A guy does his thesis on a Star Trek ship.... (1 Viewer)

[todd s]

This guy did his doctoral thesis on the Constellation class starship amd celestial mechanics. I tried reading it and it went right over my head. :b

here is the link:
http://www.celestialmechanics.org/trek.html

 

[Amy Mormino]

People do their thesis projects on pretty weird things and I'm speaking as someone currently doing a Ph.D. thesis. There was someone at my university during my undergrad years who did a thesis on alien sex scenes in sci-fi novels. The academic world is a lot more open now to publishing works based on pop culture.

 

[JustinCleveland]

I can see incorporating pop-culture into the Academy because, by and large, it is the biggest influence on the world and it's important to understand it. It was an idea, a flight of fancy, that lead to the creation of the airplane, so I can see how this project makes sense, try to understand how it could be made to happen.

However,
Even if I were to give this the benefit of the doubt, I can't see an angle that would be anything but silly.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

Maybe his thesis was on deviant sexual behavior and bizarre fetishes?

 

[andrew markworthy]

Not necessarily. Speaking as someone who has a PhD, has (successfully) supervised PhD students and examined several more, I can tell you that PhD subjects come in all shapes and sizes.

Generally the title subject is just the handle to get into the subject. E.g. a survey of alien sex scenes in movies would be a waste of time and rather pretentious if all it did was to catalogue every such event. However, more probably it would be used to examine how the use of such scenes reflects changing societal attitudes (e.g. the portrayal of women as victims of alien breeding experiments playing on images of women as passive victims, the idea of the sexual menace of strangers, etc).

 

[JustinCleveland]

Andrew,

My only concern would be the extremely limited nature of the item being studied in the general culture. You could study bondage pornography and what it means, but the simple fact is that it's not pervasive enough to have an impact and seems fruitless to study. As a rhetorician, I'd argue simply that it can't be a reflection of society if it's written by a fringe group for a fringe group. Personally my graduate studies are going to focus on war rhetoric in the American media, comparing WW2, Vietnam, and the current conflict in Iraq. I might expand it out to world media if I decide to put it into a book. But that has an impact because it's applied to the masses. I simply cannot think of anything that has a legitimate, mass appeal coming from the topic. But again, maybe I'm just thinking about it too hard.

 

[andrew markworthy]

I think I'm in agreement, but I suppose it's possible that such studies could be made accessible (e.g. an exploration of sex scenes could be a superb way of introducing newbies to textual analysis and similar).

 

[Scott Strang]

I'd like to know (which will never and shouldn't happen) what he gets for a grade.

 

[Jay H]

Actually, I thought he was doing his thesis on a Star Trek ship.

Jay

 

[JustinCleveland]

I know we're on the same plane of thought here, but I guess I'm more of a pragmatist in academia where everything should have a purpose.

And I'm sorry, but introducting people to text analysis using alien sex isn't going to work, to distracing.

And Jay, don't make me come over there...