing the desert edge is subject to the possibilities of dreaming, becoming, and occupying yet-to-become ‘spaces of maybe’. In Karachi, The massive city brings together a disparate group of people, all differentially positioned, who collectively endure urban uncertainty. In Istanbul, the politics of the maybe converts low-income home buyers and poor segments of the society into long-term debtors and subordinates them to the mechanisms of financial discipline.

The recent rise in anti-Asian violence against all ages and genders in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has a deep-seated history in US culture, white supremacy, and harmful stereotypes about Asian migrants as carriers of disease and contagion.