Robot World: Education, Popular Culture, and Science (Counterpoints)

How do goals of education and entertainment conflict in popularizations of science? In schools? Robot World explores these questions through a case study of a hands-on science museum/theme park in a tourist center in the upper Midwestern United States. Mixing ethnography, autobiography, and science fiction, this book examines science's public cultures. In unraveling this dual interest of education and entertainment, it looks at how the association of wonder and science works ideologically. It explores how the technologies in the museum become props in specific racial and gender identity formations, and it examines the experiences of the body in the hands-on museum as the ultimate science lesson.