Sally Pirie

It’s been a busy few months, running zine fests hither and yon, and then discovering myself in the pages of my brilliant friend New Zealand author Megan Dunn‘s The Mermaid Chronicles. (We were both attending a mermaid conference (yes! there is such a thing!) in Copenhagen in 2016 and she captured this, our moment before we nervously gave our papers after days of trekking around in the rain chatting merrily to one another.) I gave this paper, about how transgender children imagine themselves as enchanted selves– mermaids and mysterious, magical, luminous beings.

Now for a little bit about zines and zine fests:

“There’s a pleasure in making it difficult for yourself. Other people appreciate it and it appeals to them when you explain, ‘I sewed this together’ . . . Blogging didn’t really work for me. I didn’t get any enjoyment out of it, it didn’t feel satisfying. It’s not the same as having a real, small, colourful and crazy interactive piece of something that somebody made by hand for you.”
– Katie Haegele White Elephant Zine

One of the ways I support people who are interested in either arts-based or comics-based research is through teaching zine-making. I love the poetic economy contained in an elegant little hand-made volume, and whether they are simple “foldies” intended for easy reproduction and mass distribution or more elegant, detailed, hand-bound art objects sewn and painted as single copies or in limited production, these jewel boxes help writers of all kinds focus their stories. It may seem odd to teach people to fold and sew paper when they nearly always want me to just teach them to draw already, but I always ask that they suspend disbelief for a moment and trust this unwieldy process, for there is real analytic power in zine-making, right down to sewing or stapling or folding the pages along the little book spines.

To get ready for the zine workshops I did this spring and summer (and my upcoming workshop series supporting the show of my CBR work in Vienna this October), I did a little bit more of a deep dive into zines as method and drawing as method, beginning with Ben Shahn and ending with Silver Sprocket’s Copy and Destroy manifesto. As far back as Paine’s pamphlet-zine Common Sense, zines have been inherently political (Duncombe, 1997). As “paper artifacts that register the connection of bodies and the passage of time more fully than digital technologies” (Piepmeier, 2009, p. 21), zines have always been and will always be the original form of guerrilla publishing, subverting both the phantasmagoria of our online lives as well as the gatekeepers of conventional publishing.  They are “tangible, material . . . The writing is constrained in an object that physically ages . . it is easier to place it, the writing inside, and the person who wrote it, in time, to contextualize it. Words appearing on a computer screen are decontextualized, ahistorical, atemporal” ( Martin, 2008  np). Reading something handwritten creates a different human response than reading online.

I love making zines because the genre has so many great access points for building up good small stories. They force me to find what my Grinnell College Russian professor Dr. John Mohan called the “arias” in any story or endeavor. These are the small moments of clarity around which the larger narrative or research project stops and stands in still attention. And while there are legitimate concerns around dissemination, cite-ability, and what “counts” as academic publication (“How do I indicate ‘I published my work by leaving 40 copies in a public toilet’ on my vita?”), zines are innovative texts that can reach wider and more diverse publics than any white paper. They are read by ”anyone willing to take a look . . . in a world where the weird, absurd and unique is appreciated . . . [where] something as simple as a photocopy can change someone’s life forever” (Todd& Watson, 2006 p 4). And while the scholarly conversation that happens behind the journal paywall is valuable and valid, we must also ask for whom we are ultimately writing, and with whom we wish to really speak.

Now get out there and make the thing you would have loved to find.

The arts-based, comics-based research exhibit, “Fostering A Sense of Belonging For Higher Education Staff and Students With Caring Responsibilities: What Works” from Professor Marie-Pierre Moreau and myself has left Middlesex University and is now showing at University College Cork as part of the 2024 Athena Swan President’s Symposium. You can read more about the symposium here: https://www.ucc.ie/en/edi/news/2024-athena-swan-presidents-symposium.html

“The exhibition, titled ‘Fostering a sense of belonging for higher education staff and students with caring responsibilities’ is an original research and art based collaboration between Professor Marie-Pierre Moreau at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and Professor Sally Campbell Galman, an independent cartoonist at the University of Massachusetts. The project aims to raise awareness of carers and the diversity and intersectionalities of their experiences, and to encourage the development of practices and policies which foster carers’ sense of belonging. The exhibition will be on display in the Hub until the 15th of March.”

My new chapter on arts-based research has come out– and the fancy hard copy text arrived at my door this morning. I’m delighted that my chapter, which is a comics-based how-to and discussion of CBR methods in educational research in particular, is included in Jason DeHart and Peaches Hash’s edited volume, Arts-Based Research Across Visual Media in Education: Expanding Visual Epistemology- Volume 2. I’m right there in the beginning so you can’t miss me.

Here’s the official text description:

“In company with its sister volume, this book explores arts-based approaches to research across media, including film and comics-related material, from a variety of geographic locations and across a range of subdisciplines within the field of education. This second volume has a focus exclusively on visual output and image-based research and methods.

The book aims to highlight some of the approaches that are not always centered in arts-based research. The visual takes center stage as authors lead with comics-based representations, among other forms of arts-based inquiry. These chapters follow on from the first collection and serve to expand thinking about merging creative methods with analysis and exploration in the world of education. From mixtapes to the curatorial, these chapters showcase the ways in which scholars explore the multitude of human experiences. This second volume covers, among other topics: comics in qualitative research, visual journaling, multimodal fieldnotes and discourse, and creative visual outputs.

It is suitable reading for graduate students and scholars interested in qualitative inquiry and arts-based methods, in education and the social sciences.”

I had a great time writing and illustrating this and I hope you enjoy it.