Feminist Astropolitics with Dr Tana Joseph

As told to Kirthi Jayakumar

Dr. Tana Joseph is a South African astronomer, with a research focus on binary star systems outside of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Using instruments such as the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa and the ASKAP telescope in Australia, Dr. Joseph studies how binary star systems form, grow, change and shape the environment around them. She obtained her undergraduate and MSc degrees from the University of Cape Town. In 2013, she completed her PhD at the University of Southampton before returning to Cape Town to start her postdoctoral research career as an SKA postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Joseph has held Fulbright and Royal Society Fellowships in the US and the UK, respectively. In this interview, she talks about decolonizing spacefaring, prioritizing introspection and reflection on our engagements with space, and centering narratives from the majority world.

Dr Tana is pictured against a backdrop with an artistic rendition of The Small Magellanic Cloud, or Nubecula Minor, a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way. Visible from the entire Southern Hemisphere, The galaxy is located across both the constellations of Tucana and part of Hydrus, appearing as a faint hazy patch resembling a detached piece of the Milky Way. In the southern hemisphere, the Magellanic clouds have long been included in the lore of native inhabitants, including south sea islanders and indigenous Australians. (Photo Credits: Profile picture - Dr Tana Joseph | Artwork: Kirthi Jayakumar)

What drew you into the field of astrophysics? Where did it all begin?

I get asked this question a lot and I am sure lots of women in science get asked this question. I do like telling the story! As a child, I was really interested in science and I think the biggest influence and contributing factor to me becoming a scientist is the fact that both my parents were high school science teachers. They had their own interest in science and education. When I showed the interest and aptitude, my parents began to encourage me. From a very young age you know, my parents would discuss a range of topics under the broad ambit of science. When I was about 10 or 11, they had fixed the Hubble Space Telescope. This was in the mid-nineties. Following that, NASA started publishing what we now know as the Hubble Legacy images. This was pre-Internet in South Africa, and I am from Cape Town. My city's main newspaper at the time would publish the Hubble Legacy images on its front page, always.

To give you some historical context on why that had such an impact on me, I’m going to share about the political situation at the time. South Africa had its first democratic elections in 1994. Nelson Mandela was probably the world's most beloved politician at the time, and the Hubble Legacy Images were competing with that historical context. They would still be on the front page, accompanying stories on new laws and the politics of the time. My father is very politically active, and I was raised in an environment where I would also follow political updates. My father would read the paper from cover to cover every day, and when he was done, I would read the newspaper and started keeping track of these images. While reading the newspaper every day, I realized that these images were more than just beautiful pictures. They were scientific datasets and scientists were using these pictures to learn more about the universe and to do science! I was captivated by that and decided that this was the science I wanted to do.

This is so funny, because this question came up once at a conference. Someone from NASA who worked on this legacy program decades ago was there, and my colleague turned to him and said, “This is the success story that we were hoping for – that young children would see these images and become astrophysicists!” They actually met someone in the flesh who literally saw the images they released and became an astrophysicist. This experience showed me the power of public engagement and how the science isn't finished until it's communicated. Before I started all the social justice work for this in the sciences, I did a lot of science communication because I know how important it is and how it changed my life so completely. I now have my own science communication and diversity, equity, and inclusion company and consultancy as well. All of it goes together!

There is an understanding that outer space is considered the common heritage of humankind - however, reality suggests otherwise in terms of accessibility. How far is this a function of the lack of diversity in the field in itself?

The lack of diversity is actually also a symptom of the overarching colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy. These things are all linked, constituting what is called the kyriarchy. The lack of diversity isn't as much a cause but rather a symptom. The diversity is so lacking, especially in stem fields and outer space, because people get filtered out, and pushed out. There's research to show that for science academia, the number one predictor of whether you will the length of stay, let's say in an academic career, is socioeconomic class.

White supremacy is a big issue. South Africa is a particularly obvious example. I went to a segregated school, and this is recent history. Colonization is not in our distant histories – it happened in my lifetime. The education system in South Africa was set up on a race-based system where Black girls were sent to clean the school bathrooms because they were going to be maids and servants, and the Black boys were sent to handle ground-keeping in school campuses because they were going to be gardeners and work for white people. I was in a different racial classification under Apartheid, but the inferior levels of education received was true for all black people, and I think, to some extent, Indian people.

The system was in place to keep this dynamic going. You could become a teacher without finishing high school – because they made the last two years optional. These were the kind of things they put in place to ensure that you had low quality education. You can immediately see the implications of such an approach. The lack of diversity is a result of centuries of planned division, erasure, and subjugation. What you get now is a case of a sudden flip to “Anyone can do anything! You just have to work really hard!” The implication there is that if you really believe in meritocracy, black and brown people, women, people identifying with marginalized gender identities, poor people, or disabled people are all automatically less intelligent and less hardworking. They will then say that all these things are happening because if we are all equal now under the law, and yet only certain people are rising in certain things, it means that they have a special aptitude that you lack. They will claim that it’s actually biologically determined – and then very quickly, before you know it, it is eugenics.

This is reflected in this understanding of outer space, as this final frontier where the cutting edge technology exists. But then there's also the specific thing that astronomy is this common heritage for all of humanity. Generations of us have looked at or thought about or contemplated outer space and wondered what's out there. We grapple with enormous questions: What is life? Where did life come from? Did we come from space? Indigenous people have done this for eons, because it's one of the fundamental things of human nature to ponder the sky! Indigenous people like the Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, the indigenous peoples Africa, the Americas, and Asia, all have these incredibly rich, detailed, extremely long-standing cultural knowledge and understanding of space and of making use of the information you get from the night sky. That is so powerful and so intense. This then bumps up against this westernized idea of space as the final frontier, and as the ultimate test of greatness for a nation.

There is a hegemony in this knowledge. There is an active effort to discredit indigenous ways of knowing as not being science, as just being stories. But there are so many things that indigenous ways of knowing have taught us – things that science may not know - why can't they be together in harmony? Why does it have to be one or the other? There is this common heritage, but it is considered separate from science. We are being robbed of our heritage progressively with things like Starlink.

Our shared human heritage under one sky is being taken from us and being damaged by us because the people who decide what's important and get to do whatever they want, which is mostly rich white men from the global north don't care about culture. For them, it is about technology and progress at any cost. The human, cultural, and heritage costs are not important or not as important.

We know what happens when we are cut off from our culture and our heritage, coming as people from countries who had extremely rich, important cultural history that we've been disconnected from because of colonization. This colonization of the skies is now fueled by capitalism, with private billionaires at the forefront. Now it is just about who has more money – it isn’t just countries anymore. Capitalism has empowered individuals to fare into our common heritage without our input - and how dangerous that is! This goes much deeper: these people were allowed to rise to the top and this behavior has remained unchecked – it has been 400 years in the making! How do we dismantle that? Space is just the latest frontier that we are having to fight, obviously.

Can we think through this in the present? What might it take to dismantle this, for want of a better term, “raging dumpster fire”?

The first step is to acknowledge that these things are all linked. They all come from the same paradigms and mind shifts and values that we've been taught are intrinsic, but are actually very much set up just to help certain people and support certain people. Look where it's led, when we unquestioningly follow these things and don't stop and say, is this the way the world is supposed to be? I love the phrase you also use – it needs to be used more – the global majority. When you say it, it is obvious, but a lot of people are shocked to find out, for instance, that white people are a global minority. The way they wield power and influence tends to make you forget that. It comes back to what you see in the media. Only certain kinds of people can become billionaires. There's Oprah Winfrey, yes, but statistically, only one of us is going make it. But she also made sacrifices in her life to get there. There's this narrative of people are where they are because they are special and because they're inherently better. How do we dismantle that? How do we claim back our heritage and our understanding of what humanity is, and who deserves what? What does the idea of “deserve” mean?

The world is burning, the sky is cluttered, and we are losing our connection and shared human experience of looking at the sky and wondering what's out there, because the system was ultimately set up for this. This is the end game. This is late stage capitalism. This is unchecked colonization. Just because countries aren't colonized anymore, doesn’t mean that colonization is over.

We now see the colonization of space being firmly entrenched with militarization and capitalism. How can we decolonize our approach to engaging with and using space?

I think as scientists and specifically me as an astronomer, we have to hold ourselves accountable and be honest about our relationship with monetization. For instance, the European Space Agency, ESA, have a mission statement where they specifically talk about the mission to shape the development of Europe's space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. But they work very closely (and NASA does as well) with the military industrial complex - your Lockheed Martins and all these kind of things. There’s even a persistent rumour that the Hubble Space Telescope was a surplus military telescope, a spy telescope, that was just given to scientists (and the US military did also gift NASA two Hubble-class telescopes in 2012). The funny thing is that scientists aren't at the cutting edge of technology or knowledge or space by any means. We are, when compared to military budgets, a joke. We are like a line item when compared to their budgets. We get their scraps. We are the nice veneer and good optics face on the terrible stuff that's happening in the background. So astronomy has a lot to divest from, but we need that money.

On the one hand, they say that the ends justify the means, but they have us putting a nice face on military incursions. We need to be honest and open about and hold ourselves accountable for this. Coming to the environmental impact, the US military is the largest polluter on the planet in terms of CO2 emissions alone. Other militaries are also massively polluting, and change the faces of the countries they target. I saw a recent post on social media that said that Afghanistan now has the second highest number of military jeep vehicles, second only to the US. These are all vehicles that were left over after the war, and were just fixed up by the local people. What does this mean for geopolitics now? From space to land debris, from CO2 emissions to propping up regimes that violate human rights at a mass scale: Astronomy is this cute front for a lot of this stuff.

When missiles or anything like that are launched, or for anyone with those kind of capabilities for that matter, it is all so closely linked to astronomy. Astronomy exists specifically because the US was spying on the Russians in the 1980s. They launched some satellites that were not orbiting ones, but spy satellites that were looking for signatures of Russian nuclear tests. While checking whether the Russians were testing nuclear bombs and armaments, they saw these flashes of gamma rays that weren’t coming from the Russians. “Oh, it's come from space! That's cute!” Then, they gave some money to the scientists and got them to investigate. So much of the stuff we do directly comes from the military. The story goes that among the engineers confronted by a glitch with the Hubble, one scientist had a visit from military personnel with the blueprints for the Hubble, who pointed out exactly what had to be done to fix the glitch. Monetization, capitalism, and geopolitics all come together. As space scientists, we study the stars – it’s like no harm, no foul, no peace. My work is so non-impactful. No one is harmed. I don’t have to do any ethics clearances for any of my work. But there are so many ethical implications just below the surface that everyone wants to just gloss over! That's how they're very entwined.

The first step is acknowledging that you have a problem. I'd like to borrow from the language of addiction and recovery, where the first step is to acknowledge that there's a problem. That's not happening yet, and it needs to start happening on a large scale.

What might a decolonial model for space bearing look like, then, if you could imagine one? What needs to shift for us to apply a decolonial approach to spacefaring?

I don't want to make a blanket statements and I could never speak for the entire continent of Africa. However, in general, my focus is on African concerns. At the moment, as far as I'm aware, and I've done some research into this, there is currently no way for an African born person to go into space. There's no legislation, there are no partnerships, and there are simply no avenues for an African born person to go into space. Earlier, there used to be two avenues.

One was the traditional way where you could sign up to be part of the US space program. I have a Zimbabwean astrophysicist colleague who was part of the cadet program years ago. Following 9/11, this program stopped and all foreign born people were no longer allowed to be part of the cadet program. They no longer accept foreign born or non-US people into the program, unless they have specific legislation, ties, and reciprocity programs. African countries don't have any of these bilateral agreements at all.

The other way to do it was as a space tourist. About 20 years ago, there was a space tourism option where, again, rich white men were mostly involved. The first African space tourist was a white man, a very rich tech dude who went to space for a few days. He is a South African man who paid to go into space: Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu. Now, that space tourism program has been cancelled. Elon Musk is also South African born, and a white man. There’s no real way to be a space tourist any more, unless you want to pay some billionaire lots of money for a few minutes of weightlessness. Maybe that’s why the billionaires are going into the ocean. And look how well that turned out. They won't be doing that again in a hurry!

So the first thing the spacefaring consortium and the industrial complex of it should do, is to make sure that everyone has opportunity to go to space. Why is one continent in particular being excluded? I can't speak for other continents, but Africa is completely cut off. That's a billion people!

Rethinking the current models of bilateral agreements and how we work together and what it truly means to be a spacefaring species is important. We must think carefully what it means for us to be a space-faring species. Who gets to represent humanity? What does that mean? The spacefaring industrial complex is still actively excluding certain people for whatever reason. That's the big rethink that we need to do.

Do you know the Golden Record we sent into space? If you've ever seen the images of the representation of humans, it will tell you exactly what this exclusion looks like. The idea is that if even an intelligent race or species or beings from another planet or from somewhere else finds this record, they will be able to know where to find us, have an idea of what we look like, and the level of technology we know. I often think about this. On the record, they have a sketch of the solar system, some pulses that you can use to triangulate where we are, a sketch of a hydrogen atom, and then a sketch of an adult man and an adult woman. They're clearly white people. My God! There are images of white people in space! That is the norm. That is what we’re communicating to intelligent species in space: That we all look like this.

This was not something the whole world was consulted on. We didn't get a say in how we, as human beings, will be represented in space. I don’t want aliens to know how to find our planet. What if they are not friendly? This is the implication of having done this without our input and our consultation. This is why decolonization is so important. Who gets to make the decisions? What kind of decisions are made in the first place? What is important? Who is it important to? Why is it important? What are the long-term implications of the things that we are doing? How can they be as representative and holistic as possible in terms of representing our species and our planet? We have taken it upon ourselves as human beings to be represented. The dolphins didn't say we could do this. And they're smart! An Alsatian dog is about as smart as a five-year-old. They didn't say we can do this. Sea turtles are dying because we made decisions that impact their ecosystem. What if we invite hostility from other parts of the universe? Most of us didn't get a say in that! Decisions that are made for the sake of progress and progress alone, produce unintended consequences and create disproportionate impact. The chickens have come home to roost now for all of it.

I often ask a question I don't know the answer to. How do we convince people at the levels of power to change the status quo? How do we convince the people who benefit the most from the status quo to change the status quo? It seems impossible. There's a famous saying that says no one has ever won their freedom by appealing to the good conscience of their oppressor. We are going to have to fight for what we feel is right. All the issues in the world today are interconnected. We suffer from the same problem of the colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalistic framework that is set up to disadvantage so many to the extreme, disgusting advantage of too few people.

When we are trying to fight the system, we need to be aware of the parts of us that still benefit from it. I come from relative privilege in terms of my socioeconomic situation, especially in the South African context and in African context. I come from quite an affluent background and so a lot of things that happen in the world that affect people of marginalized identities negatively, of which I embody many, the blow is so softened because money protects me from a lot of bad stuff. Humility is so important in what we do. We need to humble ourselves. We need the humility to rise up and reflect on how to do things differently. Step back, assess yourself, always be checking in with yourself, and have that humility to say, “I don't know."

Is there a possibility for a future where that technology can coexist with indigenous ways of space faring? Is that even a possibility? If it is, what might it take to get there?

This really brings together all that we've talked about. The first thing is we need to acknowledge that this is an issue to address. There is a separation of technology and the current westernized way of knowing things and doing things, and the indigenous ways of knowing things, or just non-western ways of knowing and doing things. How do we merge these? We don't see them on an equal footing. Who gets to decide that one is better than the other? Next, practice humility. It’s okay to own up to the mistakes we’ve made and to commit to rectify them, or at least commit not to continue them. There are some things that we've done irreparable harm to, and there are some things we just have to accept. There are some animals we cannot bring back. There's some damage that we cannot undo. But there are a lot of places and things we can correct or stop, and find better solutions for. Finally, how do we get the people who are benefiting right now and who have the most influence to step out of their current paradigm? I don't know the answer to that. But these are the steps I envision. We must continue to fight, and ask these amazing questions you've brought here today. We must have these interactions and make use of the current zeitgeist to have these difficult conversations.

This interview series was supported by The Maypole Fund.