May 16, 2012

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…
Mapping Zombies: A Guide for Digital Pre-apocalyptic Analysis and Post-apocalyptic Survival
by Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton and Matthew Zook
Festive Holiday Zombie Maps
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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.

2 comments:

  1. For Zombie Geography, see also http://www.mapofthedead.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. thanks for this article, btw I hate Zombie - Klikdana

    ReplyDelete

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