William Stewart, PhD

My research examines how political relationships are shaped through technologies, infrastructures, environments, and embodied practices. I am particularly interested in situations where cooperation must be sustained amid disagreement, geopolitical tension, and uncertain futures. Much of my work focuses on outer space because it brings these questions into especially sharp relief. Space stations, docking systems, legal agreements, atmospheres, and imagined futures are not simply technical matters. They organise relationships between states, institutions, technologies, and people, shaping who can participate and what forms of cooperation become possible.

I draw together political geography, international relations, science and technology studies, and cultural geography using archival research, interviews, policy materials, visual and cultural analysis, and participatory and speculative methods.

Research Themes

Outer-Space Politics and Diplomacy

My doctoral research examined the International Space Station as a diplomatic, political, and technological assemblage. Rather than treating diplomacy only as something conducted through formal negotiations, I explore how cooperation is also produced through infrastructure, interfaces, legal frameworks, bodily practices, and the shared management of a hostile environment.

This work has developed into research on more-than-human diplomacy, transnational atmospheres, orbital docking, and the material and cultural practices through which international relationships are made and maintained.

Infrastructure and Sociotechnical Politics

I study how technical systems become political. Infrastructures establish standards, distribute capabilities, organise dependence, and make some relationships easier than others.

My research considers technologies such as space stations and docking systems not as neutral settings for politics, but as active parts of political and diplomatic relationships. This provides a way of thinking about infrastructure, governance, and cooperation both on and beyond Earth.

Post-ISS and Cislunar Futures

The planned end of the International Space Station is opening a period of uncertainty in human spaceflight. My current research considers what follows the ISS, including commercial space stations, China’s Tiangong programme, the Artemis programme, the International Lunar Research Station, and emerging divisions across orbit, the Moon, and cislunar space.

I am developing this research through The Space Station Gap, a book project examining the relationship between American political imagination and human spaceflight, as well as the geopolitical and diplomatic consequences of moving beyond the ISS era.

Embodied Geopolitics

I am also interested in how people become participants in geopolitical institutions and practices. This research draws partly on my own experience in military intelligence and multilateral diplomacy before entering academia.

My developing project, On Becoming a Geopolitical Subject, examines how geopolitical knowledge is learned, embodied, and made operational—and what becomes visible when those experiences are reconsidered through critical social research.

Worldbuilding and Speculative Methods

Alongside my research on outer space, I examine how speculation can help researchers and communities question futures that are presented as inevitable. Through Speculative Worlds, I use workshops, scenarios, creative practice, and collaborative inquiry to explore environmental, political, and technological futures.

This work treats speculation not primarily as prediction, but as a method for investigating assumptions, widening political imagination, and creating space for alternative possibilities.

Current Projects

The Space Station Gap

A book project examining the history and future of American human spaceflight through the recurring political concern that the United States might be left without a permanent human presence in orbit. The project connects debates after Apollo with the end of the ISS, commercial space stations, Tiangong, and emerging geopolitical divisions in cislunar space.

Dividing the Earth, Dividing the Moon

This article examines Artemis and the International Lunar Research Station as competing but still developing geopolitical and sociotechnical projects. It asks how terrestrial political divisions are being extended, reformulated, and materialised through lunar infrastructure, partnerships, and imagined futures.

The Lunar Turn

This article challenges the growing tendency to treat the Moon as the principal horizon of human spaceflight while relegating the International Space Station and space stations more broadly to the past.

It argues that this Lunar Turn produces a form of orbital amnesia. It overlooks the historical importance of stations as the primary infrastructures of sustained human presence beyond Earth, treats the still-operational ISS chiefly through its anticipated ending, and neglects the station-based futures emerging through Tiangong, commercial platforms, coalition infrastructures, and lunar orbit. The article approaches the space station as an enduring political form through which access, cooperation, hierarchy, embodiment, and geopolitical difference are organised.

Cooperation Without Consensus

This wider research agenda asks how people and institutions collaborate without resolving fundamental differences in interests, values, or political commitments. It builds on my research into US–Russian cooperation aboard the ISS and connects it to questions of diplomacy, infrastructure, facilitation, and collaborative practice.

On Becoming a Geopolitical Subject

A reflective research project drawing on my experiences in military intelligence, multilateral diplomacy, and academic geography. It examines how institutions train people to perceive, analyse, and act upon the world geopolitically.

Work in Progress

“From Handshakes to Moonjoy: Affective Embodiment of Outer Space Diplomacy”
Submitted to Cultural Geographies.

“Dividing the Earth, Dividing the Moon: Artemis, ILRS and the Geopolitics of Cislunar Futures”
In preparation.

“On Becoming a Geopolitical Subject”
In preparation.

“Against the Lunar Turn: Space Stations and the Politics of the Orbital Present”
In preparation.

Speculative Worlds Research Collection
Academic and public-facing outputs on interdisciplinarity, speculation, research practice, and the creation of an intellectual community.

Selected Conference Papers and Invited Talks

“ISS as More-than-Terrestrial Diplomatic Assemblage”
Space Studies: How to Build Cross-Disciplinary Cooperation between France and the UK, London, June 2025.

“Gateway to Space: The Oklahoma Spaceport as Microcosm of American Final Frontier Mythos”
RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London, August 2024.

“Assembling the ISS: More-than-Terrestrial Geopolitics”
Off-Earth Geopolitics, University of Oxford, September 2023.

“Politics of Belonging: Climbing into Space Expo’s Scale Model of the ISS”
Extra-Terrestrial Ethnographies: Fieldwork for the New Space Age, London, September 2023.

“More-than-Human Space Diplomacy”
Space Education and Strategic Applications Conference, September 2023.

The Hague Space Diplomacy Symposium
Leiden University, June 2023.

Politics of Outer Space Panel
UCL Leaders, January 2023.