Drawing together literatures on waste, discard, supply chains, and frontiers with fieldwork in several mining and launch sites in China, Sweden, the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it argues that waste-making is constitutive of a set of contemporary space activities and shapes the manner in which the immensity of the cosmos is understood and engaged by diverse publics. The talk presents a conceptual architecture and also reflexively examines the potential epistemic violence of waste-making as a spatial analytic to link Earthly and outer space geographies.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware, Associate Director of the Minerals, Materials, and Society program, Principal Investigator or co-PI on four major grants concerning energy-critical mineral supply chains or outer space technologies from the US National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She is a technical expert to the International Standards Organization Committee 298: Rare Earth Supply Chain Transparency and Traceability.
Dr. Klinger’s global research agenda consists of three distinct yet interlinked initiatives: critical minerals supply chains, global space politics, and rural and Indigenous community climate resilience. Dr. Klinger has conducted extensive multilingual qualitative and quantitative fieldwork on four continents over the past two decades. She has published numerous articles on rare earth elements, natural resource use, environmental politics, and outer space, including the award-winning 2018 book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes.
She has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, a Certificate in China Studies from The Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, and a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an alum of Rotary International Youth Exchange.