Cite as:
Jones, Craig. 2019. "Terracentric Positionings." 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.
This essay is part of the meta essay on the Social Studies of Outer Space group. Another essay related to the shared question of "how does this innovation interrupt habitual modes of doing STS?" can be found at Interrupting earthly modes of doing STS.
TBD
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
STS, despite its vast scope and numerous branches, has traditionally taken areas of study that are Earthbound, whether this be medicine, mobilities, communications, or a whole host of other areas. However, the incorporation of Outer Space as a field of study disrupts the usual scope of STS in two distinct ways. Firstly, it takes a site that is in many ways outside of the Earth (some, however, are still Earthbound, such as scientific centres, labs, launch sites, etc). Secondly, through its focus upon activities outside of Earth, Outer Space necessarily requires us to think anew our a priori assumptions when it comes to onto-epistemologies and how we come to conceptualise these extraterrestrial actions and sites.
Examples of such issues are the different ways of ‘doing’ embodied practices required in zero gravity, larger exclusion zones required around heritage sites on the Moon (Spennermann, 2004), and the Philae lander’s ‘bouncing’ after its landing (more information here). Through taking Outer Space as a site of study the sense-making practices and frameworks usually adopted by STS are troubled. Indeed, sustained engagement in studying Outer Space may be said to be a sense-unmaking practice in the way it calls into question the terracentric nature of STS and associated disciplines, these practices and onto-epistemologies having been conceived of upon Earth and with(in) the (im)material relations bound up within those ways of being.
The terracentric modes of study are disrupted in space and may prove irrelevant or severely lacking due to the vastly different environment of Outer Space. This disruption operates at multiple scales. It not only troubles our ideas around regimes of power but also requires that we consider the somewhat more mundane questions around ‘simple’ actions of being and, therefore, how knowledge is produced. All of these come to be massively disrupted and reconstituted through being in Outer Space. Thus, recognising our terracentric positionings, studying Outer Space forces questions of how/if we can think beyond the Earth and the experiential knowledges this (re)creates.
As with other sociotechnical endeavours, outer space has long been the site of social and political struggles. Nation states have competed with each other over access to orbital space for militaristic or commercial uses, to send probes and robots to other planetary bodies, and to craft messages for putative extrasolar species. Elites have also imagined outer space as somewhere they can exercise power and influence: today, we can see very clearly in the form of companies led by wealthy billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson, amongst others. They are seeking to shape collective imaginaries of what the future of humans in outer space will be like. In turn, scholars, journalists and other citizen groups also contest these elite imaginings and challenge us to think differently about outer space, to challenge the way that media reporting for example often rehearses the language of ‘colonizing’ or ‘colonies’.
One task for our network then is to join with this effort to challenge and resist, to interrupt hegemonic imaginings of human futures.
