Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space

The scales and categories of human activity are always evolving. The analytical and practical challenges that they pose for ethnographic theory and practice have the potential to consolidate as well as transform research methods and approaches. Drawing on our preliminary fieldwork, we explore how ethnographic practice can bring novel insights to the study of outer space, and map potential areas for future methodological innovation. We identify four challenges for ethnographic research in this context which coalesce around the themes of difference and controversy; connections and contingencies; absence and remoteness; as well as the local and the extraterrestrial. Our aim is to demonstrate that ethnographic practice is not only well-suited for engaging with outer space, but also useful for a critical analysis of some of the most fundamental paradigms of human understanding.

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Reindeer, rockets and space infrastructures: Enacting oligoptic-satellitarian environments in Northern Sweden

Ojani

2024

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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This article focuses on a series of connections between space infrastructures and environments in northern Sweden. Swedish space professionals often highlight the centrality of outer space for contemporary imaginaries about the planet as an interconnected whole. At the same time, the country's sounding rocket range outside the city of Kiruna relies on deep-seated constructions of the subarctic environment as empty wilderness. With the ongoing development of small satellite launch capability, the surrounding landscape needs to be sustained as an impact area, with the consequence that Sámi land practices are increasingly pushed to the sidelines. By turning to reindeer herders’ own uses of satellite technology, I delineate an oligoptic-satellitarian environment that runs athwart panopticonic understandings of satellite vision. Rather than trying to see everything from nowhere, the herders bring into view a limited set of more-than-human relations in order to challenge conceptions of the landscape as empty and exploitable. While showing that space activities in Sweden fold into and reproduce colonial histories, the article also argues that space infrastructures contain the potential for their own reconfiguration by eliciting the other worlds that are already being performed from within dominant socio-technical regimes.

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Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space

Cited by 4 publications

References 30 publications

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A disappearing frontier?: An ethnographic study of the labour of imagination of SpaceX fans and space creators in South Texas

Ethnographic research of outer space: Challenges and opportunities

Reindeer, rockets and space infrastructures: Enacting oligoptic-satellitarian environments in Northern Sweden

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