Make / Believe

This book illustrates that mediated popular culture and science-based knowledge systems, entangled and compromised as both have become, are still a robust crucible for system change for the future when they combine forces. Make/Believe opens with an account of children's collective activism in an era when their futures are jeopardized by our stories. It goes on to disentangle strategic stories in science, journalism, and popular culture, among zombies, aliens, class struggle, policy discourses, aircraft carriers, submarines, truth-warriors, and lifestyle journalism. The take-out message is that culture makes groups, groups make knowledge, and knowledge makes enemies. Make/Believe argues that mediated popular culture and science-based knowledge systems, compromised as both have become, are a crucible for system-change when they combine forces to face the future. On the brink of another era of global conflict, popular culture and science-based knowledge can provide myriad distributed ways to resist enmity and make a collaborative future instead.