| dc.description.abstract | For millennia, civilisations scattered across the earth have craned their necks up towards the cosmos to seed their origin mythologies into the blanket expanse of deep space. However the imbrication of imperial conquest, colonial expansion, and militarized competition transformed humanity’s seedbed of cosmology into a project of material incursion, casting outer space as a frontier primed for possession, surveillance, and extraction. The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons, but the horizon is no monolithic constant. It remains a jagged line as it wrestles with issues of democratisation of space exploration and access. For some countries and corporations the apparent ‘frontier’ of space is a territory familiar with significant resources and infrastructure to have become veteran voyagers; others take nascent steps, developing strategies to strengthen their space programs; and yet others remain feet planted firmly, gazing at the horizon that never moved, exploring the deep expanse of the cosmos through myth, language, ritual and dreamscape.
Indigenous people across the globe have remained explorers of this enigma through rich cultural cosmologies evolved over millennia of observation. Their knowledge represents diverse epistemologies that offer insight into radically different relationships that humans have evolved about space and its exploration, and is a fount of intangible heritage that rarely makes an appearance in the mainstream discourses. As humans become prominent actors in extraterrestrial realms, it stirs in its wake complex questions of identity politics. Whose identity becomes a blueprint for ‘humanity’? What cultures are represented and how? What cultures and narratives are silenced by deliberate obscuration or worse by ignorance and apathy? These questions emerge as a dialectic to the monolithic identities and monocultures of mind that underpin mainstream space discourse. Nested within storied cultural heritages are alternative cosmologies, attuned to other dimensions and extended voyages that offer the possibility of thickening the discourse towards a more inclusive mythology for future space exploration. For speculative design to become truly liberatory, it must create space for those rendered inarticulate by the architectures of structural design. This requires a reconfiguration of the very grammar of futurity, an effort to recruit voices we have not trained ourselves to hear. What forms of consultation and authorship emerge when the techno-poetics of the disenfranchised are taken seriously? What does epistemic hospitality look like when mediated through art and design? These questions shape the methodological horizon of this dissertation: Can voices from the margins thicken the discourse on space exploration? Can the subaltern speculate? And if so, what futures become possible when they do?
The argument then is to transition from a colonial aerospace to a decolonial cosmos. This dissertation proposes the CthulhuCosmos as a site of possibility, a speculative cosmopolitics inspired by Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, calling for tentacular forms of kinship that thread together the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial. Drawing from field-based engagements with the Likan Antai of the Atacama Desert, the Changpa of Ladakh, the Khasi of Meghalaya, the Maasai of Kenya, and other communities and sites in Central Asia, the dissertation extends epistemic hospitality to these cosmological traditions to enter into dialogue with modern techno-imaginaries in the realm of space exploration. Much has been written on dualisms in science subject/object, culture/nature but less attention has been paid to the void that undergirds these dialectics, and the mythologies of purity that enforce their boundaries.
Rather than seeking synthesis or translation, this dissertation positions these cosmologies in deliberate adjacency, provoking the emergence of ontological multiplicity without collapsing difference into a universal frame. To navigate these entangled terrains, it proposes threshold craft as a methodological framework: a practice of designing and mediating epistemic encounters at the interstices of science, cosmology, and speculative design. Threshold craft emerges as a form of cosmopolitical calibration attuned to asymmetry, opacity, and plural rationalities through which the CthulhuCosmos can be articulated as a scaffold for relational intelligibility between divergent ways of knowing. The dissertation offers a speculative infrastructure for navigating the architectures of space exploration and other emergent technoscientific domains wherever futures are being imagined and ethics remain unsettled. As a methodological framework, it enables the design of epistemic encounters grounded in ethical entanglement and relational responsibility, allowing divergent cosmologies to co‑inhabit speculative terrains without erasure or collapse. | |
