Constellations 4 Astronomy in Madagascar

In my post-doctoral project, I investigate the emergence of astronomy in Madagascar. As a scientific discipline, astronomy claims universality and connects astronomers across the globe. However, astronomical research always depends on place-bound infrastructures, both material and ideological, through which astronomy’s research object – the cosmos – is rendered approachable. My research is interested in how these infrastructures of astronomy become a vehicle to reimagine and reconfigure Madagascar’s relation to Africa (and its decolonial narratives), to the earth (and concerns for a planetary future amidst global inequalities), and to the universe (and cosmological questions about humanity).

Recently, the physics department of the university in Antananarivo, Madagascar, introduced an astronomy and astrophysics Master’s program to train astronomers capable of operating an old satellite dish that will become the country’s first radio telescope. This dish is to be included in the African component of the “Square Kilometre Array” (SKA), a network of radio telescopes that will over the course of this decade grow into the world’s largest scientific instrument. Astronomically enacting “Africa” and forecasting its “great future”, the SKA – including the Madagascar dish – is at once an object of local pride (and resistance) and an instrument attached to global ethics of scientific universality. 

My research is interested in local repercussions of this highly charged science project. Actors, things, and discourses reveal the challenges and ambiguities of doing science as a universalized practice in Madagascar. “Actors” include astronomy students whose outreach activities aim to educate the public about the value of science and to counter the persisting confusion of their discipline with astrology. How do these activities perform Malagasy ties to a global community of astronomers, and how do they relate to narratives of decolonization? “Things” include the affective materiality of the dish with its promises to enroll Madagascar into prestigious global networks of data traffic. How does the dish strengthen Madagascar’s relations to Africa and to the world of science? “Discourses” include international debates of astronomers on terrestrial and local development, concerns for planetary wellbeing, and engagement with global inequalities. How does care for constellations on earth relate to astronomy’s totalizing approach to the cosmos? In light of widespread debates about decolonization, my project engages with the constellation in which Malagasy students embrace normative claims for astronomy’s universality, a disused satellite dish becomes an affectively laden object of investment, and astronomers’ discourses attend to matters on earth.

We are yet to see how astronomy becomes stabilized in Madagascar and how Malagasy astronomers will position themselves amidst global, African, and local science networks. With this project I aim to contribute to anthropological scholarship about human relations to outer space and to the technologies that bring access to it. I seek to understand the care for normative frames in which the “reading” of the starry sky is controlled. Amidst global inequalities, my research sets out to query the ways of producing knowledge about the universe.