{"id":36568,"date":"2015-04-27T13:50:25","date_gmt":"2015-04-27T17:50:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/?p=36568"},"modified":"2022-09-26T10:04:39","modified_gmt":"2022-09-26T14:04:39","slug":"apocalypse-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/2015\/04\/27\/apocalypse-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Apocalypse now"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Students<\/a>

Zombies & Gender in Pop Culture, a course taught by Wright State lecturer Andrea Harris, examines the social impact of zombie shows.<\/p><\/div>\n

As images of a zombie apocalypse in \u201cThe Walking Dead\u201d unspool on the screen, the students in Andrea Harris\u2019 Wright State University class are furiously taking notes.<\/p>\n

The Zombies & Gender in Pop Culture class is an earnest academic exercise. And the students take it as such, throwing themselves into class discussions that transcend science fiction and explore gender, race, sexual orientation and other issues in today\u2019s society.<\/p>\n

Harris started teaching the class Spring Semester. It filled up instantly, and Harris has been asked to teach it again.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>\u201cWe\u2019re not sitting around eating popcorn and talking zombies; we\u2019re doing serious academic work here,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s gone tremendously well. The students are writing analysis papers. They\u2019re doing really incredible work.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to “The Walking Dead” and \u201cResident Evil,\u201d the class has also studied \u201cNight of the Living Dead,\u201d \u201cDawn of the Dead\u201d and \u201cZombieland.\u201d<\/p>\n

During one class, Harris leads a discussion using a scholarly article that attempts to plumb the depths of the zombie film and television craze. The discussion is spirited:<\/p>\n

Why have zombie films gone from strictly horror to a more science fiction flavor? Do the zombies represent global capitalism and how it is destroying society? What\u2019s the symbolic meaning of the prison in “The Walking Dead?” Is there such a thing as \u201czombie ethics,\u201d when morality is suspended in emergency situations and anything one must do to survive is moral?<\/p>\n

Harris, who obtained her bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in English from Wright State, has a dual appointment, in the Women\u2019s Studies program<\/a> and the Department of English Language and Literatures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She discovered the whole zombies phenomenon a few years ago after her son urged her to watch “Resident Evil,” a 2002 science fiction action-horror film that features a bioengineering pharmaceutical company responsible for a zombie apocalypse. The protagonist, Alice, an enemy of the corporation, is a strong female character.<\/p>\n

\u201cI fell in love with her character,\u201d Harris said. \u201cI said, \u2018Something is going on here. There is something different happening with representations of gender in these types of films.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon after that, “The Walking Dead” came out on television. The horror drama series features sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes, who awakens from a coma to find an apocalyptic world dominated by flesh-eating zombies called walkers.<\/p>\n

Harris was an instant fan.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started paying attention and asked the question like a lot of people are asking: What\u2019s going on with zombies? Why are zombies everywhere? What are they telling us about where we are in society right now, about who we are?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"Andreas<\/a>

Andrea Harris, who has bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in English from Wright State, says the study of pop culture can help us better understand society and other people.<\/p><\/div>\n

Harris believes that global terrorism and global pandemics along with increasing competition for resources, decreasing public trust in societal institutions, new ethical challenges accompanying technological advances and environmental and ecological concerns have contributed to a general feeling of uneasiness regarding the future of humanity. Zombies have come to represent that threat.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as the zombies arrive in films and television, all social order goes out the window,\u201d she said. \u201cSo the institutions that we think will protect us \u2014 whether it\u2019s the military, our government, the social institutions \u2014 those all collapse. The hospitals are gone. The media is gone. The government\u2019s gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

She calls “The Walking Dead” \u201cincredibly well done.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cultural resonance that it has just blows me away,\u201d Harris said. \u201cMore people have tuned into that than NFL football.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most viewers root for the survivors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you talk to people who watch this, they\u2019re thinking \u2018How would I survive? What would I do?\u2019” Harris said. \u201cThey\u2019re putting themselves in the position of the survivors. It\u2019s a way for us to envision that if the center doesn\u2019t hold, am I going to be OK?\u201d<\/p>\n

In her course work, Harris uses audience reception theory, in which audiences participate in the construction of a text’s meaning. The meaning of a given text can change according to the time and place of its reading as well as the social location of the audience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are particularly concerned that when the zombie apocalypse happens and there is no social order, what happens after that?\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re looking at things like nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, range of abilities. Is the same social order reinstated when you have that breakdown?\u201d<\/p>\n

Harris says her course is strong evidence that more attention needs to be paid to pop culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is this idea within academia that pop culture is beneath us,\u201d she said. \u201cBut if we\u2019re serious about understanding the dynamics within society and understanding people and how we\u2019re functioning in relation to one another, I think we have to pay attention to pop culture because media is more pervasive than it\u2019s ever been.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wright State lecturer Andrea Harris teaches a course that explores the social significance of zombie films and television shows in pop culture. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":36579,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[722,733,4299,2023,725,4863,747,715,4855],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-alumni","category-alumni-profile","category-faculty","category-home-news-sidebar","category-humanities-and-cultural-studies","category-liberal-arts","category-news","category-social-sciences-and-international-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36568"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129462,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36568\/revisions\/129462"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}