Utgångspunkten för studien var ett större projekt kring epilepsi och medvetande. Syftet med föreliggande arbete var tvådelat: dels att utarbeta ett instrument för att studera medvetandeinnehåll och beteende under partiella epileptiska anfall. Dels att ge en systematisk sammanställning av självrapporterade beteenden under partiella anfall och relatera dessa till aktuell forskning kring medvetande och automatiska beteenden. Vanligast rapporterade beteendet var kategorin egenkontroll, följt av kategorierna automatismer och zombiebeteenden. Fördelningen beror till viss del på att egenkontroll är ett medvetet beteende och därför lättast att rapportera. En närmare analys av exempel på kategorin zombiebeteende ger vid handen att inga exempel på de nya, komplexa beteenden utan subjektivt medvetande som kännetecknar "äkta" zombievarande föreligger. Uppdelningen av kategorierna i automatismer och zombiebeteende bör utifrån detta omprövas i framtida versioner av manualen. Slutligen konstateras att en betydande vidareutveckling av instrumentet är nödvändig för att på ett bättre sätt spegla komplexiteten i materialet.

The contemporary North American believes that you can purchase happiness. We search in boxes labeled new and improved, looking for products that are forever bigger, stronger, and faster. We want these things because they will make our lives easier, make us look prettier, and bring us social acceptance. It is our social insecurities that blindly drive this lifestyle. Happiness cannot be sold, and we have become mindless in our consumption. It is in the heart of the suburban world where you can find the beginning of the end. It is the North American shopping mall. We created it as means to meet our demands for more convenient access to stores and services. Its design was manipulated, unapologetically perfected, and rigorously overproduced. The mall has replaced our town squares and main streets with fields of asphalt, yields of the same giant signs, neon lights and brand names. The public realm has been privatized and commercialized. The zombie apocalypse is upon us. The shopping mall stands among us as the reanimated corpse of the dead downtown and represents the loss of great space. Through horror films and personal inflection, a biography of the mall, and a literary dissection of its contemporaries, this thesis examines the misconceptions of North American public spaces through the shopping mall and branded culture. This thesis rediscovers the practise of creating great space through an architectural discourse of the Humbertown Shopping Centre. We desperately need spaces for the living. I argue for public spaces that serve no commercial intent, but rather nourish our desires for authentic human interaction.

Analyzing George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) in relation to the early works of Marshal McLuhan, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse reveals an ideological parallel that can be explicated using Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony. While McLuhan, Marcuse, and Fromm observe, in order to critique, social manifestations of power in a consumerist system, Romero presents a model of hegemony in his films that he exposes to extreme stress thereby allowing viewers to observe such manifestations of power for themselves. These analyses are significant because although Marcuse, McLuhan, Fromm, and Romero present congruous ideologies, scholars of Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead have failed to recognize cultural hegemony as the source of the psychosocial criticism within each film.

The contemporary North American believes that you can purchase happiness. We search in boxes labeled new and improved, looking for products that are forever bigger, stronger, and faster. We want these things because they will make our lives easier, make us look prettier, and bring us social acceptance. It is our social insecurities that blindly drive this lifestyle. Happiness cannot be sold, and we have become mindless in our consumption. It is in the heart of the suburban world where you can find the beginning of the end. It is the North American shopping mall. We created it as means to meet our demands for more convenient access to stores and services. Its design was manipulated, unapologetically perfected, and rigorously overproduced. The mall has replaced our town squares and main streets with fields of asphalt, yields of the same giant signs, neon lights and brand names. The public realm has been privatized and commercialized. The zombie apocalypse is upon us. The shopping mall stands among us as the reanimated corpse of the dead downtown and represents the loss of great space. Through horror films and personal inflection, a biography of the mall, and a literary dissection of its contemporaries, this thesis examines the misconceptions of North American public spaces through the shopping mall and branded culture. This thesis rediscovers the practise of creating great space through an architectural discourse of the Humbertown Shopping Centre. We desperately need spaces for the living. I argue for public spaces that serve no commercial intent, but rather nourish our desires for authentic human interaction.

Thesis--Auburn University, 2009. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 44-46).

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-88). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

The Walking Dead is a popular American tv-series set in the near future, or an alternative present. Society has fallen and colapsed into a more post-apocalyptic state. Till this date the seires has reached its third season, and each episode has several million viewers around the world. In this essay the author tries to see how the tv-series reprensatation of men and women looks like. Media, such as tv-series, acts as great source of inspiration when people tries to understand the world around them. If men and women are representated diffrently that may effect how the viewers treat people in general. The purpose of this study wass to examine how men and women were portrayed in the series. What wass classed as typical male and female and how men and women relate to each other in different situations. In order to properly answer to the studys purpose previous research on gender, femininities, masculinities and stereotypes were applied. The material were then examined in a qualitative content analysis with a semiotic approach where the text were studied to elucidate its denotative and connotative meanings. In short, thhe study shows that men and women are equipped with very different abilities. The woman is often portrayed as weak while the man, almost always, is portrayed as the stronger one.

Zombie banks are banks that are practically insolvent but continue to exist through hiding bad loans on their balance sheet. This can be achieved by rolling over bad loans instead of writing them off, a process known as forbearance lending, zombie lending or evergreening. Zombie banks have received increased attention of late, not least because of the sovereign debt and banking crisis in Europe. This follows other banking crises in the US and Japan which have equally seen an increased number of bank failures, and where insolvent companies have been kept alive by banks. This study aims to give a theoretical assessment of the phenomenon around zombie banks and forbearance lending. Although zombie banks are the focus of a wide public debate, the existing research has not been able to fully explain many aspects around them, such as the several motives for forbearance lending, the impact of forbearance lending on the overall portfolio of zombie banks, or the right policy response in dealing with them. In light of this, the study presents three models that simulate the behavior of banks when rolling over bad loans. These models offer insights into the causes and effects of zombie banking, and also allow us to analyze the context of policy measures by the government and the central bank. To put the models into the right context, the study also provides a detailed overview of the theoretical and empirical literature as well as the practical experience with zombie banks and forbearance lending in Japan and Europe.

The object of this project is to dissect the filmic elements in Train to Busan (2016) to analyze how the film represents the Sewol Ferry incident, a national disaster occurred in South Korea, and how the audience is able to engage with the trauma. As the first zombie blockbuster created in South Korea, Train to Busan adapted the elements of the zombie genre that has been delineated repeatedly. The film inherited the traits of zombies, representation of government and media, and feature of human characters from the genre created in Hollywood. Additionally, national characteristics had been added through reflecting the Sewol Ferry incident. Based on the ideas of genre studies, not only the components that construct the zombie genre, but also how the spectators confront the trauma while viewing the movie can be examined. Cinematography, narrative, character settings resemble the tragic event, which consequently trigger the audience to engage with the national trauma. Thus, while adapting the genre constructed in the Hollywood, Train to Busan reveals how Korean adaptation of the zombie media has been made.

This study offers insights into the motif of monstrous corporality in a transmedia environment, through the vampire and zombie characters. Different narratives of corporeal transformation surround us constantly. On one hand, discourses of self-improvement in late modernity (Giddens 1991/2008) and ‘makeover culture’ (Johansson, 2006; 2012; Miller, 2008; Weber, 2009) demand a ‘creation of self’ through change and development, often in relation to physical appearance and bodily traits. On the other hand, numerous narratives of monstrosity and bodily change through destruction are also evident. This study takes on this double focus on corporality, against the backdrop of a late modern mediascape that has enabled people to imagine lives and possibilities different from their own through electronic mediation (Appadurai, 1996). As narratives now move between media platforms, new dimensions are brought to the imaginary, as different platforms interact differently with audiences. The aim of the study is to examine monstrous corporality in popular culture both in relation to media texts and audience practices through analyzes of representation, consumption and performance. The study examines medial and corporeal transformation through: concrete bodily change (the monstrous body), shifts between media platforms (transmedia) as well as the transmission of affect between media material and viewer (embodied spectatorship). These dimensions are explored in four empirical chapters, which examine two television series (True Blood and The Walking Dead) through textual analyses, the promotion of these series, audience participation (in online fora) and also participatory practices (Live action role play and zombie walks) through focus group interviews. The results indicate that the theme of monstrous corporeal change in TB and TWD reflects corporeal change in late modernity in several ways. Both transformations are focused on ‘before’ and ‘after’ and change of the monstrous body is connected to particular traits or parts of the body, which are also prominent in makeover culture narratives, such as skin, teeth and weight (appetite). The televisual narrative offers representations of bodily interiors and bodily harm that affect the viewers in a physical way, through an embodied spectatorship. The analyses of transmedia environments connected to the series indicate that the promotion of the programs use dimensions that emphasize the corporeal address, by bridging the gap between diegetic and actual reality. This is done through media environments (posters, websites and the like), and by introducing diegetic elements as actual, tangible objects in the actual reality of potential viewers. The analyses of posts on televisionwithoutpity.com show that participants use forum discussions as strategies to prolong and widen the media experience, and share it with others. Interviews with larpers and participants in zombie walks indicate that practices that stage the monstrous, also function as deepened embodied narrative experiences. Performances such as larps and zombie walks are interpreted as both conscious acts, and as strategies to handle unconscious performative (Butler, 1991/2006) dimensions of late modernity. Taken together, the zombie and vampire embody the pressures, risks and paradoxes connected to late modern makeover culture, and the mediated form they are presented through, tie them closer to those who engage in narratives about them.