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Paper short abstract

Swedish space professionals navigate a throny contradiction: they seek to make peripheral geographies central, even as their value depends on their constructedness as peripheral. Key to their efforts is the reframing of emptiness from a precondition for extraction to a resource in its own right.

Paper long abstract

This presentation focuses on Sweden's sounding rocket range, Esrange, located outside the subarctic city of Kiruna and overlapping with the reindeer-herding territories of several Sámi reindeer herding villages. As part of the Swedish state's efforts to tap into developments in the global space economy, the launch site is currently undergoing expansion to enable small-satellite launch capability. The paper examines how space professionals navigate the contradiction of attempting to reposition peripheral geographies as central, even though their perceived value to space activities depends on their historical constructedness as empty and peripheral. This involves a shift in how emptiness is framed: whereas earlier narratives of the region's presumed emptiness were tied to promises of abundant resources – such as timber and iron ore – space professionals seeking to establish an Arctic space hub increasingly treat emptiness as a resource in its own right. Drawing on ethnographic research among some of these actors, as well as on science-fictional portrayals of northern Sweden, I foreground the topological quality of (extra)terrestrial relations as a challenge to assessments of spatial emptiness, including the region's imagined proximity to outer space and its remoteness from things terrestrial. The presentation ultimately asks whether a topological perspective could help calibrate classic ethnographic methods for inquiry into domains that remain peripheral to conventional, grounded ethnographic research.