New Space: Developing New Methodologies for Research on the Future

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Dr. David Valentine (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) will conduct research on the narrative practices of proponents of U.S. commercial outer space enterprises ("NewSpace") to investigate the implications of imagining humanness beyond Earth, and doing so in a particular way; and the possibilities for studying imaginations of the future as a social and collective process. In order to carry out this research, Valentine will develop a social scientific approach to the analysis of imagination and the future. Research sites will include include space conferences, spaceports, launch events, teleconferences, and online blogs and webcasts. He will record presentations, interview key participants and observers, and carry out both spot and participant observation. These data will be transcribed and become the basis for interrelated data bases, which will be coded for themes using a non-hierarchical coding scheme; for discourse strategies (incluidng analogies, hypotheticals, conditionals, evidentials, and professional registers) and for networks. Social scientists have ignored "space," "imagination," and "the future" as sites of investigation, seeing them as empty of real sociality or material significance. Valentine's research will develop new methodologies for studying these topics; and findings will help social scientists determine what might learned by taking these topics seriously, as consequential both materially, for the day-to-day work of New Spacers themselves, and also the society at large, today and possibly in the future.