Zombies = Race, Gender, Politics, and Beyoncé

Lemonade. 

So, on the last day of class this semester, I brought snacks to celebrate with my students. Some chocolate cake, spicy Doritos, and I always like a little bit of lemonade. I figure it couldn't hurt. I set it all on the table at the front of the room, along with a display of books we'd sampled in our syllabus, and some new ones I wanted to encourage students to pick up. 

When it came time to pass around the snacks, my students asked me if had brought the lemonade on purpose. "Uh, no, not really, I just like it." And they were surprised, because all they could think about was Beyoncé's new release. They asked if they could play the album while we circulated thank-you cards to write. "Sure, why not?" 

Alex and Eojin present their TimelineJS of *Engendering Zombie Fiction*, their segment of our exhibit now available online.

Samples from our course syllabus: From *The Walking Dead* to *European Thought in the Eighteenth Century*.

The single Hold Up begins playing across our projector screen, and I begin thinking about how themes in the song relate to key aspects of our seminar on Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies. This semester, we had spent time interrogating the reasons for our fears of writing, of others, and of being controlled by "The Man." So some of the words coming out of Beyoncé's mouth were not so far off from conversations we'd had throughout the semester about the concomitant role of discourse in controlling bodies and perpetuating fear of the Other. But my students were already aware of this. After all, two had incorporated discussion of Beyoncé into their final project as part of [ZOMBIES REIMAGINED], our collaborative digital exhibit. This blog post introduces our exhibit and explains how we pulled it all together.​

Student Projects Reflect on Fear, Racism, and Control.

I'm so greatly proud of my students for taking up my final course assignment and really running with the idea!

​Asking them to get into collaborative groups midway through the semester, resulted in four creative examinations of zombie media using Critical Discourse Analysis as a primary method. Their projects are now available for viewing online at our project website here. ​Student bios, contributors, and more details are available on the *about* page. 

This digital humanities exhibit was made possible by assistance from Swarthmore Libraries.

Designed exclusively for the web, this exhibit is "born-digital," and organized in a format that encourages free browsing, in no particular order. Four hubs of the exhibit display a visual timeline or storymap that helps to chronicle each collaboration's innovative approach to examining popular discourse about zombies.

​The exhibit includes references to several key historical films, including Night of the Living Dead, and White Zombie, as well as TV shows iZombie and American Horror Story: Coven. 

Student authors also discuss zombies in the context of:

• the 2016 presidential election,
  
• the rise of gender-positive discourse in U.S. American higher education,
  
• the life story of Henrietta Lacks and critical race theory,
  
• as well as the positioning of zombies and aliens as fictive others reflecting societal fascinations with difference. 

You can think of [ZOMBIES REIMAGINED] as our move to dish out our own kind of lemonade--a set of analyses designed to encourage each of us to reexamine and reimagine our relationships to popular media. We invite you to interact with us and share feedback using the hashtag #ZombiesReimagined.

How We Built Our Collaborative Digital Exhibit.

Here, I'd like to share a few details of how we were able to pull together this digital humanities project in the relatively short timeline of just under 2 months. The key is that we had a lot of wonderful help from digital librarians at Swarthmore College. However, the project began as a idea I had to give students a conduit for engaging the public on themes related to what we covered in our seminar course.

​I estimate that as a result of our project, students now have a stronger understanding of what the digital humanities is, as well as a much greater appreciation for what it takes to develop thoughtful digital content through collaboration.

• Early March-to Early May: NEARLY TWO MONTHS OF COLLABORATIVE BRAINSTORMING IN SEMINAR | Early on, I encouraged my students to work together in seminar to analyze the texts we were engaging with. As students discussed texts like Heart of Darkness, Descent of Man, and ​The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks from differing critical angles, their brainstorming spread out across multiple sheets of poster paper that I would bring back to our classroom to display and build upon in subsequent meetings. Eventually, I facilitated their efforts to channel these idea maps into visual genealogies and prose analyses, all created collaboratively. These formed the stuff of our digital exhibit.

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• Mid-April: INTERDISCIPLINARY DISCUSSION IN SEMINAR | To assist us in building our ideas, I also organized an interdisciplinary conversation in our seminar to bring in students and professors who were also studying "Voodoo", Vodun, and exports of Haitian culture, though differently. The resulting discussion on April 13, 2016 with students in Prof. Micheline Rice-Maximin's francophone studies course on Haitian literature in French, as well as with Prof. Yvonne Chireau of the Department of Religion (and #MoralityRaceBody), and librarian Pam Harris, left a rich impact on our seminar.

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• Late March: CONFERENCE INSPIRATION | Back in late March, I was fortunate enough to be able to sit in on a few sessions of the 2016 conference for the National Council on Public History in Baltimore, MD. A session on digital exhibits for the public introduced me to TimelineJS as a digital storytelling tool. I came back with the the bare bones of a born-digital exhibit idea, but I still needed help figuring how to setup the back-end of the project. This is where I reached out to digital and humanities librarians at Swarthmore College for additional guidance.​

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• April: TECHNICAL & CREATIVE GUIDANCE FROM LIBRARIANS | These guys were incredible technical resources and creative consultants--after talking with them, we had decided to bring the students in on formatting their contributions into HTML for the online space, using Markdown and StackEdit as tools. Librarians Nabil Kashyap and Roberto Vargas came into our classroom to provide a tutorial in using TimelineJS, StoryMapJS, and Markdown with StackEdit. By the time our session was over, students who had never before attempted any sort of coding were experimenting with generating HTML!​

Late April: PROJECT SOFT LAUNCH AT #MORALITYRACEBODY | To encourage us to meet our project deadline, I built in a debut date with what I anticipated would be a kind audience. Using student abstracts and visual timelines, I worked with my librarian colleagues to prepare the project homepage for viewing via a live link (no other project pages were prepared by that point). At the #MoralityRaceBody panel event I organized at Swarthmore College on April 28, 2016, with support from the Department of Linguistics, I displayed posters with abstracts from each of four student collaborations for the exhibit. Students were able to present and discuss their ideas with attendees during our event reception--this provided a point of pride for both my students and myself. And I could see that they were genuinely excited to share their ideas! This helped us with the energy to see the project through its final stage of preparation.

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• Early May: I WORK WITH STUDENTS TO FINALIZE CONTENT & LIBRARIANS UPLOAD THE HTML | This final stage of the project was a LOT of work. At this stage of the project, my role was as an editor and project manager. Plus, I'm a linguist, so I can be very focused on sentence-level meaning, and making sure that an author's meaning is clear with the words they choose. It was really exciting to be able to dedicate time to closely reading the work of my students and guiding them towards greater clarity, contextualization, and brevity. In this final stage, I was also in close contact with my librarian colleagues, to assist in making stylistic decisions, and developing all remaining content (including the *about* page prose) for the [ZOMBIES REIMAGINED] exhibit website.