"Live Long and Prosper": 60 Years of Star Trek in Popular Culture
deadline for submissions:
September 10, 2026
full name / name of organization:
The Popular Culture Research Network, University of New England, Australia
contact email:
jo.coghlan@une.edu.ausource:
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/06/13/live-long-and-prosper-60-years-of-star-trek-in-popular-culture Call for Conference Papers
"Live Long and Prosper": 60 Years of Star Trek in Popular Culture - 10-11 September 2026
Free and Online
The Popular Culture Research Network, Australia
In September 1966, the first episode of Star Trek aired on American television, introducing audiences to a future shaped by exploration, diplomacy, scientific discovery, and the possibility of social progress beyond the limitations of the present.
Created by Gene Roddenberry during the cultural and political turbulence of the Cold War era, Star Trek emerged at a moment defined by civil rights struggles, decolonisation, nuclear anxiety, the space race, and rapid technological transformation. From its earliest years, the franchise articulated an ambitious vision of humanity organised around diplomacy, scientific cooperation, multiculturalism, and collective progress. Yet Star Trek has also long contained tensions and contradictions of its own, including militarisation, liberal humanism, expansionism, technological paternalism, and the limits of utopian politics
Over six decades, Star Trek has become central not only to science fiction history, but to the development of modern television itself. The franchise helped shape syndication culture, fan conventions, transmedia storytelling, blockbuster franchising, streaming-era television, and participatory fandom. It has inspired generations of scientists, engineers, activists, educators, and audiences, while influencing popular conceptions of artificial intelligence, space exploration, communication technologies, automation, ecology, and posthuman futures.
Since Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek universe has expanded to include nine live action series, three animated series, an anthology miniseries, a telemovie, ten prime-universe feature films, and three ‘rebooted’ movies set in an alternative timeline. Through an interplay of prequels, sequels, and all manner of spin-offs, Star Trek has continually re-invented itself in response to changing political, industrial, and technological conditions. Contemporary Star Trek continues to engage with questions surrounding authoritarianism, climate crisis, refugee politics, surveillance, platform capitalism, artificial intelligence governance, political extremism, and ecological collapse, demonstrating the franchise’s enduring relevance within twenty-first-century popular culture.
Sixty years later, Star Trek remains one of the most influential and enduring franchises in global popular culture. Across television, film, animation, novels, comics, games, conventions, merchandising, tourism, podcasts, streaming platforms, and digital fandoms, the franchise has continually evolved while shaping cultural understandings of race, gender, technology, politics, labour, ecology, empire, and ethics. It has done so through imaginings of primarily utopian futures grounded in examinations of the contemporary social dynamics that threaten to prevent such states of flourishing.
In the decades since audiences first heard the words “Space: the final frontier,” Star Trek remains a vital cultural framework through which societies imagine both the possibilities and contradictions of human progress. As Star Trek enters its seventh decade, this project seeks to explore how the franchise continues to shape cultural understandings of humanity, technology, justice, community, labour, ecology, and our future in space.
This conference invites scholars to examine the cultural, political, industrial, philosophical, technological, and aesthetic significance of Star Trek across its sixty-year history. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from media studies, cultural studies, sociology, political science, history, science and technology studies, literary studies, fan studies, philosophy, queer studies, Indigenous studies, disability studies, gender studies, environmental humanities, posthumanism, critical race studies, and related fields.
We particularly encourage submissions engaging with intersectional, global, decolonial, and underexplored perspectives on the franchise and its cultural impact.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Utopianism, dystopianism, heterotopias, and political imagination in Star Trek
• Race, colonialism, frontier ideology, and the Federation
• Indigenous futurisms and decolonial critiques of exploration narratives
• Gender, sexuality, intimacy, and queer futurities
• Representation, exceptionalism, sentience, and recognition
• Dis/ability, neurodivergence, and embodiment
• The limits and frontiers to humanism(s) and posthumanism(s) in Star Trek
• Conlangs, comparative xenoanthropology, and universe building
• Artificial intelligence, androids, holograms, and synthetic life
• Portrayals of the human condition through process, protocol, and organisational dynamics in Star Trek
• The Federation’s ideals in theory and in practice
• Ecology, planetary crisis, extraction, and environmental futures
• Labour, capitalism, automation, and post-scarcity societies
• Platform capitalism, streaming economies, and franchise management
• Cetacean ops, the Captain’s Yacht, and other (mostly) off-screen ‘characters’
• Examining war, militarism, fascism, diplomacy, and surveillance cultures
• Refugee politics, migration, borders, and interspecies relations
• Tribbles
• Klingons, Vulcans, Borg, Romulans, Cardassians, and constructions of alterity
• Scientific, ethical, medical, and technological imagination
• Religion, spirituality, mythology, secularism, and philosophy
• Fashion, costume, prosthetics, design, and material culture
• Foodways, hospitality, consumption, and everyday life in the Star Trek universe
• Architecture, infrastructure, and speculative urbanism
• Music, sound, language, and sonic worldbuilding
• Seriality, episodic storytelling, and television form
• Opening title sequences, visual effects history, and audiovisual aesthetics
• The Okudas, iconography, and Star Trek aesthetics
• Fan cultures, digital fandom, fan fiction, and cosplay
• Spot
• Convention cultures, tourism, and exhibitions
• Fan labour, material fandom, and participatory media
• Global receptions, Cold War politics, and transnational fandoms
• Star Trek and American identity, diplomacy, and soft power
• Memory, nostalgia, heritage, archives, and franchise longevity
• Merchandising, branding, licensing, and corporate franchising
• The cultural legacy of performers such as William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Kate Mulgrew, and others
• Star Trek and contemporary politics, crisis, and social transformation
