Astronauts as Audiences: Characteristics of the First Space Communities

The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) publishes data (2003) which includes the name, gender, town of birth, education and some interests of almost every astronaut who has been launched into space by the dominant space explorer, the United States. This list identifies astronauts form the United States, the former USSR and its subsequently independent states, Europe, Australia and Asian participants. Our analysis of this data, we suggest, revealed the most likely characteristics of the members of the first communities in space. This led us to think about these communities as "audiences," just as earthbound communities have been grouped into audience, or "market," segments by media companies.

Making media work in space: An interdisciplinary perspective on media and communication requirements for current and future space communities

As humans expand into space communities will form. These have already begun to form in small ways, such as long-duration missions on the International Space Station and the space shuttle, and small-scale tourist excursions into space. Social, behavioural and communications data emerging from such existing communities in space suggest that the physically-bounded, work-oriented and traditionally male-dominated nature of these extremely remote groups present specific problems for the resident astronauts, groups of them viewed as ‘communities’, and their associated groups who remain on Earth, including mission controllers, management and astronauts’ families. Notionally feminine group attributes such as adaptive competence, social adaptation skills and social sensitivity will be crucial to the viability of space communities and in the absence of gender equity, ‘staying in touch’ by means of ‘news from home’ becomes more important than ever. A template of news and media forms and technologies is suggested to service those needs and enhance the social viability of future terraforming activities.

Locating whiteness in the academic production of "I Philosophy" in and of time and place

This review will critically evaluate two recent texts by white academics working across disciplines of cultural studies, history and anthropology and published by UNSW Press, which share a focus on the relationship between Aboriginality, Philosophy, Place and Time in Australia. I write from the position of a queer white academic committed to engaging politically and intellectually with the challenge of Indigenous sovereignties in this place while also aware that my position as a middle class white woman and intellectual imposes limits on what it is possible for me to know about Indigenous epistemologies (see Moreton-Robinson, 2000). In the course of this review I will demonstrate how anthropology's tendency to fix its objects of study within a circumscribed space of 'difference' limits the capacity of texts produced within this discipline to account for racialized struggles over sovereignty. While these struggles are equally embedded in the ethnographic context and the nation's constitution and political institutions, we will see that Muecke and Bird Rose confront problems in analysing the relationship between the intimate space of the 'field', in which one's research subjects quickly become one's 'friends' and/or 'classificatory kin'—on one hand—and the public space of the nation within which statements about Aboriginality by white academics circulate and are vested with an authority that escapes individual intentions and control—on the other.