Réka Gál is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Technische Universität München and a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto. Her research has been funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology and the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative. She has completed her master’s in Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Together with Petra Löffler, she is the co-editor of Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene, published by meson press. 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. Her current research focuses on the environmental and labour justice implications of long-term human spaceflight.
Together with her colleagues in the Anthropology of Science and Technology team at the department, she is working on an ethnographic research project on green/sustainable chemistry as part of the research programme „Knowledge after Progress“.
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. 2024. “Feminists in [Space].” In Space Feminism, edited by Marie-Pier Boucher, Claire Webb, Annick Bureaud, and Nahum Romero. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
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, 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. “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. “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/.
Gál, Réka Patrícia. “SpaceX’s Starbase, or Breaking Things on the Rio Grande and Beyond.” Invited lecture presented to the Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology Special Interest Group of The Society for Philosophy and Technology, Virtual, 13 June, 2024.
Gál, Réka Patrícia. “Concrete Rain and Rocket Debris: Mapping the Environmental Harms of SpaceX's Boca Chica Rocket Launch Facility.” Invited talk given at the Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 29 January, 2024.
Gál, Réka Patrícia. Invited talk presented for “HOW TO BEAM: Do-It-Yourself Teleportation for Hybrid Times,” organized in cooperation between Deichtorhallen and Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany, 11 June 2022.
Boucher, Marie-Pier, Réka Patrícia Gál, and Yuxing Zhang. “Space Media Working Group.” Invited talk and round table at the Earth Day event ‘The Waste Cycle of Planetary Vision Infrastructures,’ Planétarium Rio Tinto Alcan de Montréal, 22 April 2022.
Gál, Réka Patrícia. “s(Exit) Fictions”, Invited talk presented at Observing Strange Attractors: Auto-Fictions, Ex- Embassy Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 1 June 2019.