Little bugs and wicked viruses: Communicating the COVID-19 pandemic through picturebooks for children

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the production of large numbers of books to educate children about the novel coronavirus and the measures to control its spread. The books have been produced by a wide variety of different individuals and organizations, from health professionals and educators to national public health organizations and the United Nations. This study provides a detailed analysis of 73 picturebooks about coronavirus/COVID-19 available in English and produced between March and June 2020. The analysis reveals that the books combine early scientific knowledge about the novel coronavirus with pre-existing connotations of germs to produce a specific, comprehensible cause for the social disruption produced by the pandemic. This portrayal is frequently used to mobilize children to be heroes and fight the virus through a number of behavioural measures, principally frequent hand washing and staying at home. The books also reveal adult anxieties about the nature of childhood and the uncertainty of the nature and timing of a post-pandemic future.

‘Nothing is what it seems’: Posthumanism and late capitalism in Altered Carbon

This article explores how class politics are interpreted within Altered Carbon, the 2018 television series based on the 2002 book of the same name by Richard K. Morgan. The series follows Takeshi Kovacs, a soldier turned rebel turned private detective, as he awakens after 250 years in stasis. Like all humans in this fictional world, Kovacs’s existence, or essence, has been compressed into a small disk known as a cortical stack. Altered Carbon does not present a liberated or democratic future, instead, it demarcates how our posthuman fantasies can mimic, or fully embody, the class politics we see today in our late-capitalist society. Altered Carbon asks us to consider where the boundaries of the self and the body truly lie and how those boundaries, or lack thereof, are open for exploitation by those with financial means. We must critique how posthumanism has, or has not, taken up class. I believe this issue is most salient when we consider how class mediates our past, present and potential futures. I analyse the cortical stack itself as a posthumanist interpretation of Cartesian dualism and how that mind and body divide is central to maintaining capitalism through the alienation of the worker. Altered Carbon asks us to consider what happens when one’s flesh and one’s identity in and of itself become transferable and never truly one’s own.

A preferred reality: Film portrayals of robots and AI in popular science fiction

The increasing frequency and depth of human interaction with robots and artificial intelligence (AI) prompts this research study into how media-framed portrayals of technology in popular visual media might construct social reality. Cinema serves as an important and influential form of media, and portrayals of technology in film media can influence public perceptions, specifically confirming or creating perceptions of artificial or robotic intelligence. Previous research identifies frequent portrayals of robots and AI as deceptive, aggressive monsters in films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and James Cameron’s The Terminator. However, as the distance between fantastic technology collapses into a new social reality where humans, AI and robots exist together, film portrayals reflect a more nuanced view and changing expectations for human-robot, human-AI interactions. The study applies framing theory and a content analysis methodology to examine filmmakers’ choices to determine robot and AI character types frequenting popular cinema. Seventeen popular films yielded 592 scenes to analyse. Findings from this quantitative content analysis revealed patterns portraying robots and AI more often as friendly, helpful companions of humans, rather than menacing or harmful to humans. Therefore, the researchers conclude that modern films primarily depict cohesive and complimentary interactions between humans and living technology, reflecting on heavy technology use and dependency. Furthermore, individuals who create these films may be illustrating scenes of a preferred reality, where AI and robots are meant to be our helpers, rather than threatening replacements in both society and industry.

Science, superheroes and the Science and Entertainment Exchange

Exploring two case studies – Thor and Black Panther – the article reveals how the use of Science and Entertainment Exchange (SEEX) advisers can help inspire the next generation of STEM careerists and popularize a variety of formerly marginalized scientific concepts. Blending interviews with SEEX leaders, the science consultants who worked on the films and Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) producer, Jeremy Latcham, this article blends a production economy perspective with critical analysis to better understand how the ideology of science circulates within the MCU and how its films are working to disrupt outdated notions of science and scientists.

Spreading fun: Comic zombies, Joker viruses and COVID-19 jokes

This article examines the interplay between humour, science and pandemics in culture. Asking what comic scenarios of infectious diseases look like in different media, the article focuses on comic zombiism in film, clown viruses in comics and COVID-19 jokes on the internet. What can we learn from comic zombies and the Joker – the clown prince of crime in the DC Universe – about infectious diseases? What do viral jokes about pandemics in popular communication (COVID-19 memes in particular) that explicitly refer to these pop cultural phenomena teach us about our understanding of the spread of diseases? And in what way is the spread of humour comparable to the spread of viruses? Exploring these questions, this article investigates the ways humorous interpretations of infectious diseases shape, cultivate and reinforce cultural meanings of diseases and science.

Didactic and artistic representations of prehistoric hominins: Who were we? Who are we now?

The image of the prehistoric hominin is well known: brutish and hairy, the men hunt with impressive weapons, while women tend to children or kneel over a hide. In this article I consider didactic illustrations and re-creations of human relatives in the context of science and art. I argue that these images are laden with symbolic sociopolitical meanings and are heavily biased by not only the newest scientific findings but also ideas about gender roles and civilization/civility in popular culture. Artistic representation in educational materials tends to reflect popular conceptions of ancestral life, more than data-dependent interpretations. For example, there is a bias against artistic depictions of women, children or the elderly and activities typically associated with them. Men and male activities – particularly hunting – are overrepresented. Hairy bodies, stooped posture, acute facial angles, savagery and a lack of material culture function as a symbol of incivility or animality. They are used to code an individual as being sufficiently inhuman to create a comfortable separation between viewer and ‘caveman’, which ultimately reflects our ambiguous relationship to human evolution.

Galaksija: Representation of science in Yugoslavia’s socialist-era popular science magazine

Popular science coverage in Soviet countries was often determined by the ideological function of the media. But this was not always the case, especially on the periphery of the Soviet Union. I analyse science coverage in a cult popular science magazine published at the edges of the communist East, socialist Yugoslavia, in the mid-1970s at the height of the magazine’s circulation and during the reign of the country’s communist leader Josip Broz Tito. This analysis shows that at least some Yugoslav media rose above the East/West ideological divide, freeing science from the shackles of US and Soviet ideology, while imparting a unique Yugoslav ideological vision of the world to media science coverage.

All the creatures of the wheel at stake: Re-assessing science, anti-science and religion in The Omega Man

The most significant motifs of Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971) have been heavily scrutinized. Critical literature mentions science vs. anti-science as one of the film’s themes, yet only occasionally and fragmentarily. I contend that this opposition is central to the movie and that a richer interpretation of it can be reached by taking into account more elements in the movie’s action, dialog and imagery than critics have done thus far.