CALL FOR DOSSIER SPRING 2026

Iberoforum, Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
To submit to the dossier

Worlds and Cosmos: Social and Humanist Perspectives

No longer limited to futuristic imaginings, outer space has come to be an area of concern and intervention intimately connected to and causing a permanent and absolute state of planetary crisis.
As the current moment in the astronautical industry indicates, human societies can now be characterized by their extraterrestriality, thanks to widespread dependency on satellite systems, in domains that range from warfare to the fight against climate change, and from entertainment to urban planning. Our contemporary extraterrestrial condition can also be observed in the political and economic changes that have emerged as a result of the 21st-century space economy, which are based on a type of social stratification that for the first time in our species’ history contemplates positions of celestial power exercised through the technological capacity to exist outside Earth and its atmosphere.
However, space has not always been seen as a region “external” to Earth, but also as a dimension of a multiple and inclusive space-time fabric. For many past and present Latin American indigenous communities, the cosmos is part of a world composed of relationships between humans and non-humans. While rooted in ancestral traditions, these “worldviews” exist simultaneously hegemonic technoscientific futurisms, with which they are often in tension.
Outer space is produced as a field of cultural practice within a variety and diversity of social thought that ranges from indigenous cosmovisions to posthumanist perspectives. In this context, it is pertinent to ask what the choice of conceptual frameworks allow the social and political sciences in the global south to do as a critical contribution to the development of what is perceived as the interdisciplinary field of space humanities. Especially, articulating critical cosmologies at a time when the humanities are confronting their anti-indigenous biases frontally and on a large scale.
Responding to this need, this issue of Iberoforum starts from these points and asks:

  • What are the differences, tensions, crossings, slips, coincidences between cosmos, world, planet, and outer space?
  • What (performative) work does each concept do?
  • What are the intersections between science, art, and religion with respect to cosmic perspectives?
  • Can global south worldviews offer de/anti/colonial lessons to the worldviews that participate in space industry activities?

We call for contributions (academic articles, essays, reviews, interviews, and photographic essays) to respond to these and other similar questions that contribute to the multi/interdisciplinary development of humanities from anthropology, sociology, political science, science and technology studies, history, communication sciences, performance studies, literature, the arts, and other disciplines.


Invited editors:
Anne W. Johnson, Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México
Felipe Cervera, University of California, Los Angeles


Deadline for submission: April 25, 2025
For registry in the OJS, write to: revista.iberoforum@ibero.mx

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