The important of place and mobility among researchers has been discussed at government and university policy level in Sweden for several years. The idea of knowledge transfer and learning processes through international mobility and hiring foreign researchers to Sweden is an outspoken strategy to provide fast, knowledge productive and innovative change for the Swedish university culture. An STS-analysis of the complexity at governance level in relation toplace, work-life practices, and an ethnological cultural analysis is useful to understand the complexity of both experimental research infrastructure and individual research practices.

The aim with this paper is to problematize both the scientist dependency of place and research facilities as well as structural incentives expressed by university governance, and individual practices. We analyze the advantages and difficulties of different forms of mobilities and international research practices, including physical mobility (i.e. short- and long-term stays, conferences, project meetings) and mediated (e.g. networking, writing projects) among researchers in the sciences. What do the researchers experience and learn from international stays and co-operations? What types of knowledge and skills are recognized and valued in daily work life, e.g. upon return from a post-doc or conferences? How is this process affected by disciplinary traditions, academic position, gender, age, class- and ethnic background? The main data consists of in-depth interviews with scientists at Swedish universities.

This paper is part of a PhD research on the interactions between astronomers of the Africa Millimetre Telescope (AMT) and Namibian societal stakeholders. The AMT is a radio telescope that will be built in Namibia as part of the Event Horizon Telescope. It is a collaboration between the Radboud University and the University of Namibia, and aims to work closely together with local partners to ensure knowledge transfer and capacity building within Namibian research and industry.

This paper will study how the Gamsberg – one of the potential sites for the AMT – affects the way these collaborations are shaped. The region around the Gamsberg was originally home to the Nama and has historical connections to Hendrik Witbooi, an important leader in the resistance against German colonization. In recent decades, the Gamsberg has been considered as a location for top astronomical facilities (e.g. the MPIA’s Southern Observatory, the VLT and SALT). However, political circumstances and the accessibility of the mountain has thus far prevented the establishment of a professional observatory on the Gamsberg. This paper will study how different stakeholders of the AMT (such as landowners, government institutions and university staff) relate to the Gamsberg. Through observations, interviews and document analysis, I will analyze how the meaning of the Gamsberg constructed, and whose views are (not) heard. In this way, I hope to shed light on how the history and meaning of the Gamsberg mountain is affecting ongoing interactions and power dynamics within and around the project.

Past and present astronomical practices require distinct considerations of place, with climate, weather, labor, and infrastructure among the many factors influencing observatory siting from centuries past through the present day. Fleeing the dual scourges of industrialization and urbanization that yielded ever-worsening observing conditions, many European observatories of the 18th and 19th centuries pushed to imperial peripheries in search of a clear view of the cosmos. This practice continued into the 20th century and persists in the 21st, as evidenced by ongoing conflicts over observatory construction in ecologically and culturally sensitive lands.

The advent of the first space observatories in the mid-20th century promised astronomers new access to regions of the electromagnetic spectrum absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere. Technical complexity aside they also promised a future free from many of the place-bound concerns of their Earthbound predecessors. However, even in the absence of land and long-term inhabitants as terrestrially defined, near-Earth space as a site of astronomical research was—and is—far from politically neutral.

Building upon Lisa Messeri’s work on place-making practices in space sciences, this paper examines astronomical Space Age knowledge production in context of colonial logics and land relations. Commodification of orbital slots and spectrum use, industrial wasting practices, and the global politics of Cold War Big Science undergirded a rarified form of natural resource extraction central to orbital observatory siting. Assessing the history of orbiting observatories from this perspective reveals the position of astronomy within a larger industrial extension of resource inequity and imperial ruination to extraplanetary dimensions.

What is a telescope? I propose to take a broader analytical view and attempt to find more illuminating language rather than follow scientists’ usage of “telescope” or “observatory”. Borrowing from the anthropological literature on resources, I conceptualize the matter/radiation that physicists and astronomers seek — electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves, cosmic rays, neutrinos, etc. — as resources that can only be produced in resource environments. This conceptualization generalizes the conventional conceptual categories of the lab, the field site, and the observatory.

Resources, being relationally defined, need many conditions for their production that are therefore constitutive, not external, such as the absence or suppression of matter/radiation from unwanted sources that is best accomplished in certain kinds of places, usually thought of as “remote”. But if we recognize that such resource environments are not “natural” and ask what processes produce them, we can see that it is about uneven development and extraction, not just geographical landscape. Through case studies of two sites where the planned India-based Neutrino Observatory faced opposition, I show how such projects have contradictory needs for remoteness as well as basic infrastructure, which helps us see the historical reasons for why they often end up being co-located with other extractive projects.