Sally Pirie

It’s been a very busy few months with lots of things going on. Some of it has been really quite wonderful and some of it has been pretty horrifying. With regard to the horrifying stuff, I encourage you to take what action you can take (also: every little tiny thing counts), and also to follow my comic series on my substack here: https://substack.com/@sallyannpirie.

This substack is a free every-other-week-or-so comic where I talk to the people making a difference and working hard to support equity, democracy and a better world in spite of the terrible times we all find ourselves in. I also offer practical tips for actions big and small that all of us can take. My work as a scholar and as an artist has been and will always be the work of standing with the marginalized against capital, empire and all those bad guys. That’s why I am so good at drawing them 🙂

As Tim Snyder reminds us, the Tyrant’s actions are deliberate; he benefits from our confusion, disorientation, despair and overwhelm. I am here to remind you to resist and remember, it only seems insurmountable. With enough bites we can eat the whale. Do not give up. It’s not even close to time to give up– rather, it’s punk rock time, folks.

And if you find yourself full of momentary despair, remember what Ursula K. Le Guin said: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art.”

Now for the fun stuff.

Thanks to the Forbes Library in Northampton and their zine club, I was able to be among the selected artists featured in the Winter Exquisite Zine and Diorama Fest! It really was a beautiful chance to be in the buzzing, humming presence of other creative people, doing amazing work, side by side, in the warm heart of the library on a very cold winter day. If you missed a chance to get one of my zines, you can always order them online here. I try to check the order form frequently and get those things in the mail right quick. I’m always working on new titles, and new ways to use zines as an art and academic form and I would also love to see what YOU have been working on. Self publishing, especially in our current political hellscape, is one mechanism by which we can spread information, inspiration, DIY tips, political tools, and hope.

I also was lucky enough to give two workshops at the Research Accelerator conference this past December, and another two special sessions this February. The workshops were about comics-based research in general, arts-based research in general, and visual memoing as a data analytic strategy specifically. I love visual memoing as a form of getting into qualitative and ethnographic data in new ways. Data analysis is, at its most basic, unlocking data and seeing what is there. It’s a little bit like a little icebreaker boat pushing into a solid locked up mass and breaking it apart so we can see what is there, what is not there, and what we can understand from it. You can also think of it this way: before you can connect the dots, you need to be able to SEE the dots and move them around.

Visual memoing is something I’ve written about here and in a bunch of other places, but it is at its most basic it’s drawing and making little comics while you read through your data. These visual memos can help you come up with new metaphors, new ideas and new threads of light in your data set, no matter how complicated it might be. And it doesn’t matter if you can’t draw in a way that feels representationally true to you—focus on lines and movements and metaphors to uncover bigger truths in your work. Or small truths. Or hidden truths. Or just ideas that prick up your ears. Because that is the starting point for the good stuff.  

And last (but not least!) I’m super excited to announce I won a fellowship to attend a summer visual artist’s residency at Craigardan! When I wrote out the application I honestly had no idea I would be selected, or that I would be fully funded. I’ll be able to take full advantage of the gorgeous rural retreat and all the support the Craigardan staff offer artists in residence, and I will be able to teach a course open to the public. My course will be zine-making and art books of course, both as academic texts and art objects/ personal texts. I’m a little bit nervous to be around all the very fancy people at Craigardan, but I know I’ll get great support and stretch and grow as an artist and scholar. After all, I have a book that really needs finishing and it represents a LOT of drawing.

That’s all for now. Sending you all lots of love and courage and joy. Keep on keeping on.   

Our award-winning CBR exhibit has returned from the Hong Kong opening and is now in Vienna at the WU! This time both Marie-Pierre and I were able to be in Vienna to talk about carework, and comics-based research, with the students, faculty and community, first at the exhibit vernissage, then press conference, and finally with two workshops– including one on how to do comics-based research!– open to everyone. You can read the companion booklet here.

We even made the international press!

And the UMass Press!

As I’ve written elsewhere here, this project is an important piece of comics-based research conducted in collaboration with Professor Marie-Pierre Moreau. We used CBR data analysis methods to generate the comic panels on exhibit, with an eye toward fostering greater awareness and bigger, more critical conversations about about who is doing carework, what care obligations mean for different people in higher education, and the need for universities to do a whole heck of a lot better when it comes to implementing good policy and putting that policy to work. Sexism is real, and it is concentrated in this dimension of higher education, serving to bolster it as the same old exclusionary boys’ club it has always been, no matter how people might wildly gesticulate to all the women working there. “Look at all the women! They are balancing it all so well! Feminism must have solved everything. We don’t need to do anything else!” Uh, no. Trust me, I work in a ‘feminized’ profession that should be slightly more with it, but instead treats women who have children as the problem-of-choice. (“You can’t have a research leave!” my former dean exclaimed, clearly exasperated that I would even dare to ask. “But I’m the only associate professor who hasn’t had one,” I said. To which she replied, “But look at all your maternity leaves!!! You can’t have a research leave after all those maternity leaves.” I wish I were kidding).

Never mind the fact that women do the domestic labor of higher ed. And the effects are compounded for women of color.

Following the vernissage, I gave a CBR workshop that focused on zine-making to help connect comic art with research stories. The students and faculty who attended made some beautiful mini-comics, and we are all excited to see what comes next!

Professor Marie-Pierre Moreau and I are delighted to see this work become a permanent legacy exhibit at Middlesex. I’d like to give special thanks to Nathan Fretwell, Christiana Rose and of course Marie-Pierre Moreau for making this happen! If you are interested in this exhibit coming to your institution, please reach out via my contacts page.