Future Spaces of Power: The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces

(Hardback)

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Future Spaces of Power explores the global political, cultural, and societal narratives of future space(s), complicating the cultural logic of systemic futures that are outside of dominant political imaginaries, including images and narratives of new spatial and virtual politics.

Contributors critically engage with alternative visions that encourage us to live with and escape from the systemic conditions of neoliberalism and late capitalism, considering what these alternative visions might do or fail to do in combating anti-democratic futures, environmental degradation, and new forms of imperialism. The book suggests that critiques of narratives and discourses within and about virtual and metaspaces, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and even the colonization of space and planets can provide needed insights about global futures and our perceived experiences of space and time, 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.

This collection argues that anti-postmodern readings of future spaces have missed the everyday experiences of certain bodies such as chronic health problems, stress from systemic racism, insecurity and fear, death, and constant movement to avoid detention and institutionalized violence within different spatial contexts by ignoring the differential experiences of time. By analyzing literature, film and other cultural artifacts, such as blogs, networked milieus, and science myths, contributors explore how a variety of media shape and inform our understanding and assumptions about global political, cultural, and social narratives of future space(s). This project ultimately re-emphasizes the importance of temporality in the study of future spaces as it demonstrates how governmentality overtly and covertly eliminates and regulates surplus bodies through the technological, spatial, discursive, and temporal management of space.

Reviews

This one-of-a-kind text asks us to seriously consider the outer limitsboth spatial and conceptualof neoliberal capitalism and its colonial ventures. By bringing together the 'final frontiers' of digital and outer spaces, their explorations and expansions, and, crucially, the political and cultural logics that underpin these quests, the contributions featured in this volume provide important critical insights into the study of contemporary neoliberalism and imperialism. Fun, thought-provoking, and relevant to current political and social concerns, Future Spaces of Power has much to offer to students and scholars of political theory, international relations, and cultural studies. * Franois Debrix, Professor of Political Science, Virginia Tech, USA *

Author Bio

Caroline Alphin is Instructor of English at Radford University.

E. Leigh McKagen is Adjunct Instructor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech.

Shelby E. Ward is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the Center for Civic Advancement at Tusculum University.