The Spacefaring Community and the State of Denial of Crimes in Outer Space

Activity: Lecture / PresentationAcademic

Description

Space, in the popular imagination, predominantly comprises sci-fi movies, rockets to the Moon, and more recently, NASA’s Mars Rover expedition, the James Webb Telescope pictures, and human-missions to Mars like the one that forms the centre of Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme. We look up to the stars and marvel about space exploration, hoping for a better future. Space would unite us outside of Earth where we ‘no longer dream of over-coming difficulties but merely of surviving them’ (Lasch, 1979: 49). However, the idea that, for example, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA)’s plans to return Martian rock samples to Earth in the 2030s with Martian microbes that may contaminate our planet into another pandemic (Stuart, 2022), is a possibility but not desirable to imagine. Indeed, space crime and its harms remain unacknowledged in the popular imagination and criminological imagination. This presentation will explore why the spacefaring community and criminology reside in the state of denial (Cohen, 2001).
Period8 Sept 2023
Event titleEuropean Society of Criminology 2023 23rd Annual Conference Florence, Italy: The Renaissance of European Criminology
Event typeConference
Conference number23
LocationFlorence, ItalyShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational