Introduction

Many years ago George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published the seminal Metaphors We Live By (1980). It was their argument that in using myths and metaphors we build the conceptual and emotional structures that guide how we perceive the world and how we act within it. In this, the metaphors we construct are key to understanding our cultures and societies. One of the most powerful metaphors to emerge in contemporary popular culture is the zombie. This book began with the idea that the zombie, as a powerful and unsettling metaphor, provides the opportunity to explore social models – such as ‘childhood’ and ‘school’, ‘class’, ‘gender’ and ‘family’ – that so deeply underpin educational policy and practice as to be rendered invisible. The volume brings together authors from a range of educational sites and disciplines to use contemporary zombie typologies – slave, undead, contagion – to examine the responsiveness of everyday practices of education and schooling such as literacy, curriculum and pedagogy to the new contexts in which children and young people develop identities, attitudes to learning, and engage with the many publics that make up the everyday. Using zombies in this way can, the contributors argue from their different perspectives, provide a lively (dare we suggest ‘undead’) canvas for critical examination of many of the pedagogic and institutional practices of contemporary schooling.