Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies

PhD Research

The Future States of Religion in Children’s Science Fiction Animation

The topic of my research deals with children’s science fiction programming and the representation of religion within the imaginary worlds. More specifically I will be looking at science fiction in sociocultural terms relating to space travel, exploration and colonization, as well as, discovering how children are first exposed to new religions from alien cultures, which are unlike their own. A key component will be finding healthy broadcasting that interacts constructively between old and new doctrines of science, religion and culture.

The reasoning behind this research is because of the current problems of interrelationship between the east and the west. Civilizations are at war with one another, and there is a direct resemblance of this in children’s television programming. Turning on the television and watching a child’s science fiction cartoon is like watching the evening news; cultures battle it out with morally cheap actions of combat and war.

This death by a ray gun is ethically wrong for the minds of children because the television programming could be in fact programming our future generations, and I hope to make this clear in my PhD research. Along with my written thesis will be a documentary movie that will explore the ideas mentioned above.

Supervisor: Dr. Sara Gwenllian Jones