Utopic Stratification and Star Trek’s Socio-spatial Relations of Protest, Mobility, and Place

Keywords: Socio-spatial relations, resources, science fiction, mobility, dystopia
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 38

Abstract

While all science fiction reflects broader social and spatial relations, Star Trek has often been a beacon of utopian future amongst the vastly bleak and dystopian contemporary science fiction blockbusters. Geographies of Star Trek, as well as science fiction more broadly, have explored these human-non-human relationships, geopolitics, and considerations of imaginary landscapes, often investigating Star Trek’s power for contemporary and futuristic utopia. The use of dystopia in Star Trek, however, is particularly underexplored. Dystopia, across cultural geographies, reveals alternative, imagined, and often quite rooted cases of socio-spatial relations. Drawing from similar work in political and social geography, this paper focuses on the continued institutionalized and bureaucratic challenges faced in a fictional world which has largely removed scarcity from the equation of material relations. Employing discourse analysis across the canonical post-industrial and post-scarcity Star Trek universe, we ask how ongoing socio-spatial relations of protest, mobility, and place translate in a supposedly utopian imagined world. The context of a utopic stratification and specific geographies of becoming spatially and temporally lost indicate a broader sense of becoming in both the geographies of Star Trek and dystopia. 2020 offered three series which, for the first time in two decades, push Star Trek's already vast speculative world forward. Star Trek: Picard and Discovery draw and comment heavily upon current geopolitical violences to raise questions of a lost future utopia. Drawing from these and previous series, this paper connects the geographies of the utopian and dystopian with the literary landscapes of socio-spatial relations.