Zombies in the Academy

Moore Christopher, Ruth Walker, Andrew Whelan

Description

Zombies in the Academy taps into the current popular fascination with zombies and brings together scholars from a range of fields, including cultural and communications 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 a vulnerable 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 labour practices.

Introduction 

Section 1: Zombification in the corporate university 

First as tragedy, then as corpse – Andrew Whelan

‘Being’ post-death at Zombie University – Rowena Harper

University life, zombie states and reanimation – Rowan Wilken and Christian McCrea

The living dead and the dead living: contagion and complicity in contemporary universities – Holly Randell-Moon, Sue Saltmarsh and Wendy Sutherland-Smith

Zombie solidarity – Ann Deslandes and Kristian Adamson

The Journal of Doctor Wallace – David Slattery

Section 2: Moribund content and infectious technologies 

Zombie processes and undead technologies – Christopher Moore

The botnet: webs of hegemony/zombies who publish – Martin Paul Eve

The intranet of the living dead: software and universities – Jonathan Paul Marshall

Virtual learning environments and the zombification of learning and teaching in British universities – Nick Pearce and Elaine Tan

Mapping zombies: a guide for digital pre-apocalyptic analysis and post-apocalyptic survival – Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton and Matthew Zook

Infectious textbooks – Gordon S. Carlson and James J. Sosnoski

Section 3: Zombie literacies and pedagogies 

Undead universities, the plagiarism ‘plague’, paranoia and hypercitation – Ruth Walker

EAP programmes feeding the living dead of academia: critical thinking as a global antibody – Sara Felix

Zombies in the classroom: education as consumption in two novels by Joyce Carol Oates – Sherry R. Truffin

Queer pedagogies in zombie times: parody, neo-liberalism and higher education – Daniel Marshall

Zombies are us: the living dead as a tool for pedagogical reflection – Shaun Kimber

Escaping the zombie threat by mathematics – Hans Petter Langtangen, Kent-Andre Mardal and Pål Røtnes

Toward a zombie pedagogy: embodied teaching and the student 2.0 – Jesse Stommel

Section 4: The post-apocalyptic terrain 

‘Sois mort et tais toi’: zombie mobs and student protests – Sarah Juliet Lauro

Living-dead man’s shoes? Teaching and researching glossy topics in a harsh social and cultural context – David Beer

Feverish homeless cannibal – George Pfau

A report on the global Viral Z outbreak and its impact on higher education – Howard M. Gregory II and Annie Jeffrey

Sujets

• Technology Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Science
• Technology and Culture
• Higher education
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 06 janvier 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783200764
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Cover designer: Ellen Thomas
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik
Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN: 978-1-84150-714-9
eISBN: 978-1-78320-076-4
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents
Introduction
Section 1: Zombification in the corporate university
First as tragedy, then as corpse
Andrew Whelan
‘Being’ post-death at Zombie University
Rowena Harper
University life, zombie states and reanimation
Rowan Wilken and Christian McCrea
The living dead and the dead living: contagion and complicity in contemporary universities
Holly Randell-Moon, Sue Saltmarsh and Wendy Sutherland-Smith
Zombie solidarity
Ann Deslandes and Kristian Adamson
The Journal of Doctor Wallace
David Slattery
Section 2: Moribund content and infectious technologies
Zombie processes and undead technologies
Christopher Moore
The botnet: webs of hegemony/zombies who publish
Martin Paul Eve
The intranet of the living dead: software and universities
Jonathan Paul Marshall
Virtual learning environments and the zombification of learning and teaching in British universities
Nick Pearce and Elaine Tan
Mapping zombies: a guide for digital pre-apocalyptic analysis and post-apocalyptic survival
Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton and Matthew Zook
Infectious textbooks
Gordon S. Carlson and James J. Sosnoski
Section 3: Zombie literacies and pedagogies
Undead universities, the plagiarism ‘plague’, paranoia and hypercitation
Ruth Walker
EAP programmes feeding the living dead of academia: critical thinking as a global antibody
Sara Felix
Zombies in the classroom: education as consumption in two novels by Joyce Carol Oates
Sherry R. Truffin
Queer pedagogies in zombie times: parody, neo-liberalism and higher education
Daniel Marshall
Zombies are us: the living dead as a tool for pedagogical reflection
Shaun Kimber
Escaping the zombie threat by mathematics
Hans Petter Langtangen, Kent-Andre Mardal and Pål Røtnes
Toward a zombie pedagogy: embodied teaching and the student 2.
Jesse Stommel
Section 4: The post-apocalyptic terrain
‘Sois mort et tais toi’: zombie mobs and student protests
Sarah Juliet Lauro
Living-dead man’s shoes? Teaching and researching glossy topics in a harsh social and cultural context
David Beer
Feverish homeless cannibal
George Pfau
A report on the global Viral Z outbreak and its impact on higher education
Howard M. Gregory II and Annie Jeffrey
Bibliography
List of contributors
Index
Introduction
Andrew Whelan, Ruth Walker and Christopher Moore
This collection brings together scholars and writers from around the world to confront the ‘living death’ of higher education. The contributors break out of their fortified offices and bunkered lecture halls, and claw their way free of burial mounds of student marking, grant applications and committee minutes, equipped not with shotguns and fire axes, but with a radical metaphor and a critical eye. Alternately, they come shuffling and decrepit towards you out of the shadows, with lifeless expressions, blank hunger and the stench of death surrounding them.
The figure of the zombie here provides an opportunity to express unease and dissent about the state of higher education. Working from a range of disciplines, together we refuse to helplessly succumb, choosing instead to diagnose, rally resistance, produce inoculation and contemplate an antidote. Some voices within this volume speculate that perhaps the zombie apocalypse has already happened in the academy, and that recognizing this might provide us with the best means of understanding and dealing with the conditions under which those who live, work and study in universities operate.
The chapters that follow, then, test the various ways in which universities and their populations, systems, customs, processes and pressures can be understood as undead. They do so with the aim of reanimating – or at least ‘undeadening’ – the current debates about the future of the sector. As such, the volume is intended as a contribution to the emerging field sometimes referred to as ‘critical university studies’, which investigates and critiques the massified education system and advocates on behalf of the progressive values and ideals that universities claim to embody (for example, Collini 2012; Donoghue 2008; Evans 2004; Giroux 2011; Newfield 2008; Nussbaum 2010; Readings 1996; Slaughter and Leslie 1997). Cris Shore describes the contemporary scene as follows:
What we have witnessed here is the transformation of the traditional liberal and Enlightenment idea of the university as a place of higher learning into the modern idea of the university as corporate enterprise whose primary concern is with market share, servicing the needs of commerce, maximizing economic return and investment, and gaining competitive advantage in the ‘Global Knowledge Economy’. Several factors are driving this process: the cost-cutting fiscal regime of ‘economic rationalism’ in which government funding for universities has been steadily eroded; the move from ‘elite’ to ‘mass’ university education, which has brought many more students with no comparable increase in permanent staff numbers; and the trend towards universities increasingly operating like private businesses, accompanied by the emergence of higher education as a significant export industry. Audits, performance indicators, competitive benchmarking exercises, league tables, management by targets, and punitive research assessment exercises and periodic teaching quality reviews are the technologies that have been used to spread new public management methods into the governance of universities – and all at a time when overall government funding for universities and per student has declined.
(2008: 282)
This reconstitution of the higher education sector has led to increasingly untenable discrepancies between what universities espouse as their stated aims, and how they actually work (or do not work).
The academic labour force is already precarious. In Australia, for example, nearly half of all tertiary teaching is provided by sessional or short-term contracted staff (Blackwell 2012). Half of the current Australian academic workforce is reported to be hoping to leave or retire within the next five years (Rea 2011). The casualization of part-time and fixed-term contractual academics, ‘growing at the periphery of the professional core’, can also be taken as evidence of the ‘deprofessionalization and proletarization’ of higher education across all European countries (Enders 2000: 31). According to the OECD, the Asian university sector too has turned to greater levels of casual and fixed-term employment to reduce operating costs (Santiago et al. 2008: 153). Research is increasingly commercialized, bureaucratized and rendered obvious and ‘auditable’ in the fiercely competitive processes of securing grants. These structurally driven discrepancies are corrosive of academic productivity and intellectual freedom, and thus of the core business of the institution (Boden and Epstein 2011). They involve managerial strategies of ‘asset sweating’, and as such have deleterious affective consequences for those living through them (Burrows 2012; Sievers 2008).
As soon as we look closely at the university (and particularly its gargantuan scale ), we find almost immediately that we are looking also at a host of other phenomena at the porous boundaries of the institution: ubiquitous technology and the digitization of print cultures; the labour market and the extent to which universities are (or should be) designed to service it; the expansive bloat of immaterial labour as it grows beyond office time in an always-on culture; student debt and youth unemployment; international migration; social mobility, social closure, and the perpetuation of privilege; the contexts of knowledge production and transfer and the fields of its legitimation; the paywalls of academic publishing for publicly funded research; the nature and commitments of the public sector; new public management and the neo-liberal state; the colonizing ascendance of market fundamentalism (for instance, branding exercises that wilfully evacuate the ethics and ideals of academic culture), and so on. These are some of the sorts of contexts through which higher education institutions are articulated. The overall implication is that the university, despite the nostalgic image of an elitist, inviolate ivory tower, has become a central location in contemporary societies for testing out the relations between the public, the market, and the state, and as such a kind of laboratory of the social.
Ulrich Beck famously referred to ‘zombie categories’, which continue to circulate despite being emptied of meaning in contemporary social and political contexts (Beck 2002: 47; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 203). These are not yet abandoned husks of institutional categories, or ways of thinking, that continue to be used despite their increasing irrelevance, and as such can come to distort not only how things are conceptualized or imagined, but also how things are done. The ‘ivory tower’ model of the university, along with most of the other traditional archetypes of the institution, is just such a category: an undead, lingering ghoul. Given the changes that have radically reconstituted the sector over the last 30 years, these traditi