Undead Spaces: Fear, Globalisation, and the Popular Geopolitics of Zombiism

Zombies in the classroom: a horrific attempt to engage students in critically thinking about Turkey's undead application to join the European Union

“…This finding that students could critically think about their personal experience in the role-playing exercise and make the connection on their own to jump scales to apply the concepts of positionality and othering to their understanding of the international aspects of the Turkey readings relates to arguments in the literature: zombie narratives can draw attention to the problems and interrelations of othering across spatial scales from the localized policing of different bodies in an urban setting, to the geopolitics of contested international spaces (May, 2010;Saunders, 2012).…”

“…From their introduction into North American popular culture through movies in the 1930s, when zombies signified the threat of the colonized or decolonizing other, and the only response was to destroy them, zombie narratives have mutated to open up critiques of othering and exclusion (Canavan, 2010;May, 2010). Typically, zombies are depicted as dangerous for their border-crossing tendencies, yet the movie 28 Days Later highlights the dangers of geopolitical insularity to critique British isolationism (Saunders, 2012). As such zombie narratives can illustrate the problems and interrelations of othering, even across scales, from localized policing of different bodies in the city, to the geopolitics of contested ethno-national spaces (May, 2010;Saunders, 2012).…”

“…Typically, zombies are depicted as dangerous for their border-crossing tendencies, yet the movie 28 Days Later highlights the dangers of geopolitical insularity to critique British isolationism (Saunders, 2012). As such zombie narratives can illustrate the problems and interrelations of othering, even across scales, from localized policing of different bodies in the city, to the geopolitics of contested ethno-national spaces (May, 2010;Saunders, 2012).…”

“…Gerlach and Hamilton (2003) argue that the authors they categorize as "social science fiction" writers draw on social theory such as neo-Marxist social theory and feminist theory to address class struggle, the construction of gender, and racial oppression. Zombies in recent decades have become figures in dystopian social science fiction (Canavan, 2010;Saunders, 2012). As such, zombie narratives can be considered as social science fiction, and, as imagined future worlds, be used to critique current socio-spatial responses to globalization, radical otherness, and racialized exclusion (Canavan, 2010;May, 2010).…”

Critical Geopolitics and the Framing of the Arab Spring Through Late‐Night Humor*

“…This research is positioned in the tradition of critical geopolitics and its emphasis on interpretative textual analysis of specific discourses (O'Tuathail and Agnew, 1992;Mamadouh and Dijkink, 2006;Struver, 2007). Whereas much of this work deconstructed the textual output of geopolitical elites, recent scholarship has focused on what is termed popular geopolitics, the reproduction of geopolitical viewpoints through artifacts of popular culture including news magazines (Sharp, 2000), film and audiences (Dodds, 2006;Dittmer andDodds, 2008, 2013), standup comedians (Purcell, Brown, and Gokmen, 2010), and even zombies (Saunders, 2012). This body of work shares some congruence with international relations approaches to popular culture (Weldes, 1999;Rowley, 2007;Dyson, 2015;Caso and Hamilton, 2015).…”