From the Cosmic Race to the Space Race

Abstract:

This talk introduces a mesoscale analytical framework for understanding space imaginaries that transcends conventional macro/micro divisions and linear progress narratives. Drawing on Mexican case studies, I examine how historical memory and cultural practices shape contemporary space imaginaries at an intermediate scale that complicates both grand technological narratives and individual experiences. Through ethnographic and historical analysis of Mexican space-related institutions, popular culture, and collective memory, this research reveals how space imaginaries are neither simply top-down impositions nor bottom-up constructions, but emerge through mesoscale negotiations between past and present, local and global, that fundamentally reshape our understanding of how societies imagine their relationship to outer space.

Anne W. Johnson is a Professor in the Graduate Social Anthropology Program of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, where she teaches classes on science and technology, anthropology of futures, and material culture. Her publications about outer space include articles in the Revista Colombiana de Antropología (2023) and Acta Astronautica (2021), and chapters in the edited works Exploring Ethnography of Outer Space (Routledge, 2025), Space Feminisms (Routledge, 2024), and The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Social Studies of Outer Space (Routledge, 2023). Her book From the Cosmic Race to the Space Race on Mexican engagements with outer space is forthcoming with the University of Arizona Press.