Pedagogies for cohabitation with interplanetary infrastructures of telecommunications

By Marie-Pier Boucher & Alice Jarry

in Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 2025, Vol 24, Issue 2, p245


Available online https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/adch_00118_1

How might we imagine and develop innovative ways of coexisting with the interplanetary telecommunication infrastructures (IIT hereafter) that shape our daily lives and make global communication possible? This article explores the constraints and possibilities that these infrastructures pose to generating situated forms of knowledge. While IIT are foundational to enabling communication across the globe, their physical, technical and economic requirements and obligations often hinder meaningful civic participation and limit opportunities for creative engagement. At this critical moment, we ask: What kinds of practices and approaches can acknowledge the elusive, distributed and transspatial nature of interplanetary signal flows, while also supporting a framework for inhabiting both urban and interplanetary environments? Drawing from the ‘Manifesting space cities’ workshop (held in May 2023 at Concordia University, Montreal), we reflect on the strategies we developed to critically examine and creatively interact with IIT. By bringing together diverse forms of knowledge – ranging from disciplinary and technical to tacit and expert – we examine three relational techniques: critical cartography, sensory attunement and place-based pedagogy.