ABSTRACT
The International Space Station (ISS) is arguably the oldest extraterrestrial society in low Earth orbit. Despite its profound importance to the human spaceflight programme, science, technology, and its public impact, this radical new form of human habitation and society has received limited systematic and comparative anthropological attention. The ETHNO-ISS project initiates a wide-ranging, comparative, and multi-sited ethnography amongst the various countries and sectors contributing to its modular architecture. ETHNO-ISS examines the ISS as a complex nexus of inhabitation encompassing both terrestrial and extraterrestrial realms in a novel configuration and thereby provides a wide-ranging integrative and comparative study of this unprecedented form of human society and the material conditions of its emergent ‘worlding’.
