David Bell teaches geography at the University of Leeds, UK. Among his recent
publications are the second edition of The Cybercultures Reader
(edited with Barbara M Kennedy, Routledge, 2007) and Science, Technology
& Culture (Open University Press, 2005). He still dreams of space.
Christy Collis is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Creative
Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, Australia. Collis has
published widely on the cultural and legal geographies of Antarctica, particularly Australia's
claim to 42 per cent of the polar continent. Her work on the still-unsettled legal geographies
of Antarctica led her to undertake work on the legal geographies of Space, which are directly
derived from Antarctican territorial laws. Just how these two unique legal geographies were
developed, and how they might evolve in the future, are the focii of Collis's work.
Peter Dickens is Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Universities of Brighton
and Essex, UK. He is also Associate Lecturer in Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political
Sciences, University of Cambridge. Since the early 1970s he has published widely on social
theory, psychoanalysis and the natural sciences within a critical realist perspective. His
2004 book, Society and Nature: Changing Our Environment, Changing
Ourselves was given an Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological
Association. In 2007 he published, with James Ormrod, Cosmic Society,
Towards a Sociology of the Universe. He continues to work on the sociology of
outer-space humanization and the changing relationships between cosmologies, societies and
human subjectivity.
Alice Gorman is Coordinator of the Graduate Programme in Cultural Heritage
Management in the Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Australia. Her research
involves the cultural heritage management of material culture relating to space exploration,
including terrestrial launch sites like Woomera (South Australia), Kourou (French Guiana) and
Hammaguir (Algeria), orbital debris such as the Vanguard satellite, and planetary landing
sites. In 2005 she convened a symposium on the heritage of Woomera. She is also writing a book
on the archaeology of body modification, based on her PhD research, to be published by
Blackwell in 2009.
Holly Henry is Associate Professor of English at California State University,
San Bernardino. Henry's interdisciplinary research is focused on modernist studies, the
cultural studies of science, and the history of astronomy and space science. She is the author
of Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of
Astronomy (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Matthew H. Hersch is a PhD Candidate in the University of Pennsylvania's
Department of History and Sociology of Science. He received his SB from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and a JD from New York University School of Law. Mr. Hersch
specializes in 20th-century American science, technology, labour, and popular culture, and was
the 2007–08 Guggenheim Fellow of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. He is
presently writing a labour history of astronauts.
Darren Jorgensen is lecturer in Art History in the Faculty of Architecture,
Landscape and Visual Art at the University of Western Australia. He has recently published
essays on science fiction, critical theory, Marxism and Australian Aboriginal art. He is
currently researching the experiences of cosmonauts after the fall of the Soviet Union, and is
preparing a manuscript on Science Fiction and the Sublime.
Iina Kohonen works as a researcher at the University of Art and Design Helsinki
(School of Visual Culture/Photography). For her forthcoming doctoral thesis she is studying
the Soviet ideological utopia through photographic representations of cosmic space.
Dario Llinares is at the University of Leeds, in the final year of completing
his PhD thesis entitled ‘Idealized’ Masculinity and the Cultural
Mythology of the Astronaut. His thesis conceptualizes the way the media has
constructed the astronaut as a mythic exemplar of masculinity transcending social-cultural
shifts from modernity to post-modernity. The interdisciplinary nature of his work is reflected
in the wide range of subjects on which he has lectured at both the University of Leeds and
Leeds Metropolitan University. These include courses based on gender, ‘race’, globalization,
media, politics and film. He is currently working on a new paper that theorizes the
relationship between heteromasculinity and the aesthetics of queer in contemporary cinema.
Martin Parker is Professor of Organization and Culture at the University of
Leicester School of Management. His recent publications include Against
Management (Polity, 2002), For Business Ethics
(Routledge, 2005) and The Dictionary of Utopias and Alternative
Organization (Zed, 2007).
Daniel Sage is a Research Associate at the Department of Civil and Building
Engineering at Loughborough University. In 2007 he completed his PhD (‘Cosmic Subjects: An
Imaginative Geography of the American Space Programme’)
at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University. Drawing upon
various performative ontologies, this diverse project examined the socio-technical
dis/organization of spatial registers both within and around NASA. He has published on
geopolitics, frontier geographies and NASA's art programme. His present research work is a
socio-technical study of the spatialization of project management within the construction
industry. d.j.sage@lboro.ac.uk
Stevphen Shukaitis is a lecturer in Ethics, Aesthetics, and Imagination at the
University of Essex and a member of the Autonomedia Editorial Collective. He is co-editor
(with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination:
Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). For more on
his writing and activities, see http://stevphen.mahost.org.
Warren Smith was employed for nine years as a lecturer in Organizational Studies
at the School of Management, University of Leicester, after a PhD at the University of Keele.
Since 2006 he has worked as an Associate for the School and also the Open University. He is
interested in questions of engagement, accountability and authenticity, and has written on
conspiracies, violence and science fiction, amongst other things.
Amanda Taylor is a Master's student in English Composition and Literature at
California State University, San Bernardino. Her research interests focus on posthuman
subjectivity, the cultural studies of science, intersections between Romanticism and
science-fiction, and the materiality of language. The working title of her thesis is ‘Welcome
to the World of Tomorrow Today: Matt Groening's Futurama as
Posthuman Mediator.’ Her thesis will explore relationships between humans and machines and the
impact of those relationships on (post)human subjectivity.
Brian Woods is currently an Honorary Fellow at the Department of Sociology,
Anthropology, and Applied Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. He graduated from the
University of Edinburgh in 1999 with a PhD on which the empirical part of this current work is
based. His research interests in the sociology of science and technology are varied and, along
with the Space Shuttle, he has published on a range of diverse topics including wheelchair
history, the social impact of geo-demographics, and the sociology of food allergy and food
intolerance. brian.woods@lawcol.co.uk
