Departure gates. Histories of space on Earth

gd:c annual lecture 2026

Vortrag von Asif Siddiqui (Fordham University)

You are cordially invited to the annual lecture of the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect on 20 July 2026 at 6 pm at the Historisches Kolleg (Kaulbachstraße 15, Munich).

Your attendance would honour us.

Please register by 7 July 2026 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.

Einlass ist ab 17.30 Uhr bis maximal zum Veranstaltungsbeginn. Die Zahl der Sitzplätze ist begrenzt. Der Zugang zum Haus ist nicht barrierefrei.

Die Veranstaltungen werden mit Foto und Video dokumentiert. Mit Ihrer Teilnahme erklären Sie sich mit der Aufzeichnung und deren Nutzung im Rahmen der Öffentlichkeitsarbeit des Historischen Kollegs einverstanden.