Maaike Pierik

Perceptions of astronomers on their societal responsibility

Department of Astrophysics, Faculty of Science, Radboud University

Supervisors: Noelle Aarts, Lotte Krabbenborg, Heino Falcke, Marc Klein Wolt

Background

Maaike got her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Physics and Astronomy at the Radboud University. During her Master’s, she followed the Science in Society specialization, for which she did a research internship within the Africa Millimeter Telescope (AMT) program. During this internship, she studied how the societal impact of the AMT was perceived and framed by students from Namibia and by astronomers of the AMT.

Content

Many of the world’s top astronomical facilities are located in regions outside the global North. In recent years, there has been a growing debate within the astronomy community about whether current forms of interaction with local communities around these facilities are sufficient. This debate has been stirred up most dramatically by citizen protests in Hawaii around the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT). The TMT was to be built on the Mauna Kea summit, a place that is sacred in Native Hawaiian culture, and Native Hawaiians blocked the road to the summit to prevent the construction of the TMT. Also in South Africa, Australia and Chile, local communities have voiced their dissent against or dissatisfaction with the construction of new astronomical facilities on their lands.

These types of citizen protests challenge the long-established notion that science is inherently value-free and beneficial for society. Consequently, debates arise within the astronomy community on whether, how and when to include societal stakeholders in the development of astronomical infrastructure and research. This is a relatively new discussion within the astronomy discipline, but it is becoming pressing with the ongoing establishment of new facilities across the world. This PhD research will study the development of this discussion through ethnographic research methods. It will draw on existing theories within the Science and Technology Studies (STS) discipline, for example work done by Latour, Knorr-Cetina and Rip. In this way, the research will uncover how astronomers define and enact societal within their everyday activities and shed light on which established norms or systems within the astronomy research culture may hinder astronomers to act on their societal responsibility.

This research will focus on the Africa Millimetre Telescope (AMT) project. In the AMT, the interaction between science and society plays a central role. The AMT will be built in the Namibian desert, as an addition to the Event Horizon Telescope network that published the first ever image of a black hole. Besides contributing to black hole research, the AMT aims train the next generation of astronomers and engineers in Namibia, that will use and maintain the telescope in the future. For this reason, the project is collaborating with different societal stakeholders in Namibia, such as the government and universities. The AMT therefore provides unique opportunities to study how astronomers interact with Namibian society, to realize a project that is relevant to science as well as local communities. This research will consist of several sub studies that aim to understand the AMT within its historical, global and institutional context. The overall aim of the research is to contribute to new frameworks for astronomers to discover, discuss and account for societal issues during the development of large-scale astronomy facilities.