Decolonizing Astronomy • Dr. Tana Joseph
(Astronomy Postdoc, University of Amsterdam || UK)
“There are two nearby galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere they might not be familiar — they’re at very southern latitudes, always visible from South Africa or Australia. They have few elements heavier than helium, so they form stellar systems similar to early universe galaxies. I wrote a proposal in 2012 to get telescope radio data on these galaxies. Because they’re so close we can resolve individual stars. There’s so much to explore — neutron stars, black holes with jets of radio emission, X-ray binaries. The end result will be fantastic science — the preliminary images of the data are so beautiful and detailed. Once I wrap up this project, I can put a bow on my academic career and make my science communications, consulting, and advocacy company my full-time job.
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I was born in the last few years of apartheid in South Africa. Growing up in an extremely racialized environment, I thought of myself as Black first and a woman second. When I moved to the UK for my PhD, the focus there was gender imbalance in STEM — the UK is famously in denial of their racialized past. There are only five Black astronomers in the country, and none of us is British. So in the UK I was a woman first. But you have to have an intersectional approach — in South Africa, the women you want to encourage are Black. And I can’t encourage marginalized people to join academia if it’s an unsafe space. I can’t do outreach without also working to fix the system.
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Part of the advocacy my company does is decolonization. Textbooks in South Africa show constellations as seen from the Northern Hemisphere — when you see Orion from our sky he’s nearly upside down doing a cartwheel! Decolonizing astronomy makes the knowledge relevant to the audience and includes Indigenous knowledge systems — people of southern Africa have our own cosmology and navigation tools, just as colonizing powers used the stars to navigate and colonize the globe. We need our curricula and learning materials to match the lived reality. It’s as easy as replacing images in a textbook and as complicated as dismantling unequal pay structures.”
