Zombies in the classroom: a horrific attempt to engage students in critically thinking about Turkey's undead application to join the European Union

Abstract

This paper reports on an introductory world regional geography course with a role-playing exercise. The goal was to situate students in a form of popular geopolitics that engaged them viscerally with positionality and othering. Students were assigned different positionalities in a liminal active learning environment within a context of fear of zombies; some actually engaged in othering or were othered; many vocally critiqued their own or others' positionalities and arguments. Later in the semester, students were more engaged and likely to apply the concepts of positionality and othering in critically thinking about the real-world case of Turkey's European Union application.

Keywords::

• zombies
• positionality
• othering
• popular geopolitics
• Turkey
• European Union

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Center for Instructional and Professional Development, especially former director, Tony Ciccone, and the participants in the 2010 CIPD-ELO workshops.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.