{"doi":"10.1177/15327086251407134","title":"Science, Medicine, and Monsters in Today’s American Popular Imaginary","abstract":"In this article, we maintain that the current distrust in science and medicine displayed by many Americans can be traced through twenty-first century popular culture texts, especially those dealing with monsters. As other scholars have noted, during stressful socio-cultural, historical, and (now) global moments, monsters tend to “(re)emerge” in popular narratives (Kellner, 2011), becoming an embodiment of the unease that these moments elicit (Levina, 2013). In the twenty-first century world, the many incarnations of monsters and new narratives supporting them have become a “safe space” for society to give life to its anxieties, especially those concerning science and medicine, in a way that helps a mass population manage constant crises. We use The Walking Dead universe to address these claims.","journal":"Culture Studies &#x2194 Critical Methodologies","year":2025,"id":586288,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9462,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1500826,"name":"Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1500299,"name":"Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo","orcid":"0000-0002-5097-0684","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":10,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:59:28.666390Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}