Download or read book Zombie University written by Sinead Murphy and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this full-blooded attack on the institutions of higher education, Sinéad Murphy shows the neoliberal university for what it really is: a zombie institution, churning out generations of the thinking dead. What if we have lost the ability to think straight? And what if this is why the shocking injustices of contemporary life go unchallenged in spite of being widely acknowledged? And what if the institution that is supposed to help us to think is in on the act? This is the thesis put forward by Zombie University, which shows the modern university as the fulcrum of our societies’ mode of control, tempting more and more young people to rituals of education that work to keep us down rather than raise us up.
Download or read book The Toxic University written by John Smyth and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the detrimental changes that have occurred to the institution of the university, as a result of the withdrawal of state funding and the imposition of neoliberal market reforms on higher education. It argues that universities have lost their way, and are currently drowning in an impenetrable mush of economic babble, spurious spin-offs of zombie economics, management-speak and militaristic-corporate jargon. John Smyth provides a trenchant and excoriating analysis of how universities have enveloped themselves in synthetic and meaningless marketing hype, and explains what this has done to academic work and the culture of universities – specifically, how it has degraded higher education and exacerbated social inequalities among both staff and students. Finally, the book explores how we might commence a reclamation. It should be essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of education and sociology, and anyone interested in the current state of university management.
Download or read book The Transatlantic Zombie written by Sarah J. Lauro and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our most modern monster and perhaps our most American, the zombie that is so prevalent in popular culture today has its roots in African soul capture mythologies. The Transatlantic Zombie provides a more complete history of the zombie than has ever been told, explaining how the myth’s migration to the New World was facilitated by the transatlantic slave trade, and reveals the real-world import of storytelling, reminding us of the power of myths and mythmaking, and the high stakes of appropriation and homage. Beginning with an account of a probable ancestor of the zombie found in the Kongolese and Angolan regions of seventeenth-century Africa and ending with a description of the way, in contemporary culture, new media are used to facilitate zombie-themed events, Sarah Juliet Lauro plots the zombie’s cultural significance through Caribbean literature, Haitian folklore, and American literature, film, and the visual arts. The zombie entered US consciousness through the American occupation of Haiti, the site of an eighteenth-century slave rebellion that became a war for independence, thus making the figuration of living death inseparable from its resonances with both slavery and rebellion. Lauro bridges African mythology and US mainstream culture by articulating the ethical complications of the zombie as a cultural conquest that was rebranded for the American cinema. As The Transatlantic Zombie shows, the zombie is not merely a bogeyman representing the ills of modern society, but a battleground over which a cultural war has been fought between the imperial urge to absorb exotic, threatening elements, and the originary, Afro-diasporic culture’s preservation through a strategy of mythic combat.
Download or read book Zombie Economics written by John Quiggin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-06 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land. The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism—the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, their advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe. The crisis seemed to have killed off these ideas, but they still live on in the minds of many—members of the public, commentators, politicians, economists, and even those charged with cleaning up the mess. In Zombie Economics, John Quiggin explains how these dead ideas still walk among us—and why we must find a way to kill them once and for all if we are to avoid an even bigger financial crisis in the future. Zombie Economics takes the reader through the origins, consequences, and implosion of a system of ideas whose time has come and gone. These beliefs—that deregulation had conquered the financial cycle, that markets were always the best judge of value, that policies designed to benefit the rich made everyone better off—brought us to the brink of disaster once before, and their persistent hold on many threatens to do so again. Because these ideas will never die unless there is an alternative, Zombie Economics also looks ahead at what could replace market liberalism, arguing that a simple return to traditional Keynesian economics and the politics of the welfare state will not be enough—either to kill dead ideas, or prevent future crises. In a new chapter, Quiggin brings the book up to date with a discussion of the re-emergence of pre-Keynesian ideas about austerity and balanced budgets as a response to recession.
Download or read book Zombie Theory written by Sarah Juliet Lauro and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the Philippines. The zombie’s ability to embody a variety of cultural anxieties—ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political extremism—has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship. Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other. Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland Community College; Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David McNally, York U; Tayla Nyong’o, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.
Download or read book Zombie History written by Peter Charles Hoffer and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fake history is not a harmless mistake of fact or interpretation. It is a mistake that conceals prejudice; a mistake that discriminates against certain kinds of people; a mistake held despite a preponderance of evidence; a mistake that harms us. Fake history is like the Zombies we see in mass media, for the fake fact, like the fictional Zombie, lives by turning real events and people into monstrous perversions of fact and interpretation. Its pervasiveness reveals that prejudice remains its chief appeal to those who believe it. Its effect is insidious, because we cannot or will not destroy those mischievous lies. Zombie history is almost impossible to kill. Some Zombie history was and is political, a genre of what Hannah Arendt called “organizational lying” about the past. Its makers designed the Zombie to create a basis in the false past for particular discriminatory policies. Other history Zombies are cultural. They encapsulate and empower prejudice and stereotyping. Still other popular history Zombies do not look disfigured, but like Zombies walk among us without our realizing how devastating their impact can be. Zombie History argues that, whatever their purpose, whatever the venue in which they appear, history Zombies undermine the very foundations of disinterested study of the past.
Download or read book Passage of Darkness written by Wade Davis and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1982, Harvard-trained ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled into the Haitian countryside to research reports of zombies--the infamous living dead of Haitian folklore. A report by a team of physicians of a verifiable case of zombification led him to try to obtain the poison associated with the process and examine it for potential medical use. Interdisciplinary in nature, this study reveals a network of power relations reaching all levels of Haitian political life. It sheds light on recent Haitian political history, including the meteoric rise under Duvalier of the Tonton Macoute. By explaining zombification as a rational process within the context of traditional Vodoun society, Davis demystifies one of the most exploited of folk beliefs, one that has been used to denigrate an entire people and their religion.
Download or read book Theorising the Contemporary Zombie written by Scott Hamilton and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zombies have become an increasingly popular object of research in academic studies and, of course, in popular media. Over the past decade, they have been employed to explain mathematical equations, vortex phenomena in astrophysics, the need for improved laws, issues within higher education, and even the structure of human societies. Despite the surge of interest in the zombie as a critical metaphor, no coherent theoretical framework for studying the zombie actually exists. Addressing this current gap in the literature, Theorising the Contemporary Zombie defines zombiism as a means of theorising and examining various issues of society in any given era by immersing those social issues within the destabilising context of apocalyptic crisis; and applying this definition, the volume considers issues including gender, sexuality, family, literature, health, popular culture and extinction.
Download or read book Zombies and Calculus written by Colin Adams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel that uses calculus to help you survive a zombie apocalypse How can calculus help you survive the zombie apocalypse? Colin Adams, humor columnist for the Mathematical Intelligencer and one of today's most outlandish and entertaining popular math writers, demonstrates how in this zombie adventure novel. Zombies and Calculus is the account of Craig Williams, a math professor at a small liberal arts college in New England, who, in the middle of a calculus class, finds himself suddenly confronted by a late-arriving student whose hunger is not for knowledge. As the zombie virus spreads and civilization crumbles, Williams uses calculus to help his small band of survivors defeat the hordes of the undead. Along the way, readers learn how to avoid being eaten by taking advantage of the fact that zombies always point their tangent vector toward their target, and how to use exponential growth to determine the rate at which the virus is spreading. Williams also covers topics such as logistic growth, gravitational acceleration, predator-prey models, pursuit problems, the physics of combat, and more. With the aid of his story, you too can survive the zombie onslaught. Featuring easy-to-use appendixes that explain the book's mathematics in greater detail, Zombies and Calculus is suitable both for those who have only recently gotten the calculus bug, as well as for those whose disease has advanced to the multivariable stage.
Download or read book Not Your Average Zombie written by Chera Kee and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough analysis of zombies in popular culture from the 1930s to contemporary society. The zombie apocalypse hasn’t happened—yet—but zombies are all over popular culture. From movies and TV shows to video games and zombie walks, the undead stalk through our collective fantasies. What is it about zombies that exerts such a powerful fascination? In Not Your Average Zombie, Chera Kee offers an innovative answer by looking at zombies that don’t conform to the stereotypes of mindless slaves or flesh-eating cannibals. Zombies who think, who speak, and who feel love can be sympathetic and even politically powerful, she asserts. Kee analyzes zombies in popular culture from 1930s depictions of zombies in voodoo rituals to contemporary film and television, comic books, video games, and fan practices such as zombie walks. She discusses how the zombie has embodied our fears of losing the self through slavery and cannibalism and shows how “extra-ordinary” zombies defy that loss of free will by refusing to be dehumanized. By challenging their masters, falling in love, and leading rebellions, “extra-ordinary” zombies become figures of liberation and resistance. Kee also thoroughly investigates how representations of racial and gendered identities in zombie texts offer opportunities for living people to gain agency over their lives. Not Your Average Zombie thus deepens and broadens our understanding of how media producers and consumers take up and use these undead figures to make political interventions in the world of the living. “Kee provides a compelling synthesis of theory and criticism . . . useful for horror scholars interested in how portrayals of zombie intersect with race and gender.” —Popular Culture Studies Journal “Kee’s Not Your Average Zombie is an important book . . . Put simply: if it's the one book you read about or cite on zombie, you've made an excellent choice.” —American Quarterly “[Not Your Average Zombie] offers a fresh theoretical framework to a fast-growing field . . . A fascinating contribution to the critical conversation about the zombie as a fantastic figure.” —Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts “I’m impressed by Kee’s scholarship across several fields—film history and gender and critical race studies, especially—and her cultural and historical contextualizing of the current zombie renaissance.” —James H. Cox, University of Texas at Austin, author of The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico
Download or read book Theories of International Politics and Zombies written by Daniel W. Drezner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How international relations theory can be applied to a zombie invasion What would happen to international politics if the dead rose from the grave and started to eat the living? Daniel Drezner’s groundbreaking book answers the question that other international relations scholars have been too scared to ask. Addressing timely issues with analytical bite, Drezner looks at how well-known theories from international relations might be applied to a war with zombies. Exploring the plots of popular zombie films, songs, and books, Theories of International Politics and Zombies predicts realistic scenarios for the political stage in the face of a zombie threat and considers how valid—or how rotten—such scenarios might be. With worldwide calamity feeling ever closer, this new apocalyptic edition includes updates throughout as well as a new chapter on postcolonial perspectives.
Download or read book Taking Control written by Anthony Barnett and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Last call for humanity? Americans can now secure or destroy the world. From Anthony Barnett, the creator and former editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, comes this blazing response to the confrontation between Trumpism and Biden in America, that sets out how the future of humankind is at stake. On 6 January 2021, Donald Trump tried to seize the US presidency by force. His aim: to consolidate his nativist rule. He was, and still is, supported by tens of millions of Americans. In response, Joe Biden's administration promises a massive economic shift while a decisive contest unfolds over voter suppression. This contest is of epochal importance. As the future of humankind passes through the prism of the most powerful country in the world, Barnett reflects on the stark, limited spectrum of possible outcomes. He shows that the frustration of Trumpism is thanks to the decades long resistance to market fundamentalism. But it remains divided and incoherent. It is time for the left to embrace an open, ecological politics or the world will be subordinated to the regimes of the Iron Men and their successors.
Download or read book Return of a Native written by Vron Ware and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a fixed point in the middle of English nowhere, Vron Ware takes you through time and space to explain why transcending the urban-rural divide is integral to the future of the planet. Rural England is a mythic space, a complex canvas on which people from many different backgrounds project all kinds of fantasies, prejudices, desires and fears. This book seeks to challenge many of these ideas, showing how the artificial divide between rural and urban works to conceal the underlying relationship between these two fundamental poles of human settlement. This investigation of rurality is oriented from a fixed point in north-west Hampshire, marked by a signpost that points in four directions to two towns, four villages and two hamlets. Through stories, interviews and reportage gathered over two decades, the book demolishes tired notions of rural England that cast it as a separate realm of existence, whether marooned in a perpetual time-warp, or reduced to a refuge for the retired, wealthy urbanites, extreme nature-lovers, and, more recently, anyone tired of waiting out the pandemic in towns and cities. It poses two simple questions: what does the word rural mean today? What will it mean tomorrow? The author is an ambivalent native, held captive to the land by an umbilical cord but always on the verge of fleeing home to the city. She writes from a feminist, postcolonial standpoint that is alert to the slow violence of historical processes taking place over many centuries; enslavement, colonialism, industrialisation, globalisation. Both argument and narrative are propelled by the urgent need to reconsider the concept of ‘countryside’ in the context of the climate emergency and the patent collapse of ecosystems due to intensive farming which has poisoned the land.
Download or read book Living with the Living Dead written by Greg Garrett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Living with the Living Dead, Greg Garrett shows that the zombie apocalypse has become an archetypal narrative for the contemporary world, in part because zombies can represent a variety of global threats, from terrorism to Ebola, from economic uncertainty to mental illness. But paradoxically this narrative also offers human beings a chance to find emotional and spiritual comfort; these apocalyptic stories about individuals facing the imminent prospect of grisly death also offer us wisdom about living in community, present us with real-world ethical problems, and invite us into a conversation about what it means to survive.
Download or read book Braaaiiinnnsss written by Robert Smith? and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2011-10-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fight against zombies, our most important weapons are our brains. It's time to unleash them. Think you know a thing or two about zombies? Think again. If you’re going to keep your wits – and your brains – about you during a zombie attack, you need expert advice. Braaaiiinnnsss!: From Academics to Zombies gathers together an irreverent group of scholars and writers to take a serious look at how zombies threaten almost every aspect of our lives. Spawned from the viral publication "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection," this multidisciplinary book draws on a variety of fields including biology, history, law, gender studies, archaeology, library science and landscape architecture. Part homage to zombie films and fiction, part cultural study, this collection humorously explores our deep-seated fear of the undead. Engaging and accessible, Braaaiiinnnnssss! will amuse academics and zombie fans alike. Publié en anglais.
Download or read book Give Me an Answer written by Cliffe Knechtle and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 1986-03-31 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cliffe Knechtle offers clear, reasoned and compassionate responses to the tough questions skeptics ask.
Download or read book Zombies in Western Culture written by John Vervaeke and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.
