Scholars in the social sciences of outer space have long emphasized that space is never simply “out there.” Rather, domains beyond Earth’s orbit are always also “here,” co-produced through terrestrial economies, epistemologies, and political structures (Messeri 2016; Buchli 2020; Olson 2023). Taking Achille Mbembe’s 2021 notion of planetary entanglements as our point of departure, our panel explored how the so-called “new space race” extends and reconfigures existing geopolitical dynamics in trans-planetary configurations. We examined the everyday social and political effects of renewed space faring ambition, including the displacement of communities, the speculative capitalization of unmaterialized futures, and the reproduction of geopolitical hierarchies through celestial imaginaries.
Our aim was to consider what forms of ethnographic research can critically and relationally attend to these developments. The interventions shared in Johannesburg and online invited reflection on how ethnographic methods might help reveal the co-constitution of Earthly life and extraterrestrial aspiration—foregrounding outer space not as a distant frontier, but as a site deeply entangled with contemporary structures of power and possibility (as Armstrong and Klinger 2025 have also pointed out). This review revisits those discussions, reflecting on how ethnography, with its dual inheritance of colonial complicity and decolonial potential, might serve as a method for grappling with the interwoven logics of space and coloniality. In this brief text, we offer an overview of the nexus between outer space studies and literature concerned with colonial processes, while we show how our panellists expanded these conversations by drawing attention to three interrelated points:
Can we reconfigure the terms through which coloniality and decoloniality are imagined once we move beyond Earth?
First, presenters highlighted the spatiality of outer spaces. Rather than treating space as a neutral container defined by Euclidean geometry, the presentations emphasized relational and entangled spatial configurations. Second, in challenging dominant assumptions about where and how we locate “outer space,” presenters de-centered ocular-centric perspectives that often govern our engagement with the cosmos. They called for alternative ways of sensing, knowing, and imagining space beyond vision alone. Finally, each presenter offered distinct narrative and ethnographic strategies as both a decolonial method and ethos. These approaches challenged extractive forms of knowledge production and proposed ways to ethically engage with the cosmic as embedded in political, historical, and affective contexts. Collectively, these interventions—which we summarize below and link to throughout—raise a crucial ontological question: can we reconfigure the terms through which coloniality and decoloniality are imagined once we move beyond Earth?
As scholars of outer space have argued, the lexicons of “the last frontier,” “terra nullius,” and “space colonization”—used in both everyday language and in the communication strategies of public and private space agencies—reanimate familiar imperial logics (Haskins 2018; Smiles 2020; see also Kim 2024). These narratives fold outer space into extractive infrastructures and speculative economic regimes, while naturalizing imperial desire as technological destiny. Through his 2002 work on the French/European communications satellite launch site at Kourou, in French Guiana, Peter Redfield sought to highlight the historical geography of power that courses through the notion of contemporary space projects. By calling to provincialize outer space, Redfield opened a pathway to reading empire through the imaginaries and ambitions associated with space exploration. Since then, a growing body of scholarship has continued to interrogate how technoscientific approaches to outer space draw from frameworks that have long underpinned imperial expansion and technoscientific authority. These range from territorial questions of land ownership in the form of occupations of indigenous territories by space science infrastructures on Earth, such as in Hawai’i (Sammler and Lynch 2021), to notions of imperialism that extend into the framing of outer space itself (Lempert 2021; Marshall 1995). By interrogating both the “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Harvey 2025 referring to Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun 2009) behind current spacefaring endeavours, as well as the imagined futures they evoke in terms of economic expansion and exploitation as continuations of the territorial ambitions of the Cold War (Harvey 2025:8), scholars have compared the contemporary space race to a “gold rush” (ibid. 11). Others have focused their critique on the “anticipatory regimes” (Adams et al. 2009) that rely on the logics of colonial and capitalist expansion which rule the current speculations of space colonization as propagated by technocratic public figures (Young and Docherty 2025), while also pointing out the “technological hegemony” of spacefaring nations such as the US (ibid. 172, referring to Parker 2009).
At the same time, research on indigenous-owned space stations (Fish 2024) discusses how decolonization may be mediated with the liberalism that marks the contemporary Western space industry. Moreover, indigenous scholars and allies have pointed out the transformative potential of indigenous concepts of futurity for all involved (Goodyear-Ka’Ōpua 2017) as “[…] Indigenous futurity does not require the erasure of now-settlers in the ways that settler futurity requires of Indigenous peoples.” (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013, 80).
Outer space is not elsewhere.
Building on this work, our panellists explored how these dominant technoscientific and imperial frameworks of outer space might be disrupted—both through the mundane and through alternative scientific engagements. A first proposition that emerged from our collective conversations was the need to scramble the spatial and scalar logics through which space is apprehended—to the point of rejecting analogies between Earth-bound and Space-bound activities altogether (see also Valentine 2025a). As Peter Redfield notes, scale “is not an inherently neutral quality, but rather itself operates as a sign, one that lingers through time and ‘limit forms’ of space” (2002: 793). Hae-Seo Kim’s presentation on Korean shamanism revealed how the presumed separability between body and cosmos can collapse. In this cosmology, the shaman’s body is the cosmos—a relational configuration in which outer space is not distant or abstract, but interior, embodied, and intimately connected to the work of mourning colonial violence and diasporic displacement (see also Kim 2025). Similarly, Lauren Reid’s work showed how, in Thailand, as well as in other contexts, cosmologies coexist rather than compete. Here, scientific understandings of outer space, replete with colonial expeditions, astronomical events and celestial mappings, exist alongside Buddhist practices that enable forms of interstellar communication that disrupt the binary between Earth and space, religion and science (see also Reid 2023, 2025). This multiplicity unravels the assumption of a singular, secular, scientific “outer space,” revealing instead a layered and contested terrain. Anne Johnson’s work (see also Johnson 2025) traced these relational logics to Mexican understandings of the moon—as person, world, and underworld—while Chakad Ojani’s reading of speculative fiction and film in Northern Sweden underscored how imaginaries of emptiness have long underwritten both space exploration and mining industries (see also Ojani 2024, 2025). These industries rely on a colonial erasure of presence, despite their proximity to Sámi communities whose lives and lands are continuously rendered invisible in dominant spatial narratives. Across these examples, the separation between on-Earth and off-Earth collapses. Outer space is not elsewhere. It is folded into terrestrial infrastructures, colonial histories, and contested futures.
Alongside this spatial critique was a concern with epistemology—specifically, the dominance of ocular-centric knowledge in Western science. Alkim Erol’s and Aramo Olaya Alvarez’s presentations called for moving beyond the visual, embracing embodied, sensory, and speculative forms of engagement with celestial phenomena. Erol’s work emphasized how the visual technologies and image-making practices that accompany space exploration construct specific mental territories. In an effort to unsettle this cognitive mapping, Erol proposed AI-generated visualizations as tools for imagining alternative futures of space settlement. Alvarez, meanwhile, offered a pointed critique of conventional SETI approaches, highlighting how they reproduce colonial logics through technological detection methods and universalizing assumptions about communication. Their contribution fundamentally rethinks how we conceptualize the possibility of contact with alien intelligences. The de-centering of sight, and the related critique of visual technologies as privileged mode of knowing opened up alternative methodological possibilities, from the somatic to the sonic, from ritual to fiction. These shifts in how knowledge is produced—and who is positioned as a legitimate knower—formed part of a broader challenge to the epistemological foundations of outer space research, which extends to the domain of becoming a space scientist in the first place. This was the topic of Angelika Schweimnitz’ presentation in the context of Egypt’s National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics (NRIAG). She analysed the role of educational museum spaces in addressing inequalities in space science. These spaces employ multiple sensory modalities and embodied forms of learning to engage with astronomical concepts, empowering underrepresented, particularly young female visitors, to imagine their own future in space science.
These approaches positioned narrative form itself as a site of decolonial intervention.
Narrative, too, emerged as a crucial terrain. Across the panel, participants deployed a range of narrative strategies as both method and critique. Rather than treating storytelling as supplementary to analysis, these approaches positioned narrative form itself as a site of decolonial intervention. From speculative fiction to autobiographical writing, from artistic inquiry to multimodal ethnography, these contributions emphasized the need to write with, rather than simply about, the multiplicity of cosmologies and the complexity of space-time relations.
The ontological implications of these engagements were most directly explored in David Valentine’s contribution to our panel, which asked whether the radical otherness of outer space might require a reconfiguration of the conceptual frameworks through which we imagine both coloniality and decoloniality (see also Valentine 2025a, 2025b). What kind of actor is space, with its dearth of atmosphere, gas, gravitation? How might the conditions of outer space unsettle Earth-bound categories such as territory, conquest, or sovereignty—categories long assumed to be universally expandable? In other words, Valentine invites us to ask whether outer space can uphold and extend colonial ambitions, or whether such ambitions are destabilized by the profound alterity of matter beyond our orbit (see also Valentine 2016). For other panellists, ontological difference emerged through an engagement with multiple cosmologies and practices that resist binaries such as religion/secularity, real/speculative, visual/non-visual, or inner/outer space. Ethnographic attention to these pluralities reveals that ontological world-building happens not in abstraction but in practice—whether through ritual, story, or technology.
Ontological world-building happens not in abstraction but in practice—whether through ritual, story, or technology.
It is clear that conversations about colonial continuities and imperial formations are central to any critical engagement with speculative interest in space exploration. What, then, does thinking with outer space offer to contemporary anthropological debates on ethnography and (de)coloniality? Our three-session panel at WAU demonstrated that while discussions of coloniality and its afterlives already animate much of anthropology today, thinking through outer space extends and complicates these conversations. Not because space exploration is “new”—our entanglements with the cosmos are ancient and discourses of futurity and innovation that surround the “new space race” risk obscuring its colonial inheritances. Rather, outer spaces throw into relief the material and ontological limits of terrestrial colonial frameworks, making them newly visible when projected into radically different conditions of life. As Valentine’s provocation suggests, colonial projects that aim to expand into the cosmos must contend with the radical alterity of that domain. In this sense, space is not merely a destination but a relational force—one that challenges dominant ontologies and compels us to reimagine practices of (in)habitation. It invites a reconfiguration of the terms through which life is located, sustained, and imagined. This, in turn, amplifies the voices already rethinking the colonial politics of space on Earth, and gestures toward an anthropology attuned to the entangled conditions of planet and cosmos, habitability and resistance, imperial debris and speculative life.
Featured image: Upside-down “Picture of comet McNaught with moon and planet setting over the sea at Cape Town South Africa 20:59 20 January 2006″ by Clive Lindsay, Public Domain.
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Abstract: What is at stake in engaging outer space ethnographically when colonial histories and power structures continue to shape its exploration and imagination? This question anchored a panel convened in November 2024 at the World Anthropological Union Congress (WAU) in Johannesburg, where we, Hanna Nieber, Anton Nikolotov, Alana Osbourne and Anna Lisa Ramella, explored the intersections of cosmic inquiry, colonial legacies, and ethnographic method. United by a shared concern with how outer spaces, both literal and figurative, interact with the continuities of colonialism and the imaginaries that might unsettle them, we invited participants to consider how cosmic ontologies take shape and circulate within contemporary technoscientific pursuits.
