Cosmic imperatives: critical thinking beyond the earthbound

This introductory essay to the special issue, “Cosmic Imperatives: Critical Thinking Beyond the Earthbound”, navigates differences between its co-authors/co-editors to ask what critical and political imperatives emerge from human technological engagements with the nonterrestrial cosmos, prompted by coalescing corporate and state-led plans for the colonization of other cosmic places. Working from the disciplines of geography and anthropology and from different – and in some respects, even opposed – theoretical starting places, we explore the tensions that arise among competing critical materialisms when the radical differences of nonterrestrial places form the contexts for social, political-economic, and human-nonhuman relations and relationality. While we do not aim for a synthesis of our positions, we co-build an argument that the material differences, unpredictable open-endedness, and variability of other cosmic places demand innovation and transformation of critical thought that has yet to be fully engaged in cultural geography.