My dissertation project examines how Starlink, SpaceX’s low-earth-orbit satellite internet constellation, is changing the ways we think about nature, outer space, rurality, and the future of internet connectivity. I use ethnographic methods and document analysis to trace the materiality of Starlink from its operations in outer space to the launch and manufacturing facilities critical to its development.

I examine how despite the rhetoric of unbound internet access, internet connectivity remains a localized practice. I trace the multiple impacts Starlink satellites have on astronomical research and dark and quiet skies worldwide and the efforts to mitigate these material effects. And I assess how Starlink’s emerging environmental impacts are challenging existing environmental laws as natural systems are incorporated into infrastructural networks. Through this work, I hope to provide an analysis that can help facilitate the development of more locally attuned and environmentally just information infrastructures.

Through a case study of the ferry service at Fogo Island and Change Islands, Newfoundland and Labrador, I assess how new technologies implemented to overcome existing infrastructural disparities can inadvertently deepen and extend the socio-economic and technological deficits that largely define rural and remote communities across North America.

This work builds upon my masters thesis to argue that present infrastructural deficits seen in rural communities are not a given state, but one that is continually reproduced through design choices that reinforce the separation of rural communities from more, connected urban centers. These insights also inform my present research on Starlink and other satellite constellations proposed to remedy longstanding inequities in Internet access between rural/urban regions.

A small subset of my work explores the development and deployment of digital agriculture tools. This research primarily examines how technologists and developers of DA tools envision the future contexts in which these technologies will be deployed. This work details how urban-based design assumptions fail to translate to rural contexts thereby deepening existing socio-economic and infrastructural inequities, arguing instead for more locally attuned technologies.