Waste in Space: Mines, E-Waste, Launch Sites, and Asteroids in Outer Space Geographies (11.20.23) | Latin American Studies

Waste in Space: Mines, E-Waste, Launch Sites, and Asteroids in Outer Space Geographies (11.20.23)

The Seeing and Not Seeing Seminar presents a lecture by Julie Klinger, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, University of Delaware.

Monday, November 20, 2023
4 to 5:30 PM
Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering
610 Commonwealth Avenue

Julie Klinger’s talk examines the material relations through which contemporary human engagements with outer space are being produced across four constitutive sites: mines, discarded electronics, launch sites, and asteroids. Drawing together literatures on waste, discard, supply chains, and frontiers with fieldwork in several mining and launch sites in China, Sweden, the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it argues that waste-making is constitutive of a set of contemporary space activities and shapes the manner in which the immensity of the cosmos is understood and engaged by diverse publics. The talk presents a conceptual architecture and also reflexively examines the potential epistemic violence of waste-making as a spatial analytic to link Earthly and outer space geographies.

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