Sally Pirie

In addition to my own work, I am also frequently invited to consult on others’ projects. This year I was able to provide some CBR vibes for my colleague Professor Musbah Shaheen’s groundbreaking research project on Jewish and Muslim students in higher education. Professor Shaheen conducted interviews with the students as they reflected upon and navigated the HE climate in the wake of the October 7^th attacks and the Israeli attacks on Gaza and subsequent humanitarian crisis in the region. These events and all that surrounds them constitute the proverbial third rail for many people, but Professor Shaheen found productive and critical ways to encourage frank discussion and dialogue with a diverse group of students. These are tough conversations, but necessary ones. As I conducted the CBR analyses and constructed the comics themselves, I admit I was wary of missteps– comic art is no silver bullet, folks. But the only thing worse than drawing it wrong is not drawing it at all– so I tried to take some inspiration from some of my heroes in comic art who have handled difficult and sensitive topics so well. I encourage you to look to their work here, here, here, here and here. It would certainly be easier to just draw bunny rabbits and moonbeams, but, as Joe Sacco said, “I’m doing the work I need to do to live with myself.” After all, we know what art is for. All else is folly.

Our collaboration, called Ouroboros, is inspired by the lived realities of many of the students in the project.  Professor Shaheen, who is much more eloquent than I am, writes,

Ouroboros is a storytelling and research initiative that explores the lived realities of Jewish–Muslim friendships in a moment of profound strain. In the wake of October 7, 2023, relationships that once felt stable have been tested by grief, fear, political division, and the weight of global conflict felt at a deeply personal level. Through interviews, narratives, and reflective dialogue, Ouroboros creates space for individuals to speak honestly about connection, rupture, and the complicated work of staying in relationship. The project takes its name from the ancient symbol of the serpent consuming its own tail—representing cycles of destruction and renewal—and asks whether relationships can survive, transform, and reimagine themselves under pressure.

Ouroboros highlights the emotional and relational dimensions of conflict that are often overlooked in public discourse. It centers stories of friendship as sites where larger histories of violence, identity, and belonging are negotiated in intimate ways. The project draws attention to themes of precarity, mutual care, silence, misrecognition, and the moral dilemmas individuals face when their communities are in tension. Rather than offering simple resolutions, Ouroboros surfaces the ambiguity and complexity of maintaining connection across difference, illuminating both the fragility of these relationships and the possibilities that emerge when people choose to remain engaged despite fear and uncertainty.

We worked together to produce three zines and two posters reflecting the narratives of three focal students, all of whom were disguised for their confidentiality. Eventually the project will be made into an immersive exhibit so viewers can literally walk through and be immersed in the totality of these students’ experiences. It’s painful, it’s uncomfortable, it’s inspiring, and most of all, it’s an opening for deeper understanding. Stay tuned for more from Professor Shaheen and Ouroboros.

This was one of those book chapters that was so much fun to write—and something I have been itching to get out there for some time. As many of you know, one of my early areas of scholarship was labor force feminization. I even wrote a book about how I saw a lot of the troubling trends of the alt right reflected in how some young people conceived of the gendered work of teaching, and how teacher educators and others unwittingly (or sometimes very wittingly indeed) reinforced a lot of these ideas. It wasn’t an awesome good news moment, and I felt like Cassandra jumping up and down and screaming at somebody, anybody, to pay attention to white women. That was 2012. But something I reflect on now, over ten years since I wrote the book, is that even though my findings were correct and disturbing (and validated so horrifyingly now) I’m not sure I spent enough time in the field really looking at these young women and constructing them as generously and agentively as they deserved.

So when I did the work on Ugly Bitches, yes, I was talking about art education, but also about how the teachers themselves can be radically affected—and have the capacity to shift and grow—and how we as teachers in higher education need to see their many funds of knowledge and radical potential. My students are mostly young, cis white women, but they are also smart, agentive people who have made strategic choices and are constantly, critically reflecting on those choices and evaluating their own positions of power and vulnerability. Being young right now is very challenging but these young people, mostly white cis women but certainly not all, are doing the work and I can see it how they grapple with art, self, and the idea of being powerful and effective–even if it means being ugly. I love my art education students, and I think it shows through here in their journey and my own. Let’s hear it for the ugly bitches. I’m proud to say I’m one of them.

Pirie, S. C. (2026). Ugly bitches will save your life: Teaching art as method. In H. G. Caplan and Thompson, C. M. (Eds.) Postdevelopmental Approaches to Challenging Myths and Misconceptions in Early Childhood Art, pp. 33-58. Bloomsbury. DOI: 10.5040/9781350539310.ch-2

Also, this chapter tells the amazing story of Mabel the Guinea Pig. You should buy the book so you can find out how we were all radicalized by Mabel. #Mabelforever

A few years ago I wrote a piece about The Death Game in preschool; to make a very long story short, this was an often wild, often somber, sometimes unruly and always ket game that the preschoolers in my field site cooked up as a way to explore the boundaries of children’s spaces. Sometimes the children constructed elaborate funerary landscapes, other times they enacted wildly exaggerated death throes, all the while aware that adults were picking up what they were laying down. My analyses drew heavily from the brilliant work of Rachel Rosen, who is in my mind the foremost writer on children’s death play.

This new piece, Putting Flesh on the Death Game, revisits these data in the form of a social story. As I write in the piece’s text introduction:

I spent nearly every summer of my life with my father’s family in Appalachian Tennessee, in a place called Bulldog Hollow, near the little town of Elizabethton. This meant creek shoes, catching crawdads, watching the big boys kill copperheads, my grandfather’s pipe smoke and lots of time in church. I would sit through the seemingly endless service in my shiny white patent leather shoes and monogrammed gingham dress and then join the other six year olds in the church basement for Sunday school. I remember one Sunday in particular. “Now, what is a parable?” the Sunday School teacher asked us all. “Why, it’s a story!” she exclaimed, “And Jesus taught using stories to put meat on the bones, so everybody could get something good from what he was saying.” Of course I already knew exactly what that was, for my grandmother told parables every day to lyrically impart important ideas to her crowd of multi-aged grandchildren. She was a master of putting meat on the bones.

Stories have always been a part of qualitative research, but only recently have fictions been mobilized as a formal arts-based approach. Patricia Leavy’s 2011 novel, Low Fat Love, is one of the earliest examples of using the novel as a means to represent research in this way. This novel, which is based on ten years of Leavy’s interviews with young women about gender, identity, sexuality and the body, is grounded in that research as well as Leavy’s experiences to “put flesh onto themes captured in Leavy’s research and teaching, as well as fictionalized versions of her own personal experiences. It shows us what arts-based research can look like” (Sleeter, 2024 np). Like a good teaching story, it puts meat on the bones. Other researchers have also used fiction in this way, including Sleeter (2015; 2021), who noted the power of the story as integral to imagining the richness of research in new ways, to “prompt deep reflection in a way that data and theory do not. Stories capture experiences and emotions; my students remembered stories long after forgetting social science data” (Sleeter, 2024 np). As per the above, they enflesh the robust, sturdy bones of the work.

So, when I sought to tell the story of what transpired during my three year ethnography among the preschoolers, I wanted to create a fictional account to put some meat on the bones, but I wanted to represent how social theory can be applied to the world of childhood—in particular, I wanted readers to see how Kristeva’s concept of abjection works (Kristeva, 1982). Further, I wanted to illustrate (literally!) the ways in which the feminization of a profession and the constraints of gendered carework in particular throw the entire carnival of abjection into stark relief. I had written about the taboo play (Pirie, 2017) and about abjection (Pirie, 2021a) before, but a social fiction was needed to “put flesh onto the themes” of what I found, what I learned, and, most importantly, the ways in which theory truly supports deeper understanding of how cherubs become dirty in the feminized carework space. Playing the Death Game is the result. In it, we see the interrelationship between adult identities vis-à-vis gendered goodness in the context of feminized labor and how children are constructed as reservoirs for that goodness. Once children become “improper” so also do the women who care for them, which results in the horror (and rage) of abjection (Jones et al, 2010). Further, particular children are more frequently constructed as soiled, unclean and improper because of their racialized locations, and as these children become more difficult to fold into the adult identity of good, so are they more likely to be pushed out of early childhood spaces in different ways (Pirie, 2021b). Creating The Death Game using CBR helped me apply and understand a theoretical framing for how young children being “naughty” creates a tinder box centered around precarious adult identities, beyond even the notion of the cheeky forbidden, or “ket” (James, 1989). The ethnography of childhood often presents researchers and readers with sticky, unruly data, not unlike Gottlieb’s (2004; 2012) ethnographies of infancy, where the “data” produced by babies appears as cries, leakage and sound. So “feeling” the data via the process of restorying this work contributes directly to my, and the readers’,  understanding the necessary visceralities of thick description in the preschool context.

You can read the rest of the typeset introduction material, the comic social story itself (!) and even some thoughtful little discussion questions at the conclusion in the book itself here.

Pirie, S. C. (2026). Putting flesh on the death game: Reflections on a comics-based social story methodology. In Johnson, A. T. & C. H. Sam (Eds.) Short Stories for Social Research. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003540564-8