Photo by flickr user Robby Mueller
Zombie Pedagogies
Embodied Learning in the Digital Age

Jesse Stommel
@Jessifer

Photo by Zsolt Halasi
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bit.ly/digitalhuman

“I’m utterly squeamish when it comes to watching or reading horror. I scream
frequently, and not in a light, non-committal way; my screams are loud and guttural,
emanating from the pit of my stomach and rattling in my lungs, windpipe, throat, and
mouth. I often find myself unintentionally clutching the person next to me, and, in a
few rare cases, I've even begged out loud to be taken home.”!!
~ Jesse Stommel,“Something That Festers”

Photo by flickr user SebastianDooris
Monsters are not metaphors

Photo by flickr user kevin dooley
“The monster’s body is a cultural body … [Monsters] can be pushed to the
farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the
world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return…”!!
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen,“Monster Culture (Seven Theses),”

The zombie body is lively, in many ways more lively than our own. The zombie
offers something we can’t get from representations, avatars, and emoticons.

Whether living or dead, all human bodies undergo decay. Our hair decays, our skin
decays, the teeth in our mouth decay.The process of decay is, in fact, necessary for
the breakdown and eventual replacement of dead matter with new life.

90% of the living cells in our body are not human.They’re bacteria and critters like
this one, the follicle mite, which lives in the eyebrows and eyelashes of most adults.

Photo by flickr user Bistrosavage
Many of our technologies live upon us like these parasites.

Photo by flickr user kevin dooley
“The physical universe is not all that decays. So do abstractions and categories.
Human ideas, science, scholarship, and language are constantly collapsing and
unfolding.Any field, and the corpus of all fields is a bundle of relationships subject to
all kinds of twists, inversions, involutions, and rearrangement.”!!
~ Ted Nelson,“A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate”

Photo by flickr userYogendra174
For many teachers, the increasing disembodiment of us and our students
leads to a pedagogy that is even more fundamentally disembodied.

“Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the
apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the
physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and
appliances with which they are dealing.”!
John Dewey, Schools ofTo-Morrow
Photo by flickr user Thomas Hawk

We need to handle our technologies roughly -- to think critically about
our tools, how we use them, and who has access to them.

Photo by flickr user Nomadic Lass
Even our digital work is embodied.When we interact via computers, our
feet are usually still quite literally on the ground.

all learning is necessarily hybrid!
Hybrid Pedagogy is an open-access journal that!
: is not ideologically neutral;
: connects discussions of critical pedagogy, digital pedagogy, and online pedagogy;
: brings higher education and K-12 teachers into conversation with the e-learning and
open education communities;
: considers our personal and professional hybridity;
: disrupts distinctions between students, teachers, and learners;
: explores the relationship between pedagogy and scholarship;
: invites its audience to participate in (and be an integral part of) the peer review process;
: and thus interrogates (and makes transparent) academic publishing practices.!

Hybrid pedagogy does not just describe an easy mixing of on-ground
and online learning, but is about bringing the sorts of learning that
happen in a physical place and the sorts of learning that happen in a
virtual place into a more engaged and dynamic conversation.
Photo by flickr user orangeacid

Photo by Praline3001
“A class is … an independent organism with its own goal and dynamics. It is always
something more than what even the most imaginative lesson plan can predict.”!!
~ Thomas P. Kasulis,“Questioning”

“Learning happens at the breaking point of its various containers.The semester
is arbitrary.The course is breached. Canons must yield.”!!
~ Jesse Stommel,“The Digital Humanities is about Breaking Stuff”
Photo by flickr user crdotx

Photo by EmreAyar
“What is broken and twisted is also beautiful, and a bearer of knowledge.The
Deformed Humanities is an origami crane — a piece of paper contorted into
an object of startling insight and beauty.”!!
~ Mark Sample,“Notes towards a Deformed Humanities”

Photo by flickr user Dirigentens
“It doesn’t matter to me if my classroom is a little rectangle in a
building or a little rectangle above my keyboard. Doors are
rectangles; rectangles are portals.We walk through.”!
~ Kathi Inman Berens,“The New Learning is Ancient”
“A course today is an act of composition.”!
~ Sean Michael Morris,“Courses, Composition, Hybridity”!

“Everybody is an intellectual in that we all have the capacity to think,
produce ideas, be self-critical . . . [This] demands a new kind kind of literacy
and critical understanding with respect to the emergence of the new
media and electronic technologies, and the new and powerful role they
play as instruments of public pedagogy.”!!
~ Henry Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy
Photo by flickr user seier+seier

into a mountainrange;lenses extend!
!
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish!
returns on its unself.!
!
! ! ! A world of made!
is not a world of born—pity poor flesh!
!
and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this!
fine specimen of hypermagical!
!
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know!
!
~ e e cummings,“pity this busy monster, manunkind"

Photo by flickr user RLHyde
Our bodies and flesh have become materials, food for the industrial and
social machines.The work of education, and especially of the digital
humanities, is to explore the ways in which that flesh fights back.

i
Additional Material
Presentation based on my chapter,“Toward a Zombie Pedagogy” in
Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education!
!
Jesse Stommel, !
“March of the MOOCs: Monstrous Open Online Courses”!
!
Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel, !
“TwitterVs. Zombies: New Media Literacy & theVirtual Flash Mob"!
!
Jesse Stommel,“The Digital Humanities is about Breaking Stuff”!
!
Jesse Stommel,“The Decay of the Digital Human”!
!
Mark Sample,“Notes towards a Deformed Humanities”!
!
Sean Michael Morris,“Courses, Composition, Hybridity”!
!
Kathi Inman Berens,“The New Learning is Ancient”
@Jessifer

The Humanities Just Won’t Stay Dead

Photo by flickr user Richard Elzey
ThankYou!