Dallas Smythe Memorial Lecture

Join us for our 2026 Dallas Smythe Memorial Lecture on April 9th! This year's event features Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies Lisa Parks, from UC Santa Barbara.

Title: The Satellite Coast: Vandenberg Space Force Base, SpaceX, and Relations of Infrastructural Adjacency

Abstract:

This lecture explores the material effects of intensified commercial satellite launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base on the central coast of California over the past ten years. The “satellite coast” is conceptualized as a zone of technological, economic, and socio-cultural activity where agriculture, aerospace, and Pr*son industries converge on the traditional lands of Indigenous Chumash communities. This is an area inhabited by generations of fishermen, fruit pickers, and ranchers, military personnel and space engineers, housing developers and incarcerated persons. It is a zone of skyward trajectories, speculative futures, and broken promises. Drawing on archival research, trade research, and community-based fieldwork, the chapter historicizes and analyzes material conditions faced by communities who work and live adjacent to satellite launch complexes, including environmental and public health-related concerns caused by noise and emissions, impacts on cultural resources and spiritual practices of communities indigenous to the area, and socio-economic effects on nearby towns. The research is focused on understanding the local, political-economic effects of global satellite constellations that are owned and operated by US private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Bio:

Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies, Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, and affiliate faculty in Art and MAT at UC Santa Barbara. She is a media historian and theorist, and her research focuses on satellite technologies and media globalization; critical studies of media infrastructures; media, militarization, and surveillance; environmental media; and digital media technologies and AI. Parks is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018) and Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke U Press, 2005). She is co-editor of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and Sociotechnical Relations (U of Illinois Press, 2023), Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke U Press, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers U Press, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2002). She currently has an NSF grant to support her Satellite Coast research project, and is working on a related book called Skyward: A History of SpaceX, Starlink, and Global Satellite Internet. In addition, she is a PI on a new international research initiative called "AI and the Media Industries." Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and was Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies at MIT from 2016-2020.

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