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This chapter examines the historical development of space tourism from early wondering at the heavens to more recent extraterrestrial astrotourism. It catalogs the development of the significant terrestrial space tourism market, including dark-sky tourism, launch tours, zero-G flights, and edutainment experiences, as part of a “steps to space” for costlier future developments in space tourism. Recent developments in the suborbital sector initiated by the XPRIZE and spearheaded by Virgin Galactic are the next stage in this product ladder. All these draw on a rich history of space exploration – imagined, virtual, and real – that frames how future developments in space tourism can be viewed.

Purpose – This paper explores a pervasive yet little explored myth that underlies much marketing theory and practice: living in harmony with nature. While previous research typically presents “harmony with nature” as something consumers can easily find by returning to a benevolent “Mother Nature,” the current research problematizes how “harmony with nature” is discursively constructed in contemporary advertisements.

Methodology/approach – This paper traces the visual genealogy of contemporary advertising imagery to explore different discursive constructions of the harmony myth. Over 600 advertisements published in Backpacker magazine between 2007 and 2009 form the database for this research.

Findings – Drawing on a more nuanced understanding of the organic framework of nature, and representations of nature in the artistic genre of Romantic landscape painting, the current research finds that divergent images of an “Arcadian” and “Dynamic” nature give rise to different constructions of harmony that are fraught with tension. Harmony might be as easily lost as it is found, or it might never be achieved at all.

Originality/value of paper – This research shows that living in harmony with nature is less harmonic than it seems. It extends previous research that adopted an implicitly unproblematic understanding of finding harmony in nature by uncovering nuances and contradictions within contemporary manifestations of the harmony myth. Implications for marketers and for our understanding of the human/nature relationship more generally are offered.

This chapter is an examination of the contribution of female musicianship to the Perth metal scene, particularly in relation to the positioning of women in frontier mythology and the ways in which we might read the gothic sublime in terms of women’s experiences. While it has been recognised that Australian metal music, in general, is tied to the colonial frontier narrative, Perth’s isolation produces a particular kind of frontier narrative which can be read in relation to the gothic sublime. In this chapter, the author examines three Perth metal bands which comprise female members: Claim the Throne (featuring Jess Millea on keys and vocals), Sanzu (featuring Fatima Curley on bass) and Deadspace (featuring Shelby Jansen on bass and vocals). The author will argue that there is a motif running through Perth bands that comprise female musicians that is tied to their positioning in the Western frontier narrative and its production in relation to the gothic sublime. To do so presents one kind of way to conceptualise a metal scene on the ‘Western Front’. The author emphasises that this is not a totalising conceptualisation, rather, it is one way to suggest how context might shape women’s experiences and, perhaps more importantly for this argument, the way in which women women’s experiences and historicity in relation to the legacy of ‘frontierswomen’ inflect metal music in this scene.

What insights might attending to the cyclical history of colonially imposed environmental change experienced by Indigenous peoples offer to critical intellectual projects concerned with race? How might our understanding of race shift if we took Indigenous peoples' concerns with the usurpation and transformation of land seriously? Motivated by these broader questions, in this chapter, I deploy an approach to the critical inquiry of race that I have tentatively been calling anticolonial environmental sociology. As a single iteration of the anticolonial environmental sociology of race, this chapter focuses on Native (American) perspectives on land and experiences with colonialism. I argue that thinking with Native conceptualizations of land forces us to confront the ecomateriality of race that so often escapes sight in conventional analyses. The chapter proceeds by first theorizing the ecomateriality of race by thinking with recent critical theorizing on colonial racialization, alongside Native conceptualizations of land. To further explicate this theoretical argument, I then turn to an historical excavation of the relations between settlers, Natives, and the land in Rhode Island that is organized according to spatiotemporal distinctions that punctuate Native land relations in this particular global region: the Reservation, the Plantation, and the Narragansett.