Aparna Venkatesan: Protecting space as ancestral global commons

“The legacy of Earth colonization… is still [in its] early days. We can protect this shared environment and also what I see as the intangible heritage of humanity. Space belongs to us all.”

In this episode, we are joined in conversation with Dr. Aparna Venkatesan, a cosmologist working on studies of “first-light” sources in the universe. She also works actively in cultural astronomy and space policy, is recognized internationally for her research and DEI leadership, featured widely in the media, and received numerous prizes and awards. Dr. Venkatesan is deeply committed to increasing the participation and retention of underrepresented groups in astronomy and the sciences and is active in developing co-created scientific partnerships with Indigenous communities worldwide.

Invoking us to think deeply about the ‘culture of science,’ Dr. Venkatesan offers an invitation to examine tapestries of life in relation to the more-than-earth world. Through joyful rhetoric and a love for the language of science, she calls for reflective examination deemed necessary to preserve the heritage of our ancestral global commons—space—that is currently under threat by extractive and colonial interests. In response to the growing privatization of the cosmos, Dr. Venkatesan urges for the immediacy of un-rooting these legacies by inviting other ways of knowing and engaging in communal practices of interplanetary justice as luminous as the night sky itself.

(The musical offering featured in this episode Carolina by Mother Juniper. The episode-inspired artwork is by Lucy Haslam.)

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