The second annual Space and Society lecture will be presented on Wednesday, November 7 at 6:30 PM in Leatherby B03 (Center for American War Letters), and is sponsored by the Provost’s Office. The speaker will be Dr. Lisa Messeri (Department of Anthropology, Yale University). Dr. Messeri is the author of Placing Outer Space (Duke UP, 2016), a study of how astronomers make planetary bodies into places that can be explored by humans. Since her book came out, she has turned her research in a new direction that is also relevant to many of you: the anthropology of virtual reality. She has been working on this study here in southern California for all of 2018, and she will visit the Institute for Creative Reality at Dodge in the afternoon preceding her talk.

The title of Dr. Messeri’s lecture at Chapman is “You Are There: 3-D Mars, the Planetary Imagination, and Being on Other Worlds” . This talk will be drawn from her book and will discuss NASA’s role, both during the Viking missions and the rover missions today, of producing and circulating 3D maps of Mars. Through ethnographic work with a team called “The Mapmakers” at NASA Ames Research Center, Dr. Messeri considers the work and imagination that goes in to producing these maps. How do they enable both scientists and the broader public to have a sense of “being” on Mars and how does this help us

understand human beings beyond Earth?