Feminist Astropolitics with Divya M. Persaud

As told to Kirthi Jayakumar

Dr. Divya M. Persaud (she/her) is a planetary geologist. Her doctoral thesis centered on processing and visualising 3D terrain data as virtual outcrops to investigate the exposed layers in Sakarya Vallis in Gale Crater, Mars. She has an interest in developing novel methods of applying remote sensing datasets to mission planning and science targeting for surface exploration. Dr. Persaud is also an active composer, poet, and speaker passionate about science communication and ethics in space exploration. She is co-founder and co-organiser of Space Science in Context, a global conference bringing together physical and social science practitioners and innovating in accessible and equitable meetings.

Dr. Divya M. Persaud is asking you to do what you can today to interrupt genocide, dismantle settler colonialism, and free Palestine. As you draw breath, draw on the bravery of students and scholars who came before us; the scientists in universities that no longer exist, our fellow human beings who stare up at the same stars to which we have committed our lives. Confront the apparatus that make us co-conspirators in this death-making project. Be renewed in knowing of those who will follow.

Divya is pictured before a backdrop presenting an artistic rendition of the Shadows and Plumes Across Enceladus. (Photo credits: Myah Jeffers - Profile picture | Kirthi Jayakumar - Astronomical Art based on an image by the Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA)

Can you start by sharing your background and what got you interested in planetary space?

I am a research fellow in planetary science. I run a conference called Space Science in Context, which is my Magnum Opus, every two years. It is all about bringing people from the fields of humanities, activism, and the arts, with natural scientists to talk about issues of space science, ethics, and politics in society. I got into planetary geology quite early on. As a kid, I was really interested in rocks and wanted to become a geologist kind of just because of that. When I was 11 or so, I saw a documentary on the space mission Cassini-Huygens. Cassini was a spacecraft studying the Saturnian system, that is, Saturn and all of its moons. It also had a probe on it built by the European Space Agency to descend through the clouds of the moon Titan, which is a moon about the size of Mercury. It is quite large, and has a really thick atmosphere. We have never really seen through the clouds before. This probe went through the clouds in 2005. It landed on Titan and it recorded a sequence of images as it went through and then landed.

The landing photo really struck me. It showed these rounded little pebbles all around the ground, and that was a really big deal for scientists because, when you see round rocks, it basically means there's been some sort of erosional process. Oftentimes, on earth, when we see rocks that are rounded, it means that they've been rounded by water. Subsequently, they discovered that Titan had this whole hydrological system much like Earth with rain and seas and rivers and deltas, but it was all hydrocarbons, so methane and ethane. This enchanted me as a kid and I remember being quite upset because I wondered why we did not learn about this in school.

You don't really learn about astronomy and earth science in primary school in the United States and I wanted to be one of those people who gets to look at those images and gets to compare them to what we see on Earth. I was really invested in doing earth science, but the idea of being able to relate our world to other worlds really captured me. I became quite obsessive about that and I was really lucky to see some educational programs a few years later and then ended up doing some internships as well before I started at university. It's sort of a bug that never left me. I really enjoyed research. I really enjoyed the environment where I worked with teams that worked on missions. That's what I wanted to do. Luckily, I had really supportive mentors who guided me.

My aim was to get to a PhD program and I did research throughout university, working on anything that came up, and anything that I could get my hands on, because I didn't really know what was out there. It's quite a diverse field in terms of topics. I ended up doing my PhD and I'm here now!

There is an understanding that outer space is the common heritage of humankind, but we also see that it is not as easily accessible. How far is this limited accessibility a function of the lack of diversity in the field in itself?

I think it is a twofold thing. On the one hand, and this is something that I've heard other people speak about better than me, the context for space science in the West has always been very much tied to military development during the Cold War. Governments at that time had their political motivations, and science was always reserved for white men. That access was also tied to a sense of nationality as well. The underlying idea was that this was the domain of white men and a nation building project. Our first astronauts were military men. I find that there is a really strong throughline  and that spirit and culture very much remains.

It can be really hard for a woman in any workplace, but I think there is an underpinning political ideology behind, for example, the US space context where you enter these spaces and people engaged in this space were doing work that was very much tied to the Cold War. That influences the gender dynamics in these situations. I know that women engineers face this. In my experience, I think they probably face it more than I do just based on what I've heard from them. It is very hard to find people identifying along the LGBTQIA+ spectrum in these spaces.  The second thing, looking at a more global view, is if we think about who has the capacity to, for example, launch satellites, or who has the capacity to have satellites support spacecraft to support missions, we find that it is the Global North. That is also reflected in my access to outer space, because I grew up in a country that made these opportunities accessible. I may not have been able to access such opportunities had I grown up elsewhere.

That is not a knock on any other countries, but really just that this is very much a deliberate policy that's been developing over the past century where the global north tends to monopolize space activities and does not want to democratize it, or sign, for example, the Moon Treaty or ratify The Outer Space Treaty in relation to democratizing access to space data. I think it's very much deliberate, even as so many countries in the Global South are emerging now with really excellent space programs. But this was not possible two decades ago. I think this is a really sort of critical component when we talk about accessibility of space. There is also the question of who we are allowed to collaborate with – for example, if you work with NASA, you are not allowed to collaborate with Chinese scientists. China had to develop its space capacity on its own without our scientists ever collaborating, or ever sharing knowledge or skills. So it is a slap on the face of this idea of a collective pathos of “exploring” or “studying” our universe because it is very much dictated by the geopolitics here on Earth. 

You've worked with remote sensing. One of the questions in this space that gets lost is the ethics of it all. What might a feminist approach to remote sensing look like, if one might be possible?

I've been discussing this theme with so many folks in light of world events. The ethics and remote sensing intersection is really quite hard to work with because even if we're thinking about satellites orbiting Mars, the companies that build the instruments that take the images that I use, for example, are also building satellite and surveillance technology for various militaries here on earth. It enables a lot of violence here on Earth. The remote sensing techniques that are used are very much coming from this surveillance context. It's an emerging issue, especially when we have these fleets of satellites being launched.

The idea of consent is really difficult because I think the prevailing attitude among scientists and engineers is that satellite data is agnostic of people. It doesn't really matter whether people consent to being watched or imaged or not, because this is just what we do. I think that governments and policies are likewise agnostic to the idea of informed consent in relation to what it means to image a population without them knowing. In Feminism, consent is such a significant component. Feminism tells us about autonomy. Remote sensing concerns anything geospatial, whether it means the autonomy of women to be involved in these fields or the autonomy of people to be free from what is often very colonial surveillance. It is hard to think of a future that isn't like that. What does it look like to have autonomy, to have consent built into data collection, especially in this time of big data? If you want to be highly idealistic, you might say that fewer satellites are preferable, and that would solve a lot of environmental problems as well in orbit. But I think it has to come from policy and countries being willing to say that their model of data collection is untenable and not based in human rights. That would be difficult to achieve and I’m not hopeful about it. 

I'm having conversations about current events around this issue because when we look at, for example, the United States providing surveillance drones to surveil the people of Gaza, it hits you that this is the same technology that I use to study Mars. It is the same technology that we use to study water quality, to map geology. It's the same people building that technology, and it's the same or similar laws that are dictating the use of that technology and the collection of that data. So, I think it really has to come from these countries that have the power to make this change, and I don't know that they will be willing to do this. But I'm inspired by resistance to surveillance, especially, feminist resistance to surveillance. I think there are emerging, clever ways that people are avoiding being imaged by satellites and on the ground by surveillance systems. That might be the pathway to getting that done!

What would a decolonial feminist approach to space setting look like in your idea in your imagination?

I think about this all the time! What does that look like? I think it is not about just tacking decolonization on these things and leaving it at that. If we look at the source of everything from technology to ideology, we see the political justification for economic systems underlying the space industry and exploration, and the sector as a whole. I don't think any of that can be reformed towards being decolonial and feminist. I think it is all coming from high levels of warfare and heavily colonial contexts with the Global North dominating the Global South, and we see a lot of people pushing back and saying that space exploration isn’t colonial because we're going to space where people don't exist to be colonized. But if you look at the collaboration in place, they still tend to involve the US, Canada, and Europe and maybe sometimes Japan, and maybe sometimes India, but rarely.

If you look at the activities on earth, activities that support space missions, specifically when you see who is mining the minerals to go into an advanced electronics on a rover, how weapons companies are whitewashing their images by building cameras for whatever space mission, and what human rights violations SpaceX is involved in when they launch rockets for NASA, and how the European Space Agency launches most of its spacecrafts from the colony of French Guiana, you begin to see how colonization informs spacefaring. I think it's really important for all of us looking out to the sky to know that everything comes back here, to the Earth. The labor we're doing here on Earth is supporting all of that, too. It really has to come down to the root of what we do, which also involves coming back to Earth about what we do. It is important for us to think about the labor practices behind all this manufacturing, the money that is changing hands, and the folks behind these missions and companies.

My idea for the future is that a decolonial feminist approach to space will need to follow a reset – and stopping all that we are currently doing. It's hard to say that as a planetary scientist. I don't think many people would agree with me and certainly, that's my livelihood, of course. But I don't see a tenable way of continuing to do the missions that we're doing in a way that centers human rights, equity in feminism, and decoloniality, because everything we do is based on these colonial foundations. Even the way we talk about science involves a patriarchal lens – we treat these planets as a sort of virgin, feminine world for us to dominate, you know, with our masculine ways of worldmaking. I don't know what that reset looks like, but, ideally the future we're looking at should have cooperative space missions that are about sharing data with everyone and that make data accessible to every person so that they can understand all that's out there. All that will necessitate sorting out our geopolitics here on Earth.

This interview was supported by the Maypole Fund.