20 july, gd:c annual lecture 2026

Asif Siddiqi (Fordham University), Departure gates: histories of space on Earth

 

Venue: Historisches Kolleg, Kaulbachstr. 15, 80539 Munich

 

Please register by 7 July HERE.

 

Through a reading of the considerable ground infrastructure built in the Global South to support space exploration, this talk offers some preliminary conceptual interventions into the forms in which techno-scientific infrastructures have produced human, natural, and epistemic displacements on a global scale. These ‘departure gates’—places where humans have placed launch sites, tracking stations, communications dishes, radar installations, etc.—are typically obscured from view once the space mission begins, but yet render an indelible imprint on local ecologies.

 

In looking at the history of this infrastructure in several locales, including Algeria, Kenya, South Africa, Kazakhstan, 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 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, rendering visible the seams of a larger story of the (re)appropriation of colonial geographies 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.