Lisa Parks, Film and Media Studies | 2023-2024 Recipient

Lecture: 4 pm | Light refreshments to follow

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

This lecture explores the material effects of intensified commercial satellite launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base on the central coast of California during the past ten years. The “satellite coast” is conceptualized as a zone of technological, economic, and socio-cultural activity where agriculture, aerospace, and prison 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 preliminary fieldwork and collaborative work in progress, the presentation will explore 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 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 Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara where she directs the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab. Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and her research focuses on four areas: satellite technologies and globalization; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization, and surveillance; and environmental media. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke U Press, 2005) and Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018), and is co-editor of the books: Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures 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, 2003). Parks also has published dozens of journal articles and book chapters and co-edits the History of Media and Communication book series for the University of Illinois Press. She has held visiting appointments at the IKKM at Bauhaus University in Weimar, the Institute for Advanced Study or Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, among others. She has been a PI or co-PI on major research grants from the National Science Foundation, the US State Department, and Mellon Foundation, and has collaborated with artists, computer scientists, sociologists, and geographers. In 2024 she co-founded the Digital Infrastructure and Society Consultancy to assist low-income communities facing infrastructure-related challenges. Parks is also leading a new research initiative with Professor Jennifer Holt focused on the Media Industries and AI hosted by UCSB’s Carsey Wolf Center. From 2016-2020 Parks was Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At UCSB, where she was first appointed in 1998, Parks has served as Department Chair of Film and Media Studies and as Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS).

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Established in 1954, the Faculty Research Lecturer is the highest honor the UC Santa Barbara faculty can bestow on one of its members. Each year the Academic Senate recognizes one individual for their outstanding academic and creative achievements and invites them to present their work to the campus community.

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