Can we make the tech industry ethical? As powerful constellations of tech companies grow in size and proximity to government, many despair. Who ensures that figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg use their influence to advance human dignity, fairness, and justice? Political economy offers familiar answers: tax, regulate, litigate. Necessary—but often blunt, reactive, and slow. 

This event explores a complementary route: critically reconstructing corporate identities. Rather than treating identity as superficial branding, we approach it as a governing force that shapes what organisations see as legitimate, possible, and desirable. Corporate identities can hardwire ethical commitments or quietly foreclose them. 

For social scientists interested in space and in making research matters beyond the academy, this raises practical questions. How are ethical (or extractive) identities embedded in firms? What roles can researchers, methods, and narrative tools play in shifting them? And how might interventions, from ethnography to explainer media, translate insight into institutional change within the rapidly expanding space sector?

Programme

About the speakers

Darshan Vigneswaran is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam. His research lies at the intersection of International Relations and Political Geography, and he leads research projects on ‘Migration Politics in the Global South’ and ‘Outer Space Politics’. His recent work on space politics can be found in the journals Review of International Studies and Political Geography. 

Michalina Nowakowska works in corporate communications at Spaceinterface. She has an interdisciplinary academic background spanning politics, psychology, law, and economics. Her professional experience is rooted in the private sector, with a focus on consulting, public affairs, and sales, where she has developed an understanding of how organisations operate and communicate.