Outer space on whose terms? How are billionaires' whims shaping what we do in outer space, and what can we do to change that?

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Outer space on whose terms? How are billionaires' whims shaping what we do in outer space, and what can we do to change that?

Start: Monday, April 13, 2026•06:30 PM

Location: Newspeak House• 133 Bethnal Green Road, London, E2 7DG GB

Our 2026 CADA event series continues with us welcoming Eleanor S. Armstrong (Leicester) and Réka Patrícia Gál (Munich) to explore the impact that tech billionaires are shaping the structure of contemporary space – and what we can do to respond.

Speakers

Eleanor S Armstrong - University of Leicester

Dr Eleanor S Armstrong (she/her) holds a Space Research Fellowship at the University of Leicester, UK, where she leads the Constellations Lab: Outer Space & Feminism; and is the Early Career Lead for the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space. Her research focuses 1) on queer feminist approaches to social studies of outer space, particularly the presentation of femininities, feminisms, and femmes in public discourses about outer space; and 2) on anti-colonial work in science and natural history museums. Dr Armstrong was awarded her PhD at University College London, UK, in 2020; since then she has held posts at the University of Delaware and Stockholm University, as well as visiting positions at, among others, the University of Cambridge, Ingenium Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, New York University, Stellenbosch University and University of Vienna. Armstrong is Trustee of Pride in STEM; co-lead of the international biannual conference Space Science in Context; and co-developer of the design studio EXO-MOAN.

Réka Patrícia Gál - Technical University of Munich

Réka Patrícia Gál is a Postdoctoral Researcher and feminist and anticolonial technoscience scholar at the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Technische Universität München. She completed her doctorate at the University of Toronto‘s Faculty of Information. In her doctoral research, she mapped the genealogies of technological maintenance and care labors related to US American human spaceflight, focusing on the implications of human-machine interdependence in outer space as it relates to issues of labor and environmental justice. Her work unites feminist media theory, feminist and anticolonial STS, and environmental history and anthropology to explore how technological tools and scientific methods are employed to purportedly solve socio-political problems. She is the co-editor of Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene, published by meson press.

Additional Sponsors

CADA

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