Réka Patrícia Gál
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Réka Gál is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto, and currently holds scholarly appointments as a Graduate Fellow at the Centre for Culture and Technology and at the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative. She has completed her master’s in Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Supervisor
Sarah Sharma
Publications
- Gál, Réka Patrícia. Forthcoming. “Fixing Skylab: An Alternative History of Spaceflight through Breakdown and Repair”. In Cosmic Fragments: Dislocation and Discontent in the Global Space Age, edited by Asif A. Siddiqi. Intersections: Histories of Environment, Science, and Technology in the Anthropocene. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
- Gál, Réka Patrícia, and Eleanor S. Armstrong. 2023. “Feminist Approaches to Outer Space.” In Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar and Alice Gorman, 158-172. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge.
- Gál, Réka Patrícia, L. M. Wilkins, Yuxing Zhang, Marie-Pier Boucher, Tero Karppi, and Jeremy Packer. 2021. “Space Media.” Canadian Journal of Communication 46 (3): 645–62. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2021v46n3a4085.
- Gál, Réka Patrícia. “Space Forces and The Making of (Other) Worlds: An Interview with Fred Scharmen.” 4S Backchannels, 2021. https://members.4sonline.org/news_archive_headlines.php?org_id=4S&sniid=34319549
- Gál, Réka Patrícia. “The Interstellar Railroad, Or Speculation and Shareholder Whiteness in the Space Economy.” Environmental Media Lab, 2021. https://www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/the-interstellar-railroad
- Gál, Réka Patrícia, and Petra Löffler. “Introduction.” In Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene, edited by Réka Patrícia Gál an Petra Löffler. Future Ecologies. Lüneburg: meson press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.14619/1891.
- Gál, Réka Patrícia, and Petra Löffler, eds. Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene. Future Ecologies. Lüneburg: meson press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.14619/1891.
- Gál, Réka Patrícia. “Climate Change, COVID-19, and the Space Cabin: A Politics of Care in the Shadow of Space Colonization.” Mezosfera, no. 9 (October 2020). http://mezosfera.org/climate-change-covid-19-and-the-space-cabin-a-politics-of-care-in-the-shadow-of-space-colonization/.
- Gal, Reka Patricia. “Machines of Liberation, Machines of Control: The Ambiguous Roots of Data Capitalism.” In Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Are Transforming Everyday Life, edited by Stefka Hristova, Soonkwan Hong, and Jennifer Daryl Slack, 85–107. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020.
Research
Réka's work unites feminist media theory, decolonial technoscience, and environmental history to explore how technological tools and scientific methods are employed to purportedly solve socio-political problems. She is the co-editor of Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene, published by meson press. In her DAAD-funded master’s thesis ‘Cosmic Colonial Fantasies,’ she explored the historical stages through which outer space colonial imaginaries evolved, from ancient Greece until the 18th century. She is extending this research during her PhD to map the genealogies of technological maintenance and care labors on space stations, focusing on the implications of human-machine interdependence in outer space as it relates to issues of environmental and labour justice.