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- Volume 1, Issue 1, 2018
Journal of Science & Popular Culture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2018
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Whose ‘science’ is this? – reflections on a 1930s survey of popular science
More LessAbstractFor historians of twentieth-century popular science, Watson Davis’ 1939 report, A Survey of the Interpretation of Science to the Public, has long represented a special part of the field’s ‘grey literature’. The report’s analyses appear sophisticated and nuanced. But if the survey analysis was reliable, why had it never been published? The saga of the suppressed report offers insight into how scientists and journalists perceived the role, goals and importance of popularization. The report’s observations about contemporary culture and its statistical analysis of contemporary movies, radio programming, newspapers, magazines and books, preserved in the Smithsonian Institution Archives, are valuable resources for historians.
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Reality bytes: American and global culture in the era of infoglut
More LessAbstractIn the age of environmental catastrophes, political upheavals and economic meltdowns a mere informational crisis may not sound too worrisome. But even as we try not to lose too much sleep over it, our behaviour is best modelled by the proverbial ostrich burying its head in the sand. My contention is that we better start losing sleep over it. Informationally we live in the era of Cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust, with the toxic consequences it has on the entire system of generating and disseminating knowledge, no matter which side of the Two Cultures divide you hail from. My goal is to spell out some of these consequences, although with little expectation of kindling a retrenchment, let alone reform. This is because, if anything I say below is true, in all likelihood it is too late for that.
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It’s alive in the laboratory of the mind: Frankenstein, thought experiment and facing the future of science
By Steven GilAbstractScience fiction splices actuality, eventuality and imagination into creations that provide novel and sometimes highly influential perspectives on science and society. One of the greatest examples of this is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – the infamous tale of a man who literally splices dead flesh into a new form and bestows this creation with life. By examining Frankenstein as a thought experiment, this article demonstrates how science fiction can become a commentary on scientific activity, give insight about where science might lead, and provide a resource for discussing and framing new science.
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Pathogens, vermin and strigoi: Contagion science and vampire myth in Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain
More LessAbstractThe first season of Guillermo del Toro’s television series, The Strain (2014–present) ingeniously merges the classical Bram Stoker vampire legend with the virus outbreak narrative by means of familiar contagion imagery and clichés that include the premise of an infected airplane and the running-against-the-clock efforts of the CDC protagonist, Dr Goodweather. The series offers three complementary perspectives that broaden the scope of vampirism: the medical vision of the protagonist, who insists on treating the outbreak as if it were an infectious disease; the pest exterminator Vasily who refers to these beings as vermin and rat-people; and the mythical vampire approach of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who brands them strigoi. I argue that the epidemiological perspective introduced by del Toro provides verisimilitude to the vampire myth while at the same time introducing contemporary discourses of virality and adding dichotomies of purity and corruption. By exploring the use of the genre’s conventions in del Toro’s imaginative universe, I intend to prove how a television series can be the ideal medium for unfolding epidemic narratives.
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Science fictional doubles: Technologization of the doppelgänger and sinister science in serial science fiction TV
More LessAbstractThis article focuses on iterations of the double in science fiction television (SFTV) of the 2010s and in particular how four recent series attest to both the increasing technologization of the doppelgänger and concomitant representations of science and scientists as tending towards the sinister. Each of the shows analysed here – Fringe (2008–13), Continuum (2012–15), Äkta människor (Real Humans) (2012–14) and Orphan Black (2014–17) – feature, to varying degrees, doubles of human characters that owe their fictional existence to formative scientific/technological breakthroughs. I will discuss how this recourse to science – including quantum physics, time travel, robotics and genetics – serves to technologize and thus reconfigure the double, while at the same time (re)producing powerful representations of science and scientists that tap into broader cultural memes. These include the archetypal mad scientist, corporatized and militarized science, science driven by utilitarianism and science in service to sinister conspiracy.
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