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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2020
Journal of Science & Popular Culture - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2020
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2020
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Women in science: Theatrical representations and the realities they mirror
More LessAbstractThe practice of science can be affected by gender biases, which may alter the paths and careers of women. In consideration of this reality, this article analyses two science plays that position women as main characters and scientists. Examining Shelagh Stephenson's An Experiment with an Air Pump (1999) and Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51 (2011), the article illustrates how theatre mirrors real world realities, and how the portrayal of women in science plays illuminates their challenges and contributions in science. These plays are then compared to the life experiences described by Eileen Pollack, author of The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is Still a Boys' Club, and recent studies that document the adversity women in the sciences still endure. In conclusion, this article proposes that the representation of women in science onstage is culturally relevant and important to the way we can reconsider the treatment of women scientists.
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Hiroshi Ishiguro: Android science and 'upstream engagement'
By Yuji SoneAbstractThis article discusses Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese celebrity roboticist internationally acclaimed for his creation of androids. While his anthropomorphic machines are intended as models for future human-like robots, participating in work and domestic contexts, Ishiguro also regards them as experimental tools for investigations into questions of human identity. Beyond engineering challenges, he is not afraid to ask philosophical questions, such as 'what is the human?' Ishiguro has even had facial plastic surgery to match the appearance of his robot double, Geminoid HI-1. He has been described as the bad boy of Japanese robotics, an eccentric genius who is recognized as such in Japan, and overseas. While Ishiguro conducts scientific experiments, he has also deployed his anthropomorphic robots in popular entertainment contexts such as film, television, theatre and in museum exhibitions. Although Ishiguro's androids have almost always been included in mainstream western journalism's coverage concerning the development of next-generation robots in Japan, his anthropomorphic machines are often shown along with a photo of Ishiguro in his trademark black clothing, and described as 'freaky' and 'creepy'. I argue that Ishiguro's presentation feeds the western fascination with Japanese robot technology. This article examines the relationship between Ishiguro's larger-than-life public persona and his philosophy concerning his work as a kind of storytelling and upstream engagement in the context of robotic science.
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From circus acts to violent clowns: The parasite as performer
Authors: Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Alexander G. MaierAbstractWith the growing awareness of the contribution of parasites to life, their influences on humans also become clearer. The parasite's footprints can be seen everywhere, in genetics, epidemiology, medicine, history and, as this article clarifies, parasites play a vivid part in our cultural imagination surrounding popular entertainment. Drawing and expanding on Michel Serres' and Enid Welsford's discussions of the parasite as a cultural force, this article explores the line of filiation and interplay between biological parasites, circus arts and their comic emblem, the clown, in different narratives and media. It documents not only fantasies of a collaborative relationship between flea performers and their 'masters', and of the relationship between clowns and parasites, both of which are mischievous 'characters', but also circus-related imaginaries of parasitic remote control.
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Pepper's Ghost and the augmented reality of modernity
More LessAbstractThe emergence of augmented-reality (AR) displays has inspired scholarship examining the social effects and communicative impacts of these visual technologies. But the broader concept of reality augmentation – of overlaying information onto everyday experience – has been likened to the imposition of social discourses and ideologies. This article examines the nineteenth-century stage illusion Pepper's Ghost as an early AR media system in service to the particular ideological mission of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. Despite its spectral imagery and historical parallels to spiritualism, Pepper's Ghost was instrumental in servicing the Polytechnic's goals of promoting rational modernity and scientific progress, which it accomplished by mediating the epistemic divide between superstition and science and blending Polytechnic ideology with the phenomenological experience of the screened image. In this article, I make visible the ideological function of two apparatuses: the Pepper's Ghost illusion as a media system, and the social institution of the Polytechnic itself. In the end, I situate the current revival of Pepper's Ghost stagings as a twenty-first-century phenomenon amid new restagings of Pepper's Ghost as performing 'holograms'.
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It's geology time: Redesigning the Lapworth Museum of Geology
By Verity BurkeAbstractIn 2014, the Lapworth Museum of Geology in Birmingham (United Kingdom) successfully undertook a £2.5 million redesign to restore its heritage, and to adapt its specialist-focused displays for public visitors. This essay unearths the museum's past to argue that previous displays, which required the pedagogy of geological professors to illuminate the objects for the museum's specialist visitors, are replaced by a multimedia display strategy which embeds the history of the museum's geologists within the exhibit narrative, bridging the gap between specialist and public knowledge, transforming the Lapworth into a 'museum at a university' rather than a 'university museum'.
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