Rob Krawczyk

Hi, I’m a PhD student in the Geography Department at the National University of Singapore. My first academic paper ‘Shadows of the Space Age in the Tropics’ is due to be published in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography this winter. 

As a political geographer, my PhD research, entitled Assembling Outer Space Narratives: The Popular Geopolitics of Singapore in Space, explores the development of outer space narratives in Singapore. The project aims to follow a group of space startups in Singapore’s space industry, exploring how their commercial space narratives materialise in particular environments, and how understandings of a broader ‘geopolitical environment’ background their work of assembling space narratives. 

The project situates practices of assembling outer space narratives as part of a wider history of embodied space labour in Singapore, such as the work of technicians running Sentosa Earth Station as it broadcast the Apollo XV splashdown in 1971, to the launch of Singapore’s first satellite (ST-1) in 1998, as part of a wider historical arc of developments in commercial space technology development in Asia in the post-Cold War era. The project plans to conduct ethnography (interviews and participant observation) and archival research, and intends to contribute a new case study to the geographies of outer space sub-field within political geography. 

Prior to joining NUS’s Department of Geography, I completed a BA in Geography at the University of Oxford, an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MA in Politics and International Relations from the Yenching Academy of Peking University.  

If you are also interested in the topic of Singapore in Space, get in touch at rob.krawczyk@u.nus.edu. Otherwise, stay tuned as plans for a collaborative research group on outer space studies at the National University of Singapore develop. 

Rob