Decolonising your planetarium

This guide can be applied to all forms of science communication such as workshops, science shows as well as planetarium shows.

At We The Curious, our planetarium shows are created by our in-house team. We tell amazing stories, delivered by our team of live presenters, as we take our visitors on breathtaking journeys across the Cosmos.

We aim to design our planetarium shows to be inclusive and meaningful to all our visitors. In order to better realise that ambition, we ran a series of workshops to advance our understanding of what young people really thought about space science.

We learnt that some of the students’ enthusiasm for space had been dampened by concerns around climate change and social justice. This included a disapproval of how many key industry figures talk about human space travel using language which echoes historical colonisation. We realised that when we talk about if humans will ever live on Mars, we also needed to ask should humans ever live on Mars.

We invited Reo Lewis, a PhD researcher in post-colonial linguistics at the University of Exeter and University of Bristol, to review our scripts and help us apply a decolonising lens to our shows. Reo shared some thoughts about the creation of the guide below:

A planetarium isn't just a place where we communicate astronomical facts, no matter how objective, extensive or inclusive we may aim to be. We decide where the story begins, whose discoveries we mention, whose knowledge we name, which metaphors we use, and how we imagine humanity's place in the universe. Those are storytelling choices.

My analysis and the guidelines that resulted from it, was not about deciding or judging whenever a particular word was used ‘wrong’. It's about noticing patterns in language. What assumptions and perspectives have become so normalised that we don't notice them as the default anymore? Who have we imagined our audience to be? And how does the way we choose to tell certain stories unintentionally have an effect on the stories themselves?