Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education edited by Andrew Whelan, Ruth Walker and Christopher Moore has just been published by Intellect. Here is the publishers page. And the paperback is available at a reasonable price from the usual outlets. It’s a really substantial book that uses the zombie metaphor to think through issues in higher education. I’ve got a short chapter in here that focuses on the challenges of teaching and researching ‘glossy topics’ in the context of instrumentalism, marketisation, metrics and measurement. Here is the description of the book taken from the publishers web page:
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.
I can’t help thinking that the zombies metaphor is a tad over-used …
You are probably right Deborah. My chapter doesn’t talk much about zombies, it is more about the attack on ‘glossy topics’. I think this is the usual problem though about the speed at which publishing moves. This probably seemed very fresh at the time of its conception. My chapter was written about 2 and a half years ago. Its one of the things that has always put me off editing a book, here’s a brief post on it https://thinkingculture.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/the-fear-of-editing/