#30 Don’t Look Up! How Hollywood Imports Science Policy into Films | WeAreSTS

Hollywood chooses to portray experts in particular – sometimes peculiar – ways. Those choices have profound impacts on how audiences think about subjects as diverse as dinosaurs, robots, and climate catastrophes. But do those portrayals also change the way we think about the experts themselves and the process of expertise? Does Hollywood play some kind of under-the-table role in teaching us which experts to trust? That’s the theme for today’s podcast.

Today, we listen in on a conversation between three experts here in STS who study science policy making as a process. They talk about a couple of films in which experts play starring roles. To get things going, they concentrate on two films: “Films like Don’t Look Up,” the star-studded 2021 Netflix film directed by Adam McKay. And, “2012,” the 2009 Sony Pictures apocalypse film directed by Ro ...