Zombies in the Academy
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Zombies in the Academy 07149_FM_pi-viii.indd i 1/25/13 12:59:54 PM 07149_FM_pi-viii.indd ii 1/25/13 12:59:54 PM Zombies in the Academy Living Death in Higher Education Andrew Whelan, Ruth Walker and Christopher Moore intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA 07149_FM_pi-viii.indd iii 1/25/13 12:59:54 PM 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 Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK 07149_FM_pi-viii.indd iv 1/25/13 12:59:54 PM Table of Contents Introduction 1 Section 1: Zombifi cation in the corporate university 9 First as tragedy, then as corpse 11 Andrew Whelan ‘Being’ post-death at Zombie University 27 Rowena Harper University life, zombie states and reanimation 39 Rowan Wilken and Christian McCrea The living dead and the dead living: contagion and complicity in contemporary universities 53 Holly Randell-Moon, Sue Saltmarsh and Wendy Sutherland-Smith Zombie solidarity 67 Ann Deslandes and Kristian Adamson The Journal of Doctor Wallace 79 David Slattery Section 2: Moribund content and infectious technologies 89 Zombie processes and undead technologies 91 Christopher Moore The botnet: webs of hegemony/zombies who publish 105 Martin Paul Eve 07149_FM_pi-viii.indd v 1/25/13 12:59:54 PM The intranet of the living dead: software and universities 119 Jonathan Marshall Virtual learning environments and the zombifi cation of learning and teaching in British universities 137 Nick Pearce and Elaine Tan Mapping zombies: a guide for digital pre-apocalyptic analysis and post-apocalyptic survival 147 Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton and Matthew Zook Infectious textbooks 157 Gordon S. Carlson and James J. Sosnoski Section 3: Zombie literacies and pedagogies 173 Undead universities, the plagiarism ‘plague’, paranoia and hypercitation 175 Ruth Walker EAP programmes feeding the living dead of academia: critical thinking as a global antibody 189 Sara Felix Zombies in the classroom: education as consumption in two novels by Joyce Carol Oates 203 Sherry R. Truffi n Queer pedagogies in zombie times: parody, neo-liberalism and higher education 217 Daniel Marshall Zombies are us: the living dead as a tool for pedagogical refl ection 231 Shaun Kimber Escaping the zombie threat by mathematics 243 Hans Petter Langtangen, Kent-Andre Mardal and Pål Røtnes Toward a zombie pedagogy: embodied teaching and the student 2.0 265 Jesse Stommel vi 07149_FM_pi-viii.indd vi 1/25/13 12:59:54 PM Section 4: The post-apocalyptic terrain 277 ‘Sois mort et tais toi’: zombie mobs and student protests 279 Sarah Juliet Lauro Living-dead man’s shoes? Teaching and researching glossy topics in a harsh social and cultural context 297 David Beer Feverish homeless cannibal 309 George Pfau A report on the global Viral Z outbreak and its impact on higher education 321 Howard M. Gregory II and Annie Jeff rey Bibliography 333 List of contributors 367 Index 379 vii 07149_FM_pi-viii.indd vii 1/25/13 12:59:55 PM 07149_FM_pi-viii.indd viii 1/25/13 12:59:55 PM Introduction Andrew Whelan, Christopher Moore and Ruth Walker 07149_Intro_p001-008.indd 1 1/25/13 7:50:58 AM 07149_Intro_p001-008.indd 2 1/25/13 7:50:59 AM his collection brings together scholars and writers from around the world to confront the ‘living death’ of higher education. Th e contributors break out of their fortifi ed Toffi ces 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 fi re axes, but with a radical metaphor and a critical eye. Alternately, they come shuffl ing and decrepit towards you out of the shadows, with lifeless expressions, blank hunger and the stench of death surrounding them. Th e fi gure 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. Th e chapters that follow, then, test the various ways in which universities and their populations, systems, customs, processes and pressures can be understood as undead. Th ey 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 fi eld sometimes referred to as ‘critical university studies’, which investigates and critiques the massifi ed 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; Newfi eld 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 fi scal 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 07149_Intro_p001-008.indd 3 1/25/13 7:50:59 AM Zombies in the Academy operating like private businesses, accompanied by the emergence of higher education as a signifi cant 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) Th is 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). Th e 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 fi ve years (Rea 2011). Th e casualization of part-time and fi xed-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 fi xed-term employment to reduce operating costs (Santiago et al. 2008: 153). Research is increasingly commercialized, bureaucratized and rendered obvious and ‘auditable’ in the fi ercely competitive processes of securing grants. Th ese structurally driven discrepancies are corrosive of academic productivity and intellectual freedom, and thus of the core business of the institution (Boden and Epstein 2011). Th ey involve managerial strategies of ‘asset sweating’, and as such have deleterious aff ective 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 fi nd 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 offi ce 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 fi elds 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. Th ese are some of the sorts of contexts through which higher education institutions are articulated. Th e 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. 4 07149_Intro_p001-008.indd 4 1/25/13 7:50:59 AM Introduction 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).