Academics Henry Jenkins and Colin Maclay use their combined knowledge to dig deeper and ask more ambitious questions than most pop culture podcasts out there – not doing recaps or just remaining on the level of entertainment coverage. For them, popular culture offers resources for asking questions about who we are and where we are going, questions that can be political, legal, technological, economic, or social, but often cut across all of the above.
https://www.howdoyoulikeitsofar.org/
episode 19: Episode 19: Star Trek and actual space with Margaret Weitekamp
Henry is currently a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, where he had the chance to speak about space with Margaret Weitekamp, curator of Space History department or the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. She curates the museum's social and cultural dimensions of spaceflight collection, which has more than 4,000 artifacts that include space memorabilia and space science fiction objects. We talked about the relationship of imaginaries of science fiction with those of space planning, and the benefits of displaying them side by side in the museum. We also discuss the link between the fandom of Star Trek and the dreams of space travel, we contextualize it within larger socio-cultural contexts, and also discuss the history of women in the space program.