From Panic to Pedagogy: Using Science Fiction to Teach about Population Futures in the 1970s

Author: Aiden Suarez

Field of Study: Global Public Health; Spanish

Program Affiliation: Source Project Research Program

Faculty Mentors: Will Glovinsky

Easel: 37

Timeslot: Afternoon

Abstract: In the late 1960s, anxieties about population growth became a headline issue, helped along by neo-Malthusian books such as Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and especially science fiction (SF) works such as Stand on Zanzibar (both 1968). But SF was not simply thrilling the public with dystopian overpopulation scenarios: by the 1970s, it was also being incorporated into classroom syllabi to illustrate specific scientific concepts, such as population growth. This paper focuses on a little-known educational study by sociologist Thomas Van Valey, published in 1974, that explores SF’s utility for teaching population studies in an undergraduate course. Van Valey’s experiment allows one to reconstruct this controversial period in the history of overpopulation discourse while also exploring the pedagogical implications of his study. There is strong evidence that assigning SF can be effective in social and natural science classrooms, and this case study suggests its pedagogical use for exploring the science and ethics of population futures.