On her book Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics beyond Earth
Cover Interview of June 25, 2018
A close-up
I hope the reader will thumb through the book and check out
the images and illustrations. U.S. human spaceflight is both a civil and a military
activity, which means that it produces images that are offered to the public at
large as well as images that are kept secret. I included lots of fair access images
that call attention to the stolidly technical and extravagantly creative
spectrum of government environmental systems work.
While browsing through the book, I hope readers will also
take a look at the quotes I got from the many people I worked with and
interviewed. Spaceflight stories are usually focused on high-profile machines, astronauts,
and events. As an ethnographer, I’m also interested in portraying the work of the
spaceflight scientists, engineers, technicians, and student interns who show up
at the gates of spaceflight centers every day.
I had, literally, thousands of images, to choose from and hundreds
of pages of interviews and fieldwork notes to build this book from; I selected
those that I felt would support my analytic goals, namely to call attention to
the ways the contemporary solar system is being produced as a sociocultural,
and political, environment. In this way, I situate space and spaceflight in the
unfolding arenas of environmental history and politics.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
A close-up
I hope the reader will thumb through the book and check out the images and illustrations. U.S. human spaceflight is both a civil and a military activity, which means that it produces images that are offered to the public at large as well as images that are kept secret. I included lots of fair access images that call attention to the stolidly technical and extravagantly creative spectrum of government environmental systems work.
While browsing through the book, I hope readers will also take a look at the quotes I got from the many people I worked with and interviewed. Spaceflight stories are usually focused on high-profile machines, astronauts, and events. As an ethnographer, I’m also interested in portraying the work of the spaceflight scientists, engineers, technicians, and student interns who show up at the gates of spaceflight centers every day.
I had, literally, thousands of images, to choose from and hundreds of pages of interviews and fieldwork notes to build this book from; I selected those that I felt would support my analytic goals, namely to call attention to the ways the contemporary solar system is being produced as a sociocultural, and political, environment. In this way, I situate space and spaceflight in the unfolding arenas of environmental history and politics.