Zombies and Geography: Redux

We started thinking about zombies again recently (OK, we never really stopped) when a Kickstarter project by David Hunter proposed to introduce zombie based learning (ZBL) into middle school Geography curriculum.  At first David seemed just like our kind of guy, after all he says "I love geography, and I love zombies".  Cool.

However, we did take issue with his assertion that "I’ve chosen to combine geography and zombies because I don’t think it is a natural connection."  We, sir, beg to differ. To us, the connection seems very obvious and very natural.  After all, knowing where the zombies are is really the most fundamental question we should be asking.

OK, fake outrage aside, we wanted to throw our support behind this project (and perhaps drive some donors to it) but before we got around to finishing this post, the ZBL project was fully funded. So if money was no longer an issue (Ha! After this is a public school teacher) we thought we'd offer up some instructional material for the ZBL project.

As you are now figuring out, this is really a long way of revisiting our obsession research interest in zombies and geography.  We realized that we had failed in our mission to educate if someone like David could still think that there was an ontological distinction between geography and zombies. Clearly we had to better articulate the epistemological framework by which we select the construct and actants through which Geography is studied [1].

So, without further ado we offer up, all our zombie posts (including the serialized paper titled "Mapping Zombies: A Guide for Digital Pre-apocalyptic Analysis and Post-apocalyptic Survival") for your reading pleasure…..enjoy…

• Braainss...Maapss....Braainss....Zommbiess

Mapping Zombies: A Guide for Digital Pre-apocalyptic Analysis and Post-apocalyptic Survival

by Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton and Matthew Zook

• Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, Part I: Zombies or Old People?
• Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, Part II: Brains or Salads?
• Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, Part III: Zombies in the Academy
• Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, Part IV: Zombies in the City
• Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, Part V: Artifacts of Zombie Elimination
• Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, Part VI: Mapping the Living Dead
• Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, Part VII: Vampires and Finance
• Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, Part VIII: Voodoo

Festive Holiday Zombie Maps

• Santa vs. The League of Darkness (Zombies allied with Satan!)
• A few final holiday maps (that is if you consider zombies festive)

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[1] Since David teaches Geography in middle school he can use terminology like zombie based learning (ZBL) but because we're at the university we're required to talk about stuff like ontology, epistemology and actants.  But it comes out as basically the same thing in the end.  Plus....."Look OUT! there's a zombie behind you!" [2]
[2] Always a good way to get out a difficult argument, especially if you aren't making much sense.