The nuclear taboo, <i>Battlestar Galactica</i>, and the real world: Illustrations from a science-fiction universe

Fey, Marco; Poppe, Annika Elena; Rauch, Carsten

doi:10.1177/0967010616643212

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…First, movies and television allow researchers safely to observe behaviour in extreme contexts. See, for example, the studies of Buffy the Vampire (Cordesman, 2001), Stepford Wives and Matrix (Czarniawska and Gustavsson, 2008), the Swedish crime drama Martin Beck (Buus, 2009) and Battlestar Galactica (Fey et al, 2016).…”

Section: Methodological Challenges and Social Science Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Surviving a zombie apocalypse: Leadership configurations in extreme contexts

Buchanan

Hällgren

2018

Management Learning

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What can the classic zombie movie, Day of the Dead, tell us about leadership? In our analysis of this film, we explore leadership behaviours in an extreme context – a zombie apocalypse where survivors face persistent existential threat. Extreme context research presents methodological challenges, particularly with regard to fieldwork. The use of films as proxy case studies is one way in which to overcome these problems, and for researchers working in an interpretivist perspective, ‘social science fiction’ is increasingly used as a source of inspiration and ideas. The contribution of our analysis concerns highlighting the role of leadership configurations in extreme contexts, an approach not previously addressed in this field, but one that has greater explanatory power than current perspectives. In Day of the Dead, we observe several different configurations – patterns of leadership styles and behaviours – emerging, shifting and overlapping across the phases of the narrative, each with radically different consequences for the group of survivors. These observations suggest a speculative theory of leadership configurations and their implications in extreme contexts, for exploring further, with other methods.

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Section: Methodological Challenges and Social Science Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Surviving a zombie apocalypse: Leadership configurations in extreme contexts

Buchanan

Hällgren

2018

Management Learning

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“…У последњем случају, дата (наводна) спремност за употребу нуклеарног оружја појављује се као ознака нељудскости режима држава које су у питању, пошто противречи "цивилизованом" рату, у којем није дозвољено коришћење средства за масовно уништење, а какав је прихваћен у међународном праву 29 (упор. Fey, Poppe and Rauch 2016).…”

Section: б ж 1276unclassified

Misanthropic Aspects of Science Fiction: The Examples of Battlestar Galactica and Borislav Pekić’s Atlantis

Žikić

2022

EAP / IEA

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Anthropological interest in science fiction derives from the fact that works of science fiction, while depicting imaginary worlds, actually speak about existing human communities. This paper looks at how misanthropy is communicated in science fiction works, specifically, in Borislav Pekić’s novel Atlantis (Atlantida), first published in 1988, and the TV series Battlestar Galactica, which originally aired between 2003 and 2009. The theme of both works is essentially the same: the end of human history in its present form and the attempt to create a better civilization, all of this resulting from a long-standing conflict between humans and their biggest historical mistake – robots. The subject matter of the two works is also the same: having reached a high level of technological and spiritual development, humans design robots to replace them first in the most difficult jobs, and then in everyday tasks; the robots develop self-awareness and rise against their makers, and then come to believe that they should replace people and rectify all the errors and shortcomings they have identified in them as beings and also in their social development and organization, and eventually achieve deification by surpassing their makers and initiating their own independent and – compared to humans – more just history. The novel and the series have in common, not only with each other but also with many other science fiction works, a pessimistic view of human existence: a proneness to corruptibility in terms of morals and actions as a human characteristic, and its embedding and presence in the modes of human cultural thought and social organization and actions, represent a distinct, misanthropic thematic dimension in science fiction. This is particularly apparent when the acts of othering and institutional inflicting of evil on Others are considered. This is contrary to the humanistic ideal of humanity as an essential, ennobling quality of human beings. Science fiction works that problematize misanthropy as a sociocultural category suggest that human society reflects human nature: human communities are a product of human mental and material organization, and thus the lack of agreement between proclaimed social and cultural values and corresponding behavior represents a product of human thought and actions. What follows from this in Battlestar Galactica and Atlantis is that robots are like people: they know of no values other than human ones, hence their society is similar to human societies. They strive to evolve and thus distance themselves from their makers, yet it turns out that their patterns of behaviour towards Others and their tendency to other those among them who do not think like them or refuse to behave like them, are identical to those of humans.

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“…A particular focus of the scholarship in this area is on big-budget, high-productionvalues datasets: some specific examples here include Star Trek (Dyson 2015;Vuori 2017 andWeldes 1999), Battlestar Galactica (Kiersey and Neumann (eds) 2013;Fey, Poppe and Rauch 2016), Game of Thrones (Carpenter 2012;Clapton and Shepherd 2017;Drezner 2011Drezner , 2012 and 2013; and Milkoreit 2017), The West Wing (Holland 2016), Harry Potter (Nexon and Neumann (eds) 2006), Lord of the Rings (Ruane and James 2012) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Rowley and Weldes 2012). This isn't, in and of itself, a point of criticism -the popularity, quality, high circulation, and rich analytical content of these sources make for compelling and telling research and makes the choice of these sources very much understandable.…”

Section: Actors and Artefactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the potential of the popular culture and world politics agenda: actors, artefacts and the everyday

Hamilton

2019

Australian Journal of Political Science

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The PCWP agenda has contributed a great deal to the discipline of world politics, empirically, methodologically and theoretically. However, there is scope to expand upon certain aspects of this body of scholarship. In particular, the agenda is developing some unfortunate hierarchies in its focus on high-budget 'blockbusters' at the expense of data from the everyday. It is displaying a lack of imagination in terms of its methodologies and forms of output, despite the aesthetic and creative nature of many of the artefacts. Finally, it is evincing a reluctance to explore representations beyond the textual or the visual, at the expense of other forms of representation, including sound, taste or, as I argue in this paper, artefactuality.

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The nuclear taboo, Battlestar Galactica, and the real world: Illustrations from a science-fiction universe

Cited by 14 publications

References 34 publications

Surviving a zombie apocalypse: Leadership configurations in extreme contexts

Surviving a zombie apocalypse: Leadership configurations in extreme contexts

Misanthropic Aspects of Science Fiction: The Examples of Battlestar Galactica and Borislav Pekić’s Atlantis

Exploring the potential of the popular culture and world politics agenda: actors, artefacts and the everyday

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