By relying on literary studies, this article distinguishes science fiction from fantasy: the former representing what has not happened, and the latter representing what could not have happened or what cannot happen. By intention, science fiction never truly severs itself from our experiential world, straddling this limbo of the not-possible and not-impossible, which I demonstrate using the fictional world of The Expanse—the shorthand for the fictional universe created by authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck that subsequently became a six-season TV series. In turn, I argue that despite the creeping trend in IR of examining popular culture and politics in co-constitutive ways, there is still much to be gained from utilizing popular culture for pedagogy. In order to effectively do so, we need to be more specific and explicit about what learning objectives popular culture might achieve in the classroom, such as analogical reasoning and even metacognition.

This article is about femisocial capital: a type of gendered political capital tended towards facilitating greater intra-female collaboration. Unlike its similar conceptual counterpart of homosocial capital that typically reinforces male dominance in politics, femisocial capital, at least within the scope of legislative activity, highlights a positive function of gender and politics. By examining the bill sponsorship networks of multi-term female legislators in South Korea, this article finds that the institutional legacy of the progressive party in South Korea and its female lawmakers sharing associational membership in feminist organizations (hence, the prefix ‘femi’), enables such gendered political capital to function in their favor. In contrast to research agendas that seek to find gender working in explicit ways (i.e., whether more women in office leads to greater empowerment for women in politics), this article shows that while gender does matter, it may matter in much more discreet and less obvious ways.