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This is a course about how humans imagine creatures both like and unlike themselves who also pose existential dangers to their own societies. Roughly speaking, there are two endpoints to how this imagining works in the modern moment, with, on the one hand, zombies, being conceived of as humans without language and dominated by insatiable appetites, and aliens, on the other hand, possessed of both advanced technology and social organization that are conceived of as beyond human abilities. Using recent ethnography, popular media and classic theory, we examine this near-abroad of human anxieties, speculations and even humour.
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