CfP: Satellite data, Environment and Infrastructures of Power

Proposal for a symposium at the HSS Annual Meeting in  New Orleans, LA, USA, 13-16 November 2025. “Satellite data, environment, and infrastructures of power”

 

Today, data generated with Earth orbiting satellites is essential for producing scientific, economic, and governance-related knowledge about the oceans, the atmosphere, the land surfaces and the ice, as well as the communities inhabiting and managing them. These data are not neutral: they are actively collected, analysed, maintained, and shared through a vast knowledge infrastructure. Infrastructure that must be historically situated and involves complex negotiations among data, technologies, practices, institutions, and knowledges between various social groups. Connecting satellite data back to the context in which they were produced, disseminated, maintained, and used allows us to emphasize how satellite data were defined, who controlled them, and why they matter today.

We invite empirical studies that critically examine the actors, institutions, and sociotechnical arrangements that influence in environmental satellite data development, maintenance, and governance. In doing so, we seek to illuminate the power dynamics, inequalities, organizational structures, normative values, and epistemic assumptions embedded in satellite data practices. Key themes include (but are not limited to):

• Power and Governance:  How are privilege, geopolitical, and economic tensions embedded in the production, curation, and circulation of satellite data? In which ways can satellite data function as diplomatic assets in scientific, technological, and political negotiations about the environment? This includes exploring the ways in which satellite data can be mobilized both to enforce and to challenge systems of environmental and data governance, as well as the economic and environmental frictions that emerge in their use and distribution.
• Sociotechnical Infrastructures: Under which material, social, and political conditions are data produced and accessed? Examining these dimensions revolves around examining which data regimes have been developed, such as open access or public-private partnerships— as well as the efforts undertaken to promote satellite data at different scales: whether international, regional, national, or local.
• Knowledge and epistemologies: How do satellite data affect the historical construction of scientific disciplines, practices, values, and technologies? How do the particular ways in which satellite data are arranged in visual formats such as maps, images, measurements, and graphs inform the narratives they promote or obscure? We also seek to understand how particular datasets gain economic, scientific, aesthetic, or ethical value and how they reach different audiences across political, academic, and public spheres.

This panel is coordinated under the ERC StG CLIMASAT project. All interested scholars are invited to contribute. Please send your paper proposals (title, abstract of 250 words, and short biography) before 1st April 2025 to Andrea Álvarez-Laorden and Gemma Cirac-Claveras.