Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sept. 15, 2010-May 2, 2011.

What if North Korea detonates a nuclear weapon in space and silences dozens of satellites? What if an Iranian missile threatens to destroy Israel, while a Venezuelan “research” satellite endangers one of the US’s most promising space initiatives? What if tech-savvy terrorist cells unleash back-to-back horrors in California while national leaders, robbed of spy satellite imagery, are forced to make “blind” decisions? These are the scenarios of Counterspace, a frighteningly plausible look at threats to the United States and the world. Scott, Coumatos, and Birnes use war gaming scenarios to show how the US Strategic Command might use current and near-future technology to prevent global disaster. Counterspace is equally the revelation of a terrifying possibility and the hopeful affirmation that America will triumph in the face of danger.

Space, the City and Social Theory offers a clear and critical account of key approaches to cities and urban space within social theory and analysis. It explores the relation of the social and the spatial in the context of critical urban themes: community and anonymity; social difference and spatial divisions; politics and public space; gentrification and urban renewal; gender and sexuality; subjectivity and space; experience and everyday practice in the city. The text adopts an international and interdisciplinary approach, drawing on a range of debates on cities and urban life. It brings together classic perspectives in urban sociology and social theory with the analysis of contemporary urban problems and issues. Rather than viewing the urban simply as a backdrop for more general social processes, the discussion looks at how social and spatial relations shape different versions of the city: as a place of social interaction and of solitude; as a site of difference and segregation; as a space of politics and power; as a landscape of economic and cultural distinction; as a realm of everyday experience and freedom. Similarly, it examines how core social categories - such as class, culture, gender, sexuality and community - are shaped and reproduced in urban contexts. Linking debates in urban studies to wider concerns within social theory and analysis, this accessible text will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students in urban sociology, social and cultural geography, urban and cultural studies.

Based on her extensive experience in the urban communities of Los Angeles, historian and architect Dolores Hayden proposes new perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public art, enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial struggles. In the first part of The Power of Place, Hayden outlines the elements of a social history of urban space to connect people's lives and livelihoods to the urban landscape as it changes over time. She then explores how communities and professionals can tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory. The second part documents a decade of research and practice by The Power of Place, a nonprofit organization Hayden founded in downtown Los Angeles. Through public meetings, walking tours, artists's books, and permanent public sculpture, as well as architectural preservation, teams of historians, designers, planners, and artists worked together to understand, preserve, and commemorate urban landscape history as African American, Latina, and Asian American families have experienced it. One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an African American ex-slave and midwife active betwen 1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Theater where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s. A third chapter tells the story of a historic district where Japanese American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s. Each project deals with bitter memories—slavery, repatriation, internment—but shows how citizens survived and persevered to build an urban life for themselves, their families, and their communities. Drawing on many similar efforts around the United States, from New York to Charleston, Seattle to Cincinnati, Hayden finds a broad new movement across urban preservation, public history, and public art to accept American diversity at the heart of the vernacular urban landscape. She provides dozens of models for creative urban history projects in cities and towns across the country.

Presents an alternative view of science based on the theory of counterspace

This book provides the first book-length examination of the writings of Julia Alvarez, the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and nearly a dozen other books of fiction and non-fiction and one of today's most widely read Latina writers. Kelli Lyon Johnson perceptively illuminates the themes, ideals, and passions that unite these diverse and rich works, all of which explore issues of understanding and representing identity within a global society. Forced by political oppression to leave the Dominican Republic when still young, Alvarez has lived most of her adult life in the United States. Johnson argues that through her narratives, poetry, and essays, Alvarez has sought to create "a cartography of identity in exile." Alvarez inscribes a geography of identity in her work that joins theory and narrative across multiple genres to create a new map of identity and culture. By asserting that she is "mapping a country that's not on the map," Alvarez places creativity and multiplicity at the center of this emerging cartography of identity. Rather than elaborating a "hybrid" identity that surreptitiously erases distinctions and difference, Alvarez embraces the mestizaje or mixture and accumulation of identities, experience, and diversity. To Alvarez, linguistic and cultural multiplicity represents the reality of what it means to be American, and she offers a compelling vision of both self and community in which the homeland Alvarez seeks is the narrative space of her own writings. As Johnson shows, Alvarez will continue to shape American literature by stretching the literary cartography of identity and of the Americas.

This book explains on what basis a nation can claim the status of space power, what are the criteria differentiating a space power from “lesser” space actors, and how their spacepower can be empirically measured and assessed. To this end, it sets forth a comprehensive multidisciplinary framework to enable a dynamic comparison of space actors and of the pathways that lead them in and out of the space powers’ club. Drawing upon a critical review of the existing literature, it conceptualises spacepower as a form of state power based on the complex interplay between the two defining dimensions of stateness, namely the well-studied dimension of capacity and the often neglected yet exceedingly important dimension of autonomy. The book demonstrates that only actors possessing high levels of both autonomy and capacity qualify as space powers. Different levels of either capacity or autonomy produce other types of space actors, including skilled spacefarers, self-reliant spacefarers, primed spacefarers, and emerging space actors. This innovative conceptual framework is complemented by an in-depth comparative assessment that collects and processes a large amount of hard-to-find data on the most active global space actors and aggregates multiple indicators into a compound, non-hierarchical index of space power visualised in the form of a matrix.