Research Seminar in Cultural Anthropology: Chakad Ojani "Infrastructuring outer space, un-Earthing anthropology: Outline for a book project on cosmic relations in Sweden"

Sweden is transforming its sounding rocket range into a launch site for small satellites. I examine how this development is mediated by infrastructures of resource extraction and their associated forms of marginalization, thus highlighting space’s “groundedness,” or how human activity in space remains inseparable from sociopolitical dynamics on Earth. By discussing contemporary concerns such as space weather and orbital debris, I simultaneously argue that emergent extraplanetary relations also demand attention to influence running in the opposite direction: from space to Earth. This perspective situates space within terrestrial relations while attending to how those relations are, in turn, being “un-Earthed.”