DOI: 10.18848/2327-7963/cgp/a298 ISSN: 2327-9133

The Cultivation, Sustenance, and Disruption of Zombie Pedagogies in Higher Education

Rubby Dhunpath
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The zombie pedagogy metaphor has gained notable traction within critical higher education scholarship. However, much of its deployment has focused on cataloging pedagogical practices deemed “undead,” rather than interrogating the institutional conditions that animate and sustain them. This position paper reorients the analytic lens from the zombie to the necromancer: from identifying zombie pedagogies to theorizing the institutional systems that cultivate, reproduce, and potentially disrupt them. Drawing on Quiggin’s metaphor of zombie economics, Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, DiMaggio and Powell’s account of institutional isomorphism, and Foucault’s analytics of power/knowledge, the article contends that zombie pedagogies do not merely survive institutional critique; they are actively produced by it. Three mechanisms are identified as central to this production: coercive isomorphism through audit and accountability regimes; mimetic isomorphism through competitive benchmarking and rankings; and normative isomorphism through credentialing and cultures of professional formation. The article further advances the concept of discursive capture, the process by which zombie pedagogies absorb and metabolize critical language, while leaving their structural foundations intact. In response, it theorizes the conditions for genuine disruption, distinguishing between surface reforms readily assimilated by zombie pedagogies and the structural insurgency required for their burial. The South African higher education context provides both empirical grounding and a heightened sense of urgency for this analysis.

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