scholarly journals “What is my purpose?” Artificial Sentience Having an Existential Crisis in Rick and Morty

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Television Show ◽  
American Television ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Terrestrial Life ◽  
Existentialist Philosophy

The American television show Rick and Morty, an animated science fiction sitcom, critiques speciesism in the context of bleak existentialist philosophy. Though the show focuses primarily on human characters, it also depicts various forms of artificial sentience, such as robots or clones, undergoing existential crises. It explicitly effaces any distinction between human sentience and artificial sentience, forcefully treating all sentient life with an equivalent respect (or disrespect). The show also problematizes human speciesism in relationship to terrestrial and extra-terrestrial life.

scholarly journals “What is my purpose?” Artificial Sentience Having an Existential Crisis in Rick and Morty

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Television Show ◽  
American Television ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Terrestrial Life ◽  
Existentialist Philosophy

The American television show Rick and Morty, an animated science fiction sitcom, critiques speciesism in the context of bleak existentialist philosophy. Though the show focuses primarily on human characters, it also depicts various forms of artificial sentience, such as robots or clones, undergoing existential crises. It explicitly effaces any distinction between human sentience and artificial sentience, forcefully treating all sentient life with an equivalent respect (or disrespect). The show also problematizes human speciesism in relationship to terrestrial and extra-terrestrial life.

Drama at Dunder Mifflin: Workplace Bullying Discourses on The Office

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin M. Sumner ◽  
Jennifer A. Scarduzio ◽  
Jena R. Daggett
Keyword(s):  
Workplace Bullying ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Television Show ◽  
Workplace Bully ◽  
American Television ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
Content Analyses ◽  
Bullying Behavior ◽  
Bullying Behaviors

This study examines the portrayal and affective framing of workplace bullying behaviors on the popular American television show The Office. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses were conducted on 54 episodes spanning the show’s nine seasons. Results revealed 331 instances of workplace bullying, for an average of 6.13 bullying behaviors per episode. Workplace bullying behavior on The Office was grouped into five categories: sexual jokes, public humiliation, practical jokes, belittlement, and misuse of authority. In general, instances of workplace bully were scripted as humorous and lacking significant consequences, which could further contribute to social discourses that perpetuate the problem of bullying in real-life workplaces.

Asians and Asian Americans in Early Science Fiction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Terrestrial Life ◽  
The Invisible

This essay considers the expressive and figurative dynamics of Asians in science fiction in the early 20th century. Racial sentiment and policy in the era saw and defined Asians as “ineligible aliens” to exclude from immigration and citizenship. Asian figures expressed these dynamics in science fiction, adapting Orientalist tropes and Yellow Peril themes to the imperatives of the emergent genre. The invisible menace of villainous masterminds like Fu Manchu from crime and detective fiction were refigured as visible science fiction foes whose defeat redeemed the power and potential of science from its degenerate and dehumanizing application. Asian racial tropes aligned particularly with science fiction’s concern about extra-terrestrial life forms. While the term “alien” was not used in the period for such creatures, its later prominence expressed valences and associations, particularly with “invasion,” that Asians originally represented in the genre.

Dismantling the Genre

2018 ◽  
pp. 386-408
Author(s):  
Elena Benthaus
Keyword(s):  
Reality Television ◽  
Television Show ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Television ◽  
Audience Responses

The American television show So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) is commonly referred to in the scholarship as a reality dance competition, a reality talent show, or simply as reality television. Instead of looking at the competitive aspect of SYTYCD and its relation to the genre of reality television, this chapter focuses on the show’s inherent intertextuality, specifically in relation to the early American popular entertainment genres of vaudeville and melodrama. It argues that vaudeville performance aesthetics and melodramatic performance modes are attractions on display, which produce what media scholar Henry Jenkins refers to as “affective immediacy” and “affective intensification” as part of the spectatorship experience that goes beyond the competitive aspect of SYTYCD. It focuses on the dance routines as well as audience responses to these routines from the SYTYCD dance fan community on YouTube.

Mechanical Maids and Family Androids: Racialised Post-Care Imaginaries in Humans (2015–), Sleep Dealer (2008) and Her (2013)

2019 ◽  
Vol 123 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Kerry Mackereth
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Operating Systems ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Television Show ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relations Of Power

Feminist investigations into caring technologies emphasise the tension between their reproduction of care’s assumed femininity and their ability to destabilise gendered markers and systems. However, the existing literature ignores the historical racialisation of care and its perpetuation in the form of the posthuman caring object. This article examines how racialised relations of power shape the posthumanisation of care in three science-fiction works, Channel 4’s television show Humans (2015), Alex Riviera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008) and Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013). While Her’s disembodied operating systems are premised upon an implicit whiteness, posthuman caring objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer take a racialised, embodied form. Drawing upon the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, this article examines how the racialised objects in Humans and Sleep Dealer are constituted as both labourers and commodities, purchased for the purpose of facilitating white reproductivity. Nonetheless, this article also documents how these caring technologies complicate key binaries such as subject/object, human/machine and productive/reproductive labour. In doing so, they disrupt the whiteness of the social reproduction paradigm. The article concludes by calling for greater feminist engagement with the racialisation of care labour in human and posthuman forms, in order to challenge white, heterosexual models of reproductivity based upon the exploitation of racialised labour.

scholarly journals Vegetal Scale in the Anthropocene: The Dark Green

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-100
Author(s):  
Heather Isabella Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Carbon Dioxide ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Ecological Changes ◽  
Terrestrial Life ◽  
Dark Green

      When exploring the problem of delineating possible “scales” useful to describe the Anthropocene’s ecological changes, I suggest plant-human relations as the basis of our models rather than solely Human impact with a capital “H” as if a stand-alone species. Instead, human beings are a species within the photosynthesis-shaped, oxygen-infused atmosphere, and countering the ongoing industrial ecocide means seeking multispecies justice. One may claim that the “vegetal” stands as the ontological antithesis of being “animal,” but that view expresses a one-dimensional disregard for the essential work and bodies of plants and their fellow photosynthesizers that produce oxygen, drive the carbon cycle, feed terrestrial life, and influence water cycles. Indeed, “animal” is an emergence from the vegetal context. But our plant stories are shifting with the anthropocenic inflection. This dark green project explores narratives, both scientific and creative, of plant-human interactions in time of planetary change; and these interactions are not always peaceful or on an easily comprehended scale. As an example, I consider the 2015 short science-fiction story from Alan Dean Foster, “That Creeping Sensation,” that portrays how plant-human relations take on frightening new forms in a climate-changed world altered by heat, carbon dioxide, and the not-always-supportive activities of plants. With all the heat and carbon dioxide, plant life explodes and produces a massive increase in oxygen. In response, insects grow enormous and specialized first-responders must battle the bugs. Foster’s texts portray scales of non-human agency larger than the human whose power encompasses, enables, and sometimes threatens human life. His “cli fi” tale of giant bugs presents human beings as inextricably enmeshed in a plant-dominated existence. To paraphrase Derrida, there is no outside the vegetal.

scholarly journals ‘You Know the Business and I Know the Chemistry’: The Scientific Ethos of Breaking Bad

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-89
Author(s):  
Ben Wetherbee ◽  
Stephanie Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Breaking Bad ◽  
American Television ◽  
Textual Construction ◽  
Images Of Science ◽  
Scientific Ethos ◽  
Serial Television

We conduct an analysis of the American television drama Breaking Bad as a show that resists the label of 'science fiction', while its use of scientific imagery and discourse create what we call a 'scientific ethos'. This essay explores the use of science as an appeal to intelligence and credibility in Breaking Bad. We include a theoretical discussion of how ethos emerges in serial television narratives, an analysis of the show's textual construction of its ethos, and a discussion of the intertexual and social effects of that ethos. Finally, we recommend the adoption of a rhetorical perspective in analysing how images of science circulate in fictional texts.

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