Speakers

 

 

 

Ian Klinke

Ian Klinke is a political geographer at the University of Oxford. His research covers the history of geopolitics, war and the intellectual far right. He has written two books to date. Cryptic Concrete: A Subterranean Journey into Cold War Germany (Wiley, 2018) examines West Germany’s now abandoned nuclear military landscape. Life, Earth, Colony: Friedrich Ratzel's Necropolitical Geography (University of Michigan Press, 2023) illuminates Friedrich Ratzel’s ideas and traces their reception from the late 19th century to the present.

 

 

Rory Rowan

Rory Rowan is Assistant Professor of Geography at Trinity College Dublin. His research spans political ecology, geopolitics and intellectual history, and currently focuses on the changing geopolitics of outer space and the environmental governance of ‘space resources.’ He is the author, with Claudio Minca, of On Schmitt and Space (2016), a book exploring the spatial theory of the controversial German legal and political philosopher Carl Schmitt. He has also explored the political consequences of the Anthropocene and the production of the planet as an object of governance, in Progress in Human Geography, Society and Space and e-Flux. He regularly contributes to academic journals and art publications.

 

 

Yi-Ting Chang

Yi-Ting Chang is a doctoral student in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. Her DPhil thesis entitled "From geo- to astropolitics: How Taiwan constructs vertical territory within the global satellite network" aims to investigate Taiwan's outer space history and politics against the backdrop of the ongoing cross-strait tension.

 

 

Julie Klinger

Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware, presenting with collaborators: Eleanor S. Armstrong, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University (Sweden); Ingrid Burrington, Emmanuel Chinkaka, Mehrnaz Haghdadi, Temidayo Oniosun, Kopo Oromeng, Romain Richaud, Coryn Wolk, PhD student researchers at the University of Delaware Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, and Qitong Wang, PhD candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. 

 

 

Mia Bennett

Mia Bennett is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. As a political geographer with geospatial skills, she researches cultures and practices of frontier-making in the Arctic from the local to regional scales. Bennett's methods combine fieldwork and critical remote sensing, a subfield whose development she is helping to lead. Bennett received a PhD in Geography from UCLA and an MPhil in Polar Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar.

 

 

Bleddyn Bowen

Dr Bleddyn Bowen is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Leicester, specialising in space policy and warfare, the military uses of outer space, and strategic thought. He is the author of Original Sin: Power, Technology and War in Outer Space (Hurst, 2022), as well as War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics (Edinburgh UP 2020). He has advised on space policy and strategy for institutions including the UK Parliament and Government, the European Space Agency, the Pentagon, and US Government. He is the founder and co-convenor of the Astropolitics Working Group at the British International Studies Association, an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, and Co-Convenor of the CSSAH Space Studies Working Group at the University of Leicester.

 

 

Craig Jones

Craig Henry Jones is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Strathclyde Law School. He completed his PhD at Lancaster University on the nascent asteroid mining industry and the ways this is being used to enclose Outer Space through the (re)creation of (neo)colonial discourses and how this is being contested by and through the works of Ethnofuturist artists.

 

 

Chih-Yuan Woon

Chih Yuan WOON is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His current research looks critically at the geopolitical and geoeconomic implications of China’s ‘rise’, contextualizing such debates through the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as China’s ongoing interests and interventions in the Arctic region.

 

 

Rachael Squire

Rachael Squire is a Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research draws on feminist geopolitical approaches to explore the intersections between territory and earth futures through a range of spatial contexts including the sub-marine and outer space. 

 

 

Jason Dittmer

Jason Dittmer is Professor of Political Geography and Head of Department at University College London. His research is on geopolitical assemblages, thinking through the politics of materiality and affect in areas from diplomacy to heritage. His current projects focus on British colonial heritage overseas, and how it evolves over time through its relations with locals and tourists.

 

 

William Stewart

William Stewart is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography, University College London. His current research on the geopolitics of the International Space Station focuses on the diplomacy and politics of microgravity and life in orbit. His research interests include the politics of materials, outer space and popular culture.

 

 

Saskia Vermeylen

Saskia Vermeylen is reader in law and co-director of the Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Her work on space law and utopian literatures was funded by a Leverhulme fellowship and she has published widely on space law and utopianism. She is also a curator https://www.wuk.at/en/magazine/extr-activism/ and is currently preparing two new exhibitions on law and arts in Romania and South Africa. Her work on space law has been widely quoted in the press and was a main speaker in the physics pavilion at WOMAD in 2022.