Abstract
This article lays out the pedagogical benefits of using popular zombie productions, particularly AMC's The Walking Dead, to teach a critical introduction to modern political theory. Based on my undergraduate course: "Political Theory, Climate Change, and the Zombie Apocalypse," the article outlines how The Walking Dead can be used to critique the mythic assumptions built into modern social contract theory; to introduce other political ideologies, including conservatism, anarchism, fascism, and communism; and to consider the political challenges raised by a global problem such as climate change in an increasingly neoliberal environment. Zombie productions are offered as a particularly salient pedagogical tool that can help awaken critical political analysis for the Millennial Generation.
Highlights
What if zombies infiltrated a course on political theory, infecting half-dazed undergraduates with a hunger to understand what constitutes a just political community? What if the dead-eyed, shuffling, animated corpses of film and fiction could be used to consummate an awakening to how political theory matters for our future and the future of the planet?
Even Hobbes and Locke acknowledged that the state of nature idea was an apparatus built for theoretical purposes. Why this particular myth, and what are the political implications of it? We explore these inquiries by reviewing evolutionary patterns in human behavior, considering how the social contract theorists‟ picture may look different if we bring women and children back into view, where social contract theorists have ignored them
As the obstacles to meaningful political action and the ramifications of inaction on climate change become clearer to students who are generally not accustomed to pondering these issues, I find that they begin to express legitimate anger at the problem they have been handed
Summary
This course serves as one of four gateway course options to the political science major, though it is interdisciplinary, drawing from sociology, cultural theory, economics, environmental studies, and film/media studies. Group members take care of one another beyond the boundaries of the modern nuclear family: in Rick‟s group, every adult takes responsibility for the surviving children Such scenes from The Walking Dead compel students to consider the notion of human “natural mutual hostility”at the heart of early social contract theory as an ahistorical myth. Compared against these competing systems, we can see how Rick‟s group anchors a proto-Lockean liberal center, as it were, positioned between three ideological poles These are (1) the anarchism of either looselybounded groups or all-out moral lawlessness, represented in the negative extreme by the cannibalistic community the group encounters in Season 6; (2) a traditionalist conservatism that is useful in some respects (e.g. remembering how to grow food and care for others) but unable to adapt to the horror of zombie plague and brutal human competition for survival; and (3) a ruthless authoritarian model that quashes rights and collective input. Students demonstrate deft engagement with Marxian critiques to consider how zombie narratives might be compelling to contemporary audiences precisely for the way zombies remind us of something about ourselves in a neoliberal era
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