Séminaire de recherche OSPAPIK – Critical Outer Space Studies: Framing an Emerging Field – Claire Cazajous-Augé

In this talk, Claire Cazajous-Augé will present the special issue Critical Outer Space Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, which she co-edited with Jens Temme (K.U. Eichstätt, Germany) for the journal Caliban. The issue introduces a new interdisciplinary field concerned with the cultural, political, historical, and ethical dimensions of outer space exploration and its imaginaries. Bringing together perspectives from literary and cultural studies, political theory, gender studies, science and technology studies, as well as astronomy, the field examines how dominant narratives of space expansion can be challenged and reimagined through more inclusive, ecological, and justice-oriented views. She will first explain the genesis of the special issue and its connection with an international and interdisciplinary lecture series and master seminar. She will then discuss the intellectual stakes of the field. Claire will finally provide an overview of the main themes and contributions present in the special issue which exemplify the ways in which critical outer space studies can be applied. More broadly, the presentation will reflect on the role of the humanities and social sciences in shaping contemporary debates about humanity’s future beyond Earth.

Claire Cazajous-Augé is an associate professor in Anglophone literature and environmental humanities at Université Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès, France. After completing her doctoral dissertation, she published a monograph on Rick Bass’s short stories. She has worked on the relationships between human and nonhuman animals in contemporary American environmental literature, which she examines through the lenses of ecopoetics and zoopoetics. She has also conducted several studies on other nonhuman species and spaces in American literature, such as trees and wetlands. Her research now focuses on the ecopoetics of outer space in the context of the Second Space Age. She is a member of the ATÉCOPOL (Toulouse Political Ecology Workshop) and of the arts-and-sciences project “S’Enforester.”