03-113 Biologies in Text and Film
9 units, Carnegie Mellon University
In this interdisciplinary course, students investigate how biological science is represented in film and text, exploring how a particular type of expert knowledge and its methodologies are evoked and disseminated in popular media. This course encourages students to participate in medical humanities research under the scope of "Science and Science Fiction" (Luokkala, 2019), an approach that seeks to discuss how scientific and speculative writing have an obligation to disseminate and explore science knowledge, exposing how plausibility, reality, and art converge around the great shared problems impacting our world. Biologies in Text and Film encourages students to explore one of the foundational aspects of medical humanities, how scientific knowledge and its applied research (e.g. public health) are entangled with human participants and socio-cultural practices. The strength of this approach is that students learn and perform biology while simultaneously exploring the cultural and social impact of this mode of knowledge formation and how it is disseminated in the popular mind. Students explore the difficulties of engaging with the unreal—those fictive, textual worlds within which we immerse ourselves—and the almost hyperreal notion of the "real" around us—those structures we've come to associate with hard, unbreakable, and transferable scientific truths. Students should expect to explore narrative fiction (e.g. films and short stories/ novels) as these texts converge with topics ranging from epigenetics, molecular, and cellular biology, and neuroscience. This approach prioritizes the real-world impact of science and scientific knowledge as it resonates with society and within science fiction. Students will have the opportunity to apply the scientific method in new and future applications and to explore the translational applicability of science in innovative and speculative scenarios.
Prerequisites: none listed
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