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Imagining Future Biothreats: The Role of Popular Culture

Lentzos, F; Gouyon, J-B; Balmer, B; (2020) Imagining Future Biothreats: The Role of Popular Culture. In: Jaspers, U and Dunn Cavelty, M and Wenger, A, (eds.) The Politics and Science of Prevision Governing and Probing the Future. (pp. 158-176). Routledge: London, UK. Green open access

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Abstract

This chapter explores the role of futurist storytelling in relation to biological weapons. It first describes some of the barriers and difficulties inherent in making realistic assessments of the threat from future biological weapons, before narrowing its focus to an understudied but significant element of these assessments: imagination and popular culture. The chapter makes a theoretical case for why science fiction and anticipatory knowledge production are interlinked, arguing that culture co-constitutes political actors, problems, values, representations and threat assessments, and that culture should be recognized as a major and integral part of the transaction that engenders political behaviour. As such, the chapter uses pop culture as a ‘lens’ to provide insight into understanding how different groups ‘see’ biological weapons and how science fiction has a constitutive effect on biological threat assessments. The argument is illustrated with some of the most prominent examples from the bioweapons sci-fi genre. The chapter concludes with an outlook on key research questions for future work in this area.

Type: Book chapter
Title: Imagining Future Biothreats: The Role of Popular Culture
ISBN: 0367900742
ISBN-13: 9780367900748
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.4324/9781003022428
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003022428
Language: English
Additional information: This chapter is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Science and Technology Studies
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10112602
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