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Future Spaces of Power

The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces

Future Spaces of Power cover

Future Spaces of Power

The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces

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Pre-order. Available Nov 13 2025
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Description

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Contributors

Introduction: Future Spaces of Power
Caroline Alphin, E. Leigh McKagen, Shelby E. Ward
Part 1: Outer Spaces
1. (Re)Creating Home and Empire in Contemporary Star Trek
E. Leigh McKagen (Virginia Tech, USA)
2. Disimagination and Corporate Futurity: The Neoliberal Enclosure of Outer Space
Craig Henry Jones (Lancaster University, UK)
3. From the Belt to Across the Sol: Lessons from The Expanse for Reforming the Outer Space
Treaty
Troy Thurman (Independent Scholar, USA)
4. Cosmic Dismemberment: Decolonizing Space Exploration In Cuban Speculative Fiction
Lu Han (Cornell University, USA)
5. The Pedagogy of Alien Response Movies: Limitations in liberal international politics
Shelby E. Ward (Tusculum University, USA)

Part 2: Digital Spaces
6. The Biopolitics of Modern Social Darwinism: A Critique of Neo-reactionism and Its Anti-Democratic Spaces
Caroline Alphin (Virginia Tech and Radford University, USA)
7. You Reap What You Sow: Affect, Neoliberal Techno-Utopias and Community Building in Stardew Valley
Deanna Holroyd (The Ohio State University, USA) and Holly Parker (University of Lincoln, USA)
8. Telehealth Publics: Networked Milieus of Care Production
Shaun Respess (North Carolina State University, USA)
9. Kitot'sattook: Indigitalized Spaces, Time Travel and Kinship Computing Interconnection (KCI)
Patricia May-Derbyshire (Simon Fraser University, Canada)

Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published Nov 13 2025
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 208
ISBN 9781666957587
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions 229 x 152 mm
Series Critical Futures: Creative Interventions and Revolutionary Possibilities
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Caroline Alphin

Caroline Alphin is Instructor of English at Radfor…

Anthology Editor

E. Leigh McKagen

E. Leigh McKagen is Adjunct Instructor in the Depa…

Anthology Editor

Shelby Ward

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