ABSTRACT. This work embodies an invitation to dare to write differently, to write as a human being engaged in the challenging, frustrating, exhilarating work of academia rather than as a zombie trapped in the banality [and yes, often the nonsense] of formal academic writing. Resisting zombification involves recognising the opportunities and the constraints of academic writing, the possibilities available to writers to explore the most fitting ways of communicating their knowledge, their values and their research within the confines of their ‘textual environments.’ It also involves differentiating between the skills and standards internal to the discussion of what constitutes ‘academic’ writing and those external to that discussion and thus negotiable or expendable if necessary. Finally, it involves the acknowledgement that we have both an ethical duty and a practical incentive to enable writers to be ‘composers of text,’ so ‘academic’ writing can fulfil its transformative imperative of enabling change for social justice as opposed to fulfilling the ‘performativity’ of a hollowed-out semblance of an academic text. Building on the scholarship of Molinari (2022) and other ‘composers of text,’ I use the lens of critical realism to invite you, dear reader, to explore the structures and mechanisms that lie beneath our current practices of ‘academic’ writing practices to understand and potentially change them.

Keywords: academic; writing; critical realism; writers; zombification

How to cite: El Mazbouh, M. (2025). Resisting zombification: The writer as a ‘composer’ of text. Knowledge Cultures, 13(1), 27-49. doi: 10.22381/kc13120252

Received February 2, 2025 • Received in revised form February 28, 2025
Accepted March 1, 2025 • Available online May 1, 2025