Electromagnetic economies of worth: Repurposing a radio dish and debating technoscientific modernity at the equator

Abstract

In 2017, an old satellite dish in Ghana was repurposed into a radio telescope. While highly celebrated in public, complications surrounding this conversion resulted in criticism in the African astronomy community. While ‘repurposing’ has been optimistically embraced in recent Science and Technology Studies literature, we challenge ‘repurposing’s’ seemingly natural alignment with the common good, defined here as the path towards technoscientific modernity in Ghana. Instituting a distinction between a project of ‘repurposing’ for capacity development and building a new radio observatory in South Africa for global science presupposes a difference between real ‘inspired’ science and technology that serves a ‘civic’ orientation. In postcolonial societies, we cannot speak of singular ‘orders of worth’, but inevitably multiple orientations towards technoscientific modernity and visions for the ‘common good’. We locate a converted radio telescope and its digital infrastructure within such contested visions through phases of materially inscribed ‘orders of worth’. Over time, successive ‘worths’ are materially inscribed Ghanaian ground station as a site for 1) global telecommunications, 2) capacity building, 3) satellite data transfer. We present the material politics at work between various stakeholders: astronomers, government, the private sector and residents living near the observatory.