Crossings+Boundaries

Religion and philosophy have always been present in human space exploration, in the form of religious rituals practiced during space missions, placement of sacred objects in space, and astronauts’ descriptions of transcendental changes in perspective when looking back on Earth. Space exploration also poses ethical, religious, and philosophical challenges. How, for example, do we protect other celestial bodies from contamination by human space exploration? How do we protect the Earth from contamination by extraterrestrial samples brought back on spaceships? How will human society be represented to extraterrestrial beings? What are the wide-ranging implications of finding life in the universe?

In his talk, Waltemathe will discuss these issues, exploring questions that seem to belong to the realm of science fiction while focusing on scientifically plausible exploration scenarios.

Michael Waltemathe is senior lecturer in the Department of Protestant Theology at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. He also serves as an officer of the Astrosociology Research Institute, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to the development of astrosociology as a multidisciplinary academic field. Dr. Waltemathe is also a founding member of IASGAR, the International Academy for the Study of Gaming and Religion.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series.

CROSSINGS+BOUNDARIES

Michael Waltemathe: Religious and Philosophical Implications of Space Exploration

In this inaugural event for the IHC's Crossings + Boundaries public events series, four UCSB faculty members will discuss their varied experiences as interdisciplinary scholars.

Beth DePalma Digeser, Laila Shereen Sakr, Jeremy White, Brandon Whited

INAUGURAL PANEL: Interdisciplinary Crossings + Boundaries

When seven rocky planets were discovered around the
star TRAPPIST-1, claims of potentially habitable worlds
animated the scientific discourse and press coverage.
Beautiful animations of the surfaces of these planets and
imaginative tales of planet hopping suggested that this
discovery was not just about discovering more planets,
but that it was also about discovering worlds. In this talk,
Messeri will recount ethnographic findings from her work
with exoplanet astronomers. She will explore how planets
become worlds and what resources scientists draw on to
execute this conceptual crossing and imaginatively leave
the boundary of our world to extend human presence
beyond the solar system.
Before joining the Anthropology department at Yale earlier
this year, Lisa Messeri taught at the University of Virginia
and the University of Pennsylvania. Her published work
includes Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of
Other Worlds (2016), which traces how the place-making
practices of planetary scientists transform the void of
space into a cosmos filled with worlds that can be known
and explored.

Sponsored by the Idee Levitan IHC Endowment and the IHC’s
Crossings + Boundaries series.
Image Courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Lisa Messeri: Interstellar Crossings

The world is witnessing the greatest mass migration since 1945. More than sixty-five million people, about one in every hundred on Earth, have fled their homes. Some are internally displaced; others are refugees who have moved to multiple countries. This talk will discuss the three main causes of this giant human tide: the implosion of the Middle East following the Arab Spring; climate change, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where drought and advancing deserts are pushing people to abandon their homes; and famine, because of which at least twenty million people are currently at risk of starvation, most of them in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia. In his talk, Filkins will take the audience on a tour of these places and discuss ways to address the complex causes of mass migration.

Filkins has been a staff writer with The New Yorker since 2011. From 2000 to 2010, he was a reporter for the New York Times, reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. He has also worked for the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times, where he was chief of the paper’s New Delhi bureau. In 2009, he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times journalists covering Pakistan and Afghanistan. His book, The Forever War, won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series; the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life; and the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment.

Dexter Filkins: Exodus: The Largest Movement of People Since the Second World War

Ronald Rael’s talk reexamines what the 650 miles of physical barrier dividing the US and Mexico is and could be, suggesting that the wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling. Rael will illuminate the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape through the story of people on both sides of the border who transform and creatively challenge the wall’s existence. He will also discuss his architectural studio’s counterproposals that reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance, and meaning. Rael proposes that despite the intended use of the wall, which is to keep people out and away, the wall is instead an attractor, engaging both sides in a common dialogue.

Ronald Rael is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture and Associate Professor in Architecture, the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a partner in the award-winning architectural firm Rael San Fratello and CEO of Emerging Objects, a 3D Printing MAKE-tank. He is the author of Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (2017), Earth Architecture (2008), and Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing (2018).

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.

Ronald Rael: Borderwall as Architecture

This talk approaches the controversy over the killing of the gorilla Harambe in the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 as a unique window onto the making of animalness and blackness in the contemporary U.S.  It will explore the notion of a racial-zoological order in which the “human” is constructed simultaneously in relation to both the “black” and the “animal.”

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine.  She is the author of Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (2000) and Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (2015), both of which won book awards from the American Political Science Association.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Crossings + Boundaries series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment.

Claire Jean Kim: Murder and Mattering in Harambe's House

The IHC’s mission is to advance knowledge about human experience in cultural, historical, and social contexts and to do so through programs that foster human agency, social connectivity, and civic empowerment.

IHC events include lectures, seminars and conferences organized by IHC research focus groups and sub-units as well as events co-sponsored with campus departments. In addition, the IHC mounts year-long public programs on themes suggested by UCSB faculty and graduate students.

Michael Waltemathe: Religious and Philosophical Implications of Space Exploration

IHC UCSB