Muniyappa, Prathima. Designing the CthulhuCosmos: Toward a Speculative Cosmo-Politics of Indigenous Epistemology in Space. PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2025.

Abstract

For millennia, civilisations scattered across the earth have craned their necks  up towards the cosmos to seed their origin mythologies into the blanket  expanse of deep space. However the imbrication of imperial conquest,  colonial expansion, and militarized competition transformed humanity’s  seedbed of cosmology into a project of material incursion, casting outer  space as a frontier primed for possession, surveillance, and extraction. The  history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons, but the horizon is no  monolithic constant. It remains a jagged line as it wrestles with issues of  democratisation of space exploration and access. For some countries and  corporations the apparent ‘frontier’ of space is a territory familiar with  significant resources and infrastructure to have become veteran voyagers;  others take nascent steps, developing strategies to strengthen their space  programs; and yet others remain feet planted firmly, gazing at the horizon  that never moved, exploring the deep expanse of the cosmos through myth,  language, ritual and dreamscape.  

Indigenous people across the globe have remained explorers of this enigma  through rich cultural cosmologies evolved over millennia of observation.  Their knowledge represents diverse epistemologies that offer insight into  radically different relationships that humans have evolved about space and  its exploration, and is a fount of intangible heritage that rarely makes an  appearance in the mainstream discourses. As humans become prominent  actors in extraterrestrial realms, it stirs in its wake complex questions of  identity politics. Whose identity becomes a blueprint for ‘humanity’? What  cultures are represented and how? What cultures and narratives are silenced  by deliberate obscuration or worse by ignorance and apathy?

These questions emerge as a dialectic to the monolithic identities and  monocultures of mind that underpin mainstream space discourse. Nested  within storied cultural heritages are alternative cosmologies, attuned to  other dimensions and extended voyages that offer the possibility of  thickening the discourse towards a more inclusive mythology for future  space exploration. For speculative design to become truly liberatory, it must  create space for those rendered inarticulate by the architectures of structural  design. This requires a reconfiguration of the very grammar of futurity, an  effort to recruit voices we have not trained ourselves to hear. What forms of  consultation and authorship emerge when the techno-poetics of the  disenfranchised are taken seriously? What does epistemic hospitality look  like when mediated through art and design? These questions shape the  methodological horizon of this dissertation: Can voices from the margins  thicken the discourse on space exploration? Can the subaltern speculate?  And if so, what futures become possible when they do?  

The argument then is to transition from a colonial aerospace to a decolonial  cosmos. This dissertation proposes the CthulhuCosmos as a site of  possibility, a speculative cosmopolitics inspired by Donna Haraway’s  Cthulhucene, calling for tentacular forms of kinship that thread together the  terrestrial and the extraterrestrial. Drawing from field-based engagements  with the Likan Antai of the Atacama Desert, the Changpa of Ladakh, the  Khasi of Meghalaya, the Maasai of Kenya, and other communities and sites  in Central Asia, the dissertation extends epistemic hospitality to these  cosmological traditions to enter into dialogue with modern techno imaginaries in the realm of space exploration. Much has been written on  dualisms in science subject/object, culture/nature but less attention has  been paid to the void that undergirds these dialectics, and the mythologies  of purity that enforce their boundaries.  

Rather than seeking synthesis or translation, this dissertation positions these  cosmologies in deliberate adjacency, provoking the emergence of  ontological multiplicity without collapsing difference into a universal frame.  To navigate these entangled terrains, it proposes threshold craft as a  methodological framework: a practice of designing and mediating epistemic  encounters at the interstices of science, cosmology, and speculative design.  Threshold craft emerges as a form of cosmopolitical calibration attuned to  asymmetry, opacity, and plural rationalities through which the  CthulhuCosmos can be articulated as a scaffold for relational intelligibility  between divergent ways of knowing. The dissertation offers a speculative  infrastructure for navigating the architectures of space exploration and other  emergent technoscientific domains wherever futures are being imagined and 

ethics remain unsettled. As a methodological framework, it enables the  design of epistemic encounters grounded in ethical entanglement and  relational responsibility, allowing divergent cosmologies to co-inhabit  speculative terrains without erasure or collapse.