Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Anthropology

First Advisor

Marc L. Moskowitz

Abstract

This project examines how SpaceX’s development of Starbase Boca Chica Beach in Brownsville, Texas, produces what I call desubjectified futures: the systematic transformation of residents from subjects who imagine and create futures into objects upon which futures are imposed. Drawing on five weeks of ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with residents, environmental justice organizers, and members of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe, I argue that SpaceX achieves hegemony not simply by manufacturing consent but through an ontological operation that strips communities of the capacity for collective self-determination before consent becomes meaningful.

I trace this process through three interrelated modes. First, discursively, how SpaceX deploys narratives of emptiness and civilizational progress that collapse the residents’ temporal agency as well as delegitimize their spatial belonging. Materially, the corporate restructuring of Boca Chica through land acquisition, eminent domain threats, and regulatory capture forecloses the institutional structures through which collective resistance may organize. Finally, the visuals that are commissioned in Brownsville function Foucauldian apparatuses that interpellate the residents into abstract universal subjects.

Rights

© 2026, Iwalewa Oluwajuwonlo Olorunyomi

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