Faculty Fellows

We are pleased to announce our 2025-2026 cohort of CAH Faculty Fellows.

Jeannette Alden Estruth (History), “The Galactic Commons: Reimagining Interplanetary Commons from the Cold War to the Present”

The generosity of the Santa Clara University CAH Faculty Fellows Program will allow Estruth to complete her writing and workshopping of a current article-in-progress, “The Galactic Commons: Reimagining Interplanetary Commons from the Cold War to the Present” for publication.

In the early 2020s, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Bloomberg News began defining the recent proliferation of privately-owned low-Earth-orbital spacecraft launches as inaugurating a “new space age.” During the summer of 2019, Amazon founder and multibillionaire Jeff Bezos had launched himself into suborbital space with his new space travel firm, Blue Origin. In 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Federal Government had established a sixth branch of the American military, the Space Force, and took over a long-standing joint air force base in Greenland from Denmark. By the early 2020s, academic reports issued by Perry World House at Penn, the Whiting School of Engineering at Hopkins, and the Harvard Business Review were all in agreement that the United States had entered a “new space age.” In April of 2023, MIT hosted a New Space Age Conference, and in April of 2024, McKinsey’s daily newsletter, “Chart of the Day,” dropped an article into thousands of inboxes entitled “Space: The Missing Element of Your Strategy.” The “new space,” it seemed, had arrived.

By contrast, the “old” Space Age was assumed to be located in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the United States’ attempts to prove scientific, technological, and economic supremacy over the Soviet Union. Indeed, the primary explorers of space in the 1950s and 1960s were nation-states, not individuals, nor private corporations. So what changed?  This article will trace the enclosure of outer space through American federal policy over the last eighty years. In doing so, it will argue not only that space was a galactic commons that became privatized by the American federal government and military in cooperation with private capital, but also that this process of enclosure became crucial to the current technology industry’s speculative intellectual and cultural project of imagining work without labor. The article will ask: Why is space a horizon of this imaginary? What are the stakes of this imagination? How did the enclosure of space help cheapen, obscure, and make invisible terrestrial labor? How does labor itself contest, negotiate, structure, and conflict with these processes? If the “new space” tech barons have made a grab for political power over the imagined future of outer space, what is the history of this grab? If technologies become sites of politics, how has space exploration been embedded in, and become constitutive of, social relations and state formation? 

For many of today’s lawmakers and investors, commercial space ventures are the imagined future of space. The goal for emerging space travel firms is to make commercial flights common and affordable enough for residential space colonization to increase, and to open the possibility of mineral mining on the moon and Mars. They seek to open new frontiers for resource extraction, to expand surveillance and mapping of earth, and to provide viable habitation for a galactic elite. The dream is that a select group of people will emigrate from earth, and settle in the heavens: the envoys not of mankind, but as deserters of it.

Michael Kevane (Economics), “Voices of Tomorrow: Science Fiction Stories by Students, for Readers in Ghana and Burkina Faso, Illustrated by Africa-Based Artists”

Prof. Kevane’s  project “Voices of Tomorrow: Science Fiction Stories by Students, for Readers in Ghana and Burkina Faso, Illustrated by Africa-Based Artists” continues work he has been doing since 2001,supporting community libraries and reading through the non-profit organization Friends of African Village Libraries. Since a civil conflict has closed almost 20 community libraries in Burkina Faso, FAVL has in recent years produced and distributed more than 75,000 copies of 150 locally-authored and illustrated chapbooks. As a new initiative in that chapbook effort, Kevane hopes to foster more genre writing and reading. Working in collaboration with Prof. Kirk Glaser (SCU English), this project will pair Santa Clara University students with Africa-based illustrators to develop science-fiction themed chapbooks, in the Afrofuturism style. The chapbooks will be produced and distributed to libraries and schools in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Click here (www.mkevane.com) to learn more about Prof. Kevane and his research Program.

Daniel Summerhill (English), "Building a Language, Building a World"

"Building a Language, Building a World" is a multi-phase project that includes the curation of an anthology of abolitionist poets, a reading and panel discussion as well as resources for those interested in transforming their understanding of harm, healing and justice. Poetry and social justice are inherently linked if we think of language as a tool for empathy, truth-telling and world building–all functions that literary giants such June Jordan, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and others understood as the enterprise of "writing." Their work on and off the page are testaments to that legacy. Speaking about his role as a “social poet,” Langston Hughes said, “the moon belongs to everybody.” In this way, we are all both admirers of the moon and also keepers of it. Hughes spoke of his early work as “social poems” because they were about people's problems – whole groups of people’s problems – rather than his own personal difficulties. Hughes’ statement echoes the importance of empathy and the human requirement to be understood and to understand. James Baldwin, said he wrote to “bear witness to things that everybody knows but refuses to face.” I liken Baldwin’s discussion to echo the sentiment of poetry being the work of witness, truth telling and excavation. The Center for Arts and Humanities facet of this project will include a reading and talk by writers working at the intersection of prison abolition and poetry.

An exciting part of these projects is how they will engage with students, faculty, and community partners. Stay tuned for more details about these collaborations.

Past Faculty Fellows