Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how competing representations of the future are produced, normalized, and contested through the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope in the contemporary Karoo resource frontier, South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses how competing representations of the future are produced, normalized, and contested in the contemporary Karoo resource frontier. In recent years the Karoo has been the target of a number of globally driven, developmental initiatives in the fields of science & technology, energy, and extractive industries. Among these is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, a globally funded scientific enterprise entailing the design and construction of the world's largest radio telescope. Through the SKA, technological innovation operates to construct the Karoo resource frontier as a space of imagination in which the territorial logic of the State overlaps with dynamics of global capital expansion. The experience of the present is compressed between a past perceived as insufficient and a future waiting to be written as part of a broader civilizing mission. The Karoo is represented as empty and full at the same time, empty of people and histories, but full of expectations and promises for future developments. In the Karoo resource frontier the future is abstracted - constructed as a predictable product of the past; opened - subjected to human shaping and planning; and commodified - defined in terms of its expected economic return in the present. Such representations overlap with other embedded, embodied, contextual and individualized futures which tend to be displaced and rendered largely invisible. As result taming the future is inescapably connected to how political power is used to normalize and institutionalize certain futures over others in the present.