Science and power in situ: new lenses for understanding the entanglements of astronomy clusters with host communities in Chile and South Africa

This article examines the social entanglements of large-scale astronomical research infrastructures (RIs) with their host communities in which they are embedded. Responding to a marked gap in both the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and impact assessment literatures, where societal consequences for host communities have remained undertheorized, we propose a novel analytical framework that brings together three scholarly traditions: the literature on Big Science and RIs; infrastructure studies, which foregrounds the layered, multi-scalar consequences of large technical systems for those situated at their margins; and Latin American STS, with its long-standing attention to centre-periphery dynamics and the social and economic impacts of science and technology. Taken together, our framework enables an analysis that is attentive to questions of impact and of power; in doing so, it traces whose interests are privileged, at whose cost, and how global hegemonies of knowledge and capital reproduce themselves in localized settings. The framework is then applied to two exploratory case studies developed through documentary and desk research: the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile’s Antofagasta region, and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in South Africa’s Karoo. Both facilities are internationally funded radio telescope arrays located in isolated, high-altitude, and highly unequal territories where, while physically located in the global South, the bulk of institutional power and prestige remains in the global North. In both cases, local voices have been marginalised in institutional framings, even as national and international stakeholders claim substantial benefits. The article concludes with a series of policy recommendations, arguing that social impact assessment must be integrated from the outset of infrastructure development, that remote sites cannot be treated as terra nullius, and that institutions of the global South must actively interrogate and negotiate agreements in processes of enabling hosting facilities, lest scientific prestige come at the cost of local agency and subaltern positionality.