Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education
Very excited at the news of the publication of Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education. Ever since the launch of the zombie course at the University of Baltimore there has clearly been plenty of room for further undead related higher education activity. This is though a very serious text with serious intent:
Zombies in the Academy taps into the current popular fascination with zombies and brings together scholars from a range of fields, including cultural and communication studies, sociology, film studies, and education, to give a critical account of the political, cultural, and pedagogical state of the university through the metaphor of zombiedom. The contributions to this volume argue that the increasing corporatization of the academy—an environment emphasizing publication, narrow research, and the vulnerability of the tenure system— is creating a crisis in higher education best understood through the language of zombie culture—the undead, contagion, and plague, among others. Zombies in the Academy presents essays from a variety of scholars and creative writers who present an engaging and entertaining appeal for serious recognition of the conditions of contemporary humanities teaching, culture, and labor practices.
Some of the chapter titles give more information about the thrust of the arguments here:
- ‘Being’ post-death at Zombie University
- University life, zombie states and reanimation
- The living dead and the dead living: contagion and complicity in contemporary universities
- Zombie processes and undead technologies
- Virtual learning environments and the zombification of learning and teaching in British universities
- Mapping zombies: a guide for digital pre-apocalyptic analysis and post-apocalyptic survival
- Undead universities, the plagiarism ‘plague’, paranoia and hypercitation
- EAP programmes feeding the living dead of academia: critical thinking as a global antibody
- Zombies are us: the living dead as a tool for pedagogical reflection
- Escaping the zombie threat by mathematics
- Toward a zombie pedagogy: embodied teaching and the student
- Living-dead man’s shoes? Teaching and researching glossy topics in a harsh social and cultural context
Really looks good and the ideal book for reading on the beach this summer.
