Outer Space from the South: An Ecology of Practice in Africa’s Space Science Infrastructures

• In Event: Science, Technology and Society in Outer Space - II

Abstract

With the exception of people undertaking space explorations, people on our planet are bound to a view of the Earth through an image. However, images are not neutral and are produced through a long chain of technologies, infrastructures, conceptual categories, aesthetic judgments and technical skill. This ‘ecology of practice’ is distributed unevenly, toward the geopolitical North rather than South. ‘Space in the tropics’ (Redfield 2000) locates outer space elsewhere, co-constituted by technology as well as social, political and historical conditions.

Recent years have seen a surge of space science projects in Africa. The most notable is the construction of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world’s largest radio telescope. The project’s rationale is to study our universe from the perspective of the less explored southern sky, through a multi-country endeavor that allows mobilizing enough resources and capacity to produce images of objects in outer space. Drawing on case studies from Ghana and South Africa’s astronomy infrastructures we highlight the tensions that emerge in placing outer space from the South.

We argue that the development of astronomy in Africa - and space science more generally – reflects a tension between the claims of outer space science as a universalistic project stemming from western epistemologies and the specific postcolonial experience mediating these initiatives when undertaken in the South. The tensions become manifest in the ‘ecology of practice’ through which objects in outer space are transformed into images, a translation of the unknown into the known that is situated in both space and time.

Author

• James Lawrence Merron, University of Basel