But why here? Space technologies, the logic of location, and the violence of infrastructure

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• Asif Siddiqi (Fordham University)
• Thursday 05 June 2025, 15:30-17:00
• Biffen Lecture Theatre, Department of Genetics, Downing Site.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact David Thompson.

Twenty-Ninth Annual Hans Rausing Lecture

This talk is part of a larger project that imagines a history of space exploration centering the Global South as a crucial site for humanity’s first steps off the planet. During the Cold War, when the United States, the Soviet Union, and many Western European nations first began to explore space, they stationed considerable ground infrastructure on Africa, Asia, and Latin America to track, communicate with, and launch satellites into orbit. Largely invisible in popular accounts of space exploration, these technoscientific stations, strewn across many postcolonial locales, produced a wide range of entanglements with local populations and environments, usually in the form of displacements of people or damage to local ecologies. In looking at the history of this ‘passive’ infrastructure in several locales, including Algeria, Kenya, and India – the talk offers insights along three threads. First it explores the ways in which the selection criteria for locating such technoscientific infrastructure derived from a certain kind of ‘logic of location’ which naturalized exclusionary practices as being ‘rational’ and opposition to them as being antimodern, ahistorical, and against the greater good. Second, it restores ‘history’ to these sites by situating them outside of the space program, thus linking them to broader political economies and colonial geographies, rendering visible the seams and sutures of a larger story of the (re)appropriation of postcolonial geographies in the late 20th century for space exploration. Finally, the talk offers a methodological intervention, situating this kind of technoscientific ‘passive’ infrastructure (and often, their abandoned ruins) as part of a global (and postcolonial) history of technology, one legible at multiple and overlapping registers, including the social, the technological, and the environmental.

• Asif Siddiqi is Professor of History at Fordham University, New York. He specialises in the history of science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular focus on communities and practices operating globally and under conditions of stress and scarcity.

This talk is part of the Rausing Lecture series.

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