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2023 (English) Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Efter rymdutopin : Postsovjetiska Ryssland och framtider i rymden
Abstract [en] Since the early 2000s, new projects of space expansionism have emerged, including the commercial-, military-driven and scientific projects to colonize the Moon and Mars. The new space expansionism followed a period of comparatively lower attention to space in international politics, and it is sometimes called the New Space Race by analogy to the 20th century Space Race between the USSR and the US. With the first Space Race, outer space became explicitly politicized and served as a locus of futuristic utopian social and political imagination, not least in the USSR and the socialist bloc. In this dissertation, I investigate the possible ways of constructing alternative social and political futures in and through space in post-Soviet Russia. Drawing theoretically on postcolonial critique of space expansionism, the concepts of biopolitical production and of assemblage, and methodologically on narrative analysis, I argue that social and political futurism in and through space today presupposes changing attitudes to space and time in a way that challenges analyses from the angles of political science and IR. In this thesis, I highlight socially and politically futuristic practices which exist on the margins of political power and have greater autonomy from official discourse, arguing for the understanding of utopia in postmodernity as an assemblage.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2023. p. 210
Series
Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations, ISSN 1652-7399 ; 214
Keywords space, Russia, utopia, postcolonialism, assemblage
National Category
Political Science (excluding Public Administration Studies and Globalisation Studies)
Research subject
Politics, Economy and the Organization of Society; Baltic and East European studies
Identifiers urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-51323 (URN) 978-91-89504-27-1 (ISBN)978-91-89504-28-8 (ISBN)
Public defence
2023-05-12, MA624, Alfred Nobels allé 7, Huddinge, 10:00 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
Funder The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, 65/2017
2023-04-202023-04-122023-12-12 Bibliographically approved