Cite as:
Tutton, Richard. 2019. "Network making." In "Social Studies of Outer Space." In Innovating STS Digital Exhibit, curated by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August.
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Furthering its theme, Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations , the 2019 annual 4S meeting in New Orleans will include a special exhibit, Innovating STS , that showcases innovations ...Read more
All Innovating STS exhibits are oriented by nine shared questions in order to generate comparative insight. These are:
ARTICULATION: What STS innovations (of theory, methodology, pedagogy...Read more
The idea that we would wish to create a network started at a particular time and in a particular place: Lancaster University. For it was here in the summer of 2018 that most of us met for the first time in person. Lancaster University was established in the 1960s and is located outside of a small city in the North West of England. It’s home to the Centre for Science Studies, which organized the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) conference in July of that year.
For the conference, Deborah Scott and Valentina Marcheselli, Matjaz Vidmar, Richard Tutton and Franc Mali organized two panels, which featured the work of 11 different speakers on topics that ranged from resource extraction, space weather, “new space” innovation, orbital debris, to multiplanetary imaginaries. Together, these panels represented how STS scholarship could think critically about relations between Earth and outer space. In the rooms in which these panels took place, we listened to and engaged in discussions about our ongoing research. On Twitter, we posted pictures and summaries of what was said for others to see.
Over the three days of the conference, we came to appreciate that there could be a wider community of scholars interested in approaching outer space through STS. After the panels concluded, we arranged to meet at the social event on a warm, sunny Friday evening. We took over a table, ordered drinks, and talked about our ideas for the future.
The idea of a network took shape. We would have a WordPress site, we would seek funding for future meetings, we would continue where we left off in Lancaster at future conferences such as 4S in New Orleans and elsewhere.
Over the next few weeks, we began to correspond with each other and debated what name we should give to the network and what we wanted to achieve with creating such a network. We decided to borrow Lisa Messeri’s term ‘social studies of outer space’, in part because it resonated with how that term has been used in STS (from the journal Social Studies of Science, to social studies of biomedicine). It seemed to capture what we thought we were about. However, Messeri provides scant details on what a ‘social studies of outer space’ would actually involve in her 2016 book, Placing Outer Space. Therefore, we came to realize that we would have to decide what we would mean by the ‘social studies of outer space’.
Ideas flow with alcohol and in the warm afterglow of a series of successful talks. Acting on those ideas, creating the infrastructures that we imagined took much longer to realize. Network members paid for and launched a WordPress site and a Twitter handle. We then planned to hold a roundtable session at 4S in New Orleans, but, after consultation with the conference organizers, we have found ourselves creating another STS infrastructure, one that permits us to present themes from the work that highlights how outer space technoscience is a contested site of innovation and investment in particular sociotechnical futures, and to reflect on our own experiences of seeking to institutionalizing this work.
