What does the planetary look like when approached from Africa? This panel interrogates how science and technology infrastructures across the continent – observatories, satellite tracking stations, climate monitoring networks, mineral extraction regimes, energy grids, data centers, conservation territories, and digital platforms – actively produce the planetary as a domain of knowledge, governance, and aspiration.
Rather than treating Africa as a peripheral site where global projects are merely implemented, we ask how African landscapes, institutions, and political histories are central to the making of planetary science. From astronomy installations and national space agencies to climate science and colonial wildlife conservation; from mineral extraction supply chains to undersea cables and satellite systems, the continent is deeply entangled in projects that operate across human-historical, geological, and cosmic timescales. These projects are not simply planetary in scope; they reorganize land, labor, law, and expertise on the ground.
Approaching planetarity from Africa sharpens longstanding questions in African studies about development, extraction, sovereignty, and inequality. Scientific and technological infrastructures often arrive with promises of modernization, skills transfer, and global integration. Yet they also generate new regulatory regimes, reconfigure property and territory, and distribute benefits unevenly. They embed local environments within planetary and cosmic imaginaries, even as they foreclose alternative futures.
This panel invites contributions that examine how planetary knowledge and planetary politics are assembled through African sites and histories. How do infrastructures mediate between everyday life and global or cosmic scales? How do postcolonial states negotiate participation in planetary science? In what ways do colonial and Cold War histories shape contemporary regimes of expertise and legitimacy? And how do African actors – scientists, policymakers, workers, and communities – reshape what planetarity means?
By centering Africa as a vantage point rather than a backdrop, the panel seeks to rethink planetarity as historically layered, politically contested, and materially grounded. It approaches the planetary as both a universal condition and a set of infrastructures and imaginaries unevenly built through African territories.
I’d like to receive abstracts/summaries by email (davide.chinigo@unibo.it) no later than March 12.
