How Pop Culture Shapes the Meanings of Science

Popular culture is one of the most powerful spaces where publics encounter science, form attitudes toward it and imagine what scientific futures might look like. Film, for example, reaches global audiences and offers a narrative imagination lab where emerging technologies can be explored long before they enter everyday life. These cinematic worlds help shape cultural meanings of science: what feels possible, what feels risky and what feels desirable.

The POPSICULE at the Australian National University works at exactly this intersection of science and imagination. It’s an award-winning interdisciplinary hub that studies how science circulates through popular culture and how cultural narratives, aesthetics and emotions shape public engagement with scientific ideas. Through a range of research and engagement projects and creative collaborations, the POPSICULE experiments with new interactive forms of science communication and investigates how stories - from blockbusters to bio-art - influence the way society understands scientific innovation.

Come and join Anna-Sophie Jürgens, founder of the POPSICULE, for a whirlwind tour through their latest adventures - from animated pop-up book visions to the ways synthetic biology and emerging biotechnologies are being reimagined in contemporary film. We’ll dip into cinematic worlds where genomes glitch, ecosystems push back, bodies get weird and the future refuses to behave. And who knows - by the end, you might even decide to become a Popsiculist, joining the crew of science-culture explorers who treat pop culture as both a playground and a laboratory!

Room 115

Attend in person or watch on Zoom.