Congratulations to Kiernan McClelland on successfully defending his PhD dissertation titled Third Place in the Space Race: Securitizing Rhetoric, the Logic of Threat, and the Securitization of the Canadian Civil Space Program.
Kiernan McClelland completed his doctoral studies at the Department of Political Science at Carleton University under the supervision of Dr. Elinor Sloan. Previously, Dr. McClelland had worked as a consultant with Space Strategies Consulting Ltd. and for Transport Canada. He currently works for the Canadian Space Agency.
His research provides a historical reinterpretation of the emergency of the Canadian civil space program during the 20th century. It focuses on the identification, construction, and socialization of civil space activities, from early Canadian science satellites to Canada’s participation in the Space Shuttle, as constructed security issues within the Canadian federal government and the corresponding political effect of such securitizing moves on the trajectory of Canada as a spacefaring state during the period considered the “Space Race”. McClelland proposes the application of securitization theory to better explain the relationship between the development of national civil space programs and national security within emerging spacefaring states.