Essay on Automation, Robotics and Off-World Frontier-Making

Robot arm

Our visiting researcher Andy Lockhart has written an essay with Simon Marvin and Aidan While for Society and Space. In this essay, they explore the nexus of relations between national governments, capital and technological development involved in the opening up of new resource frontiers in outer space. While debates about off-world mining are often concerned with whether it will ‘succeed’ or not, they are more interested in what it tells us about contemporary frontier-making and what the rendering of extreme environments ever more legible to state and capitalist interests means for resource politics and struggles in the decades ahead.

The essay is part of the forum: The Final Frontier? The Enclosure of a Commons of Outer Space.

Read the essay: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/automation-robotics-and-off-world-frontier-making