“REINDEER, ROCKETS AND OLIGOPTIC-SATELLITARIAN ENVIRONMENTS IN NORTHERN SWEDEN”

Sweden is currently expanding its sounding rocket range with a view to developing orbital launch capability. While framed by space actors as a response to urgent planetary challenges such as climate change, the expansion also relies on historical constructions of northern Sweden as empty wilderness and the concomitant marginalization of Sámi land practices. By turning to reindeer herders’ uses of space infrastructure, Ojani delineates an oligoptic-satellitarian environment that runs athwart panopticist understandings of satellite vision. Rather than trying to see everything from nowhere, the herders bring into view a limited set of more-than-human relations that challenge perceptions of the landscape as exploitable. While suggesting that space activities in Sweden fold into colonial histories, in this presentation, Ojani also argues that space infrastructures contain the potential for their own reconfiguration by eliciting the other worlds that are already being performed from within dominant sociotechnical regimes.

View biography on chakadojani.com.