Playing with Star Trek in the critical geography classroom: STEM education and otherwise possibilities

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on the classroom use of the Star Trek American science fiction television franchise to teach critical and emotional geographies to undergraduates specializing in science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM). Both science fiction and STEM education are ambivalent and contradictory scenes of social reproduction, extending a promise of social transformation, but often maintaining complicity in heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and empire. Enlivening students to what Ashon T. Crawley calls the “otherwise possibilities” immanent to both science fiction and STEM education is necessarily difficult emotional work. Reflecting on teacher shame and anxiety and student resistance to course material, I turn to psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Donald W. Winnicott, to argue that Star Trek offers a richly contradictory “transitional object” for students to play with otherwise possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Star Trek
• STEM education
• liberal arts education
• otherwise possibilities
• psychoanalysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As Moseley (2004) explains, U.S. liberal arts colleges are “mostly private schools” that “specialize in undergraduate education characterized by small class size, intense faculty-student interaction, and significant attention to writing and analytical skill development” (10). Comprising a mere 3% of the U.S. college population, these institutions are not well-known within the U.S. and even more obscure beyond it, but often provide excellent preparation for advanced study.

2. Educators curious about appropriate episodes of Star Trek to address a particular social theme need only enter “Star Trek” plus the name of thetheme in an Internet search engine to elicit a myriad of articles, often including on StarTrek.com, making highly relevant suggestions.