Abstract
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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.