LSSH Space Lunch Seminar 13th May 2026 @12.00-13.00 with Graham Minenor-Matheson and Michael Godhe

[Graham Minenor-Matheson]

 Good afternoon space fans!

Apologies for the late notice but we have a seminar tomorrow lunchtime we wanted to alert you all to.

We are delighted to present our next space lunch seminar of the 2026 Spring Term this time on Wednesday 13th May@1200-1300CET.  Our original speaker had to drop out so this time we welcome Michael Godhe and Graham Minenor-Matheson from Linköping University who will be talking about "Documenting the Apocalypse: Visions of Elon Musk’s multiplanetary future in documentaries”!  This is gonna be another good one! So please join us, tell all of your friends and colleagues too!  

 

Abstract, Zoom details below:

 

“Documenting the Apocalypse: Visions of Elon Musk’s multiplanetary future in documentaries”

 

Abstract:

More than a decade ago, Majid Yar argued that the topography of utopia, considering the past centuries “moral atrocities” and pathologies, was relocated and “projected into the space of the virtual, an ‘other worldly realm in which the most extravagant of possibilities are imagined”. More than a decade later, the utopian sensibility of the virtual has been exhausted by both capitalist realism and illiberalism. But another “other worldly” site for projections of utopian possibilities has been projected by some of the same persons that have transformed social media(s) into libertarian nightmares or illiberal anti-woke hate-speech territories. Mars has been used as a site for visions of a “multi-planetary” future beyond the crises of our time, as a utopian project that will help humanity to solve problems on Earth but also functions as a lifeboat, an ark, if Earth will not be able to support human life in the future. In popular media and newspapers, it has often been conceptualized as a reignited space race and framed within apocalyptic rhetorics by Elon Musk (and other tech billionaires). To critically engage with the claims in these visions of a “multi-planetary” future is important since this is a question of what kind of futures we want to have and who gets to express these futures-in-the making. While there have been many studies of representations of Martian (and Lunar futures) in popular media, not least social media such as X (formerly Twitter), there is a huge research gap when it comes to one of the most popular genres today, namely documentaries and their futures-in-the making. In this article, we show how popular science documentaries on outer space exploration use apocalyptic rhetoric especially in relation to Elon Musk’s vision of humanity as a “multi-planetary” species. The apocalypse is strangely fused with utopian thinking, either as a site for the reconstitution of society both on Earth and otherworldly, or as a Libertarian dream fused together with Cosmism imaginaries”

 

Graham Minenor-Matheson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://liu-se.zoom.us/j/68836789119?pwd=Q756VFfMJp2h5yyRmXZWJx5AEJpMxS.1

Meeting ID: 688 3678 9119
Passcode: 890280

 

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Thanks!

 

Graham and Michael

Med vänlig hälsning
Graham Minenor-Matheson
PhD Candidate