The orbital technosphere: The provision of meaning and matter by satellites

Gärdebo, Johan; Marzecova, Agata; Knowles, Scott Gabriel

doi:10.1177/2053019617696106

Cited by 24 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…As studies of infrastructure show, highlighting this relational quality is imperative as off-earth processes now increasingly impinge on everyday life (Clormann & Klimburg-Witjes 2021). For instance, ground-based infrastructures and satellite-supported services are vulnerable to space weather and orbital debris (Gärdebo et al 2017;Taylor 2020).…”

Section: Social Studies Of Outer Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space

Timko¹,

Korpershoek²,

Ojani³

et al. 2022

Anthropology Today

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Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a relational understanding of place/ space. Progress in Human Geography 40(4): 455-475. -et al. 2020. Dukarr lakarama: Listening to Guwak, talking back to space colonization. Political Geography 81: 1-10. Brown, P. 2013. A mobius strip of scientific imagination: How deep does the relationship between science fiction and science go? EMBO Reports 14(11): 959-963. Buchli, V. 2020. Extraterrestrial methods: Towards an ethnography of the ISS. In T. Carroll et al. (eds) Lineages

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Section: Social Studies Of Outer Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space

Timko¹,

Korpershoek²,

Ojani³

et al. 2022

Anthropology Today

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“…. ]" (p. 180), and Gärdebo, Marzecova, and Knowles (2017) who argue that the space debris layer in orbit challenges the notion of the technosphere. Existing STS work on waste, recycling, sustainability, and caring for infrastructures, in contrast, primarily addresses planetary concerns.…”

Section: The Making Of Interplanetary Spaces: Co-production and Boundary Infrastructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Knowledge and its material embodiments are at once products of social work and constitutive of forms of social life" (p. 2). Such a perspective on the mutual shaping of science, technology, and social order helps to understand how contextualizing orbital environments and their planetary counterparts as mutually constitutive renders visible the interdependencies of world-knowing and world-making (Gärdebo, Marzecova, and Knowles 2017). Jasanoff (2004) identifies four sites of coproductive relationships: the making of collective identities, public discourses, representations, and the governing of institutions (p. 6).…”

Section: The Making Of Interplanetary Spaces: Co-production and Boundary Infrastructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a boundary infrastructure, space debris thus appears to enable what Olson and Messeri (2015) have called "scalar politics of cosmologies" (p. 31). As it requires speaking of orbital-planetary environments by always referring to a multitude of scales, it also mirrors what Gärdebo, Marzecova, and Knowles (2017) define as an interscalar vehicle: An "empirical object [ . .…”

Section: Scaling Visualizations: Space Debris As a Boundary Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

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Troubled Orbits and Earthly Concerns: Space Debris as a Boundary Infrastructure

Clormann

Klimburg-Witjes

2021

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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Like other forms of debris in terrestrial and marine environments, space debris prompts questions about how we can live with the material remains of technological endeavors past and yet to come. Although techno-societies fundamentally rely on space infrastructures, they so far have failed to address the infrastructural challenge of debris. Only very recently has the awareness of space debris as a severe risk to both space and Earth infrastructures increased within the space community. One reason for this is the renewed momentum of interplanetary space exploration, including the colonization of the Moon and Mars, which is part of transhumanist and commercially driven dreams of the so-called New Space age. Understanding space infrastructures as inherently linked to earthly infrastructure, we attend to the ways in which space debris, a once accepted by-product of scientific-technological progress, economic interests, and geopolitics, increasingly becomes a matter of concern. Drawing on qualitative interviews with European space sector representatives and work in Science and Technology Studies on infrastructures, we argue that their discursive efforts and visual representation strategies coproduce space debris as a boundary infrastructure. We suggest considering this boundary infrastructure as relating orbital environments and the planet through enacting sustainability and responsibility for beyond-planetary environments.

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“…The circumnavigations of the 1500s that turned the Earth into a navigable sphere had by the 2000s culminated in an orbital technosphere, encircled by satellites providing real-time monitoring of melting ice caps and raging wildfires on the planet, along with data processing to assess their immediate and long-term geo-physical consequences (Gärdebo et al 2017). It was in this epistemological configuration that the Earth system emerged as a lens through which one could study planetary changes caused by humans.…”

Section: Environing Media and Terrestrial Globalisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Where Humans and the Planetary Conflate—An Introduction to Environing Media

Wickberg¹,

Gärdebo²

2020

Humanities

Self Cite

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In this essay, we provide an outline of historical and contemporary examples to illustrate the theoretical concept of environing media. We first discuss how humans have environed their surroundings long before the advent of scientific modernity and the rapid evolution of media technologies that helped in making the planet governable. Against this background, we argue that a fundamental shift in the human–Earth relation happened after 1500 and that this shift is attributable to the development of environing media employed in the process of terrestrial globalisation. We see the present profound renegotiation of the human–Earth relation as a continuity, albeit with a different intensity as exemplified by the work in Earth system science. Finally, we invert Mike Hulme’s call for scientists to meet the humanities into an appeal to humanists to embrace the environmental sciences and pursue more integrative research. Recent developments in environmental history have seen an increased interest in the shaping of environments by means of technology. To this end, scholars have developed theoretical concepts like “environing technologies”, which are based on the premise that the environment is a historical formation by people and societies who form their surroundings as well as their sense of place. In the same vein, historical ecology has shown that premodern peoples also shaped the natural world to their purposes far more than what has generally been understood. The central premise is that what is understood as the environment is the result of human intervention and that environing technologies structure the way that it is used, perceived, and understood. These insights resonate with core notions in media theory, but they have never before been brought together. Given that all of our understanding of the environment today is the product of several processes of mediation, the theory of environing technology would benefit from stronger theorisation of the role of media. While the scale and intensity of information storage, processing, and transmission by media today are unprecedented, the logic of mediated data processing essentially remains the same as five centuries ago when agents of the Spanish Empire took part in shaping the understanding of the environment of the Americas and the globe. For these purposes, we propose the concept of environing media, as a means of both joining intellectual forces and pushing theoretical analysis of both branches further. The paper outlines the theory of environing media using examples from the Global South, in particular the shaping and sensing of landscapes in and around the Philippines. From early modern to late modern times, this region of the world has been influenced by environing media, most importantly circumnavigating ships and orbiting sensing satellites. The result is landscapes made and remade according to colonial and later capitalist priorities operating on a global, and eventually a planetary, scale.

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The orbital technosphere: The provision of meaning and matter by satellites

Cited by 24 publications

References 35 publications

Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space

Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space

Troubled Orbits and Earthly Concerns: Space Debris as a Boundary Infrastructure

Where Humans and the Planetary Conflate—An Introduction to Environing Media

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