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Movies and news reports represent for many the first source of interaction with social robots. Congruently, as tools for the dissemination of popular representations of robots, movies can have a direct impact on public perception, acceptance, and discourse about this type of technology. In this article, a content analysis of popular movies and franchises involving (fictional) social robots was conducted (k = 34). With this analysis, we sought to understand a) the main tropes used in movies involving robotic characters, b) the type of human-robot relationships depicted in those movies, and c) how the fictional robots compared with real robots in terms of their abilities. The results suggest that robots tend to be typically depicted in a polarized way that either emphasizes their extreme social abilities or their violent and destructive motives, with the former being slightly more prevalent. As a result, the relations between humans and robots tend to be either friendship or antagonism. Fictional robots are often portrayed as having advanced technical abilities that allow them to navigate multiple complex social settings and engage in different occupations typically performed by humans, in contrast with the abilities held by the most popular commercially available robots we have today. Movies and news reports represent for many the first source of interaction with social robots. Social robots tend to be portrayed in a very polarized way. Recommendations for future research and robot development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firefly is a TV series that aired in 2002 and 2003 in the United States. The series belongs to the space western subgenre, which allies science fiction and western tropes by layering, in this case, a dystopian society, space travel, standoffs in desolate landscapes, and saloon brawls. This juxtaposition of genres is reflected in the language of Firefly's characters in three ways: world-specific slang, Chinese code-switching, and features evoking Southern American English. This study explores the latter, employing quantitative methods used in variationist sociolinguistics. Using a corpus of all episodes of the series and the film Serenity (2005), we show that features reminiscent of Southern varieties of English, specifically nasal fronting and the use of ain't, are stratified according to the social realities of the world of Firefly. Nonstandard linguistic variants are used to represent rebel smugglers as opposed to characters representing valued professions. This pattern contributes to world-building in Firefly by indexing divisions between the superpower-controlled territories and the recently settled edge of the universe. The use of realistically constrained Southern linguistic features draws upon present-day notions of linguistic (non)standardness to indicate marginality. Firefly therefore relies on its audience's linguistic knowledge of the real world to create its fictional one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, "Language, Water, and Dance," offers a meditation on pandemic time by engaging with Native American histories in relation to Indigenous epistemologies and theories as well as recent events. Looking to Winter Counts and science fiction by Indigenous authors, this meditation suggests that how we think of time and reality are intimately linked to settler colonialism in the United States. The creative form of the essay mirrors the ways in which Indigenous writers and theorists describe time as a spiral rather than a linear progression of lived experience. Relationality and Dakotaness are at the center of the essay's stories of activism, performance, and survival. A discussion of the "Native slipstream" connects science fiction to the work of water protectors and the NoDAPL movement. The recordings of events through Winter Counts demonstrate how memory and history are collectively shared processes that were also linked to colonial pressures to assimilate Indigenous peoples living in the Plains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, further suggesting that the first pandemic to impact Indian Country was a colonial one. Concluding with a brief reading from Cherie Dimaline's young-adult novel, The Marrow Thieves , suggests that as long as we can dream there is still hope for the world where being a good relative is at the center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Walidah Imarisha discusses the potential of visionary fiction for social transformation. She highlights the importance of science fiction as a space for imagination and mentions her collaboration with adrienne maree brown in the anthology "Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements". The author argues that visionary fiction should be anticapitalist and without hierarchy, and that action is necessary to create emancipated futures. The anthology has had a significant impact on the social justice movement in the United States. Imarisha also emphasizes the importance of listening to and valuing the leadership of the most vulnerable people during the pandemic, and emphasizes the need to imagine and work towards creating fairer futures. She discusses the importance of visionary fiction as a tool for reimagining the past and shaping the present and future, and highlights the need to recognize and connect with the experiences of non-white people, especially black people. Imarisha also emphasizes the importance of creating independent spaces of information and knowledge, where communities can write their own stories. [Extracted from the article]

Through this article, we examine the history and conventions of copaganda in the United States, and critically consider how HBO's Watchmen has responded to and represented the historical relationship between policing and white supremacy. We argue that while Watchmen works to explicitly critique the history of white supremacist violence in US policing, the show reproduces several copaganda conventions. Watchmen depicts central law enforcement characters who commit violence as heroes, uplifts the main police character as an eventually almighty arbiter of justice, portrays white supremacist law enforcement characters as anomalous individual infiltrators (a.k.a. "bad apples"), and was created in collaboration with various members of law enforcement. After presenting this case study in contemporary copaganda, we consider how science fiction series can more meaningfully respond to the movement for police and prison abolition through representing abolitionist futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]