Sally Pirie

This past week we put together the first ever (!!) comics-based research conference, CBR NOW! at the University of Vermont, sponsored by a generous grant from the New England Humanities Consortium. While Professor Luis Vivanco did most of the heavy lifting (the rest of us were the ‘brain trust’- a position I have never been in before but honestly it was delightful to be any kind of brain, trustworthy or otherwise) it was a team effort on the part of the organizers: Luis, myself, Prudence Doherty of the University of Vermont Libraries, Professor Monica Chiu of the University of New Hampshire, Andy Kolovos of the Vermont Folklife Center and James Sturm of the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Over the two days together we had lectures, workshops and planning sessions to begin to tentatively define the contours of our exciting emerging field. Our guest speaker and keynote was Professor Marcus Weaver-Hightower, who has been the author of some of the seminal works in the field. He is also a lovely person.

I am going to borrow from the CBR NOW website, authored by Luis, as I think it sums up why we are doing this work. I’ve pasted his text in, below. However, in our conversations both before and during the two-day event, something that kept coming up were the concepts of relationality and exchange. In my own work with indigenous research methodologies and frameworks, this stands counter to the isolating, neoliberal, transactional nature of academia writ large and instead works at the pace of connection, which is slow, non-extractive, and invites everyone to the table. This is not efficient, nor is it speedy, but is rather a happening at the intersection of art and science and gift economies where, in the words of Carleton University Master Book Artist Larry Thompson, amazing things happen.  

Here’s why we are doing this:

• Relationship. Making comics as a form of scholarship is time-consuming, isolating, and still undervalued in the logocentric and peer-reviewed domain of academia. Building a supportive community of scholar-creators in relationship with partners outside of academia is an important step toward realizing the potential of comics-based research to reshape and enrich connections between creative arts and scholarly research, to develop new systems of peer review, and to communicate our research with diverse publics. Our goal is to cultivate professional, intellectual, and creative relationships across the New England Humanities Consortium to support this work.
• Professional development. A key factor holding back scholars in, or desiring to move into, arts-based research is lack of access to professional development opportunities.
• Exchange. We believe opportunities for higher ed researchers and teachers to sit together with cartoonists and other professionals involved in sequential arts will generate rich exchange and learning for all parties. Our event will be an opportunity to create, share, and exchange ideas, insights, physical objects, and artifacts with each other.
• Intervention. During the gathering, we will invite willing participants to explore the creation of an interdisciplinary, multi-modal handbook or edited volume on comics-based research, which currently does not exist. Collectively, we also need to spark a necessary conversation about CBR and its relationship with peer review and institutional standards for promotion.
• Collective benefit. This project aligns with the NEHC’s core mission to strengthen intellectual collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange between our institutions, and to provide innovative educational, intercultural, and curricular programming that broadens public visibility for research and fosters transformative thinking.

Stay tuned for more! #cbrnow

So it looks like a manuscript that I thought I published was not in fact published and now it is published¹. Either way I am completely honored to have my work appear in Education, Citizenship and Social Justice under the editorship of Professors Nathan Fretwell and Lee Jerome, two esteemed colleagues in the field. I must also thank them for their patience and grace in accommodating my CBR scholarship.

I love this manuscript because it combines three of my favorite things: 1) unruly, naughty children who are agentive and powerful and standing up for personhood, 2) adults being clapped back for their misshapen, adultist veneration of the imaginary cherubic child, and 3) drawing interesting things—in this case a lot of little bags of dog poo. These are things the Revolution is made of, folks. Take note, fellow Americans.

As the editors write in the introduction (which you should read in its entirety, and which is available open access here), this entire issue is about activism. They continue,

“It brings together an international collection of papers offering insights into struggles over education in a variety of contexts. Collectively, the papers capture the breadth and diversity of educational activism. They document battles fought by a range of different actors and illustrate how educational settings can become important sites for collective mobilisation and active citizenship. Beyond introducing the contributions to the collection, this opening paper serves two further purposes. First, we survey recent research in the field to build a picture of prominent areas of conflict in public education systems. And second, we present a novel conceptualisation of educational activism designed to aid further understanding and development of this important area of educational enquiry. Our ambition is for the collection to inspire further research in the field and encourage closer collaboration with campaigners engaged in struggles for educational and social justice (Fretwell & Jerome, 2026)”

Further, and germane to my project, the editors observe that “there can also be a tendency to belittle school-based activism by dismissing it as simple misbehaviour” and we must, therefore, be vigilant as to how adultism keeps us from giving full weight to children’s activism across contexts, but certainly in school.  As I have written elsewhere, I think we need to re-examine misbehavior writ large; is it a stretch to say that naughtiness is a kind of activism? I believe that this is possible. And, as I found in my preschool project all those years ago, the unruly child, the naughty child, the child simply repellant and crawling with ket, the child who generates adult discomfort—they are all worth heeding. Prick up your ears, grownups.

Finally, the editors also had these very nice things to say about my piece. I am so pleased to have earned the high opinion of some of my heroes in the field:

“In a refreshing departure from the conventional research article format, the opening paper by Pirie utilises comic-based research methods to present a visually arresting account of young people’s direct action to oppose the trans-exclusionary behaviours of school staff in two US middle schools. In documenting the mistreatment faced by trans- and non-binary youth at the schools in question, young people’s resistance and rebellion to this mistreatment and adult efforts to contain and manage their ‘unruly’ behaviour by channelling it into more docile, acceptable forms, Pirie raises important questions about young people’s political agency and the (im)propriety of youth activism when viewed through the lens of adult prerogatives. The article challenges the primacy of adult-centred perspectives and adult policing of ‘proper’ forms of protest. It argues that engaging in unruly actions, such as holding sit-ins or defacing school property, whilst unpalatable to adults, nevertheless constitute means for expressing agency and resistance. To dismiss such actions as simple troublemaking or delinquent behaviour, Pirie contends, undermines young people’s worth as political actors capable of defending their own interests and determining their own priorities. Providing rich insights into the dynamics of youth activism in school contexts this article is illustrative of the tensions and conflicts which can arise when young people exercise agency in ways that upset adult authority.”

You can read the whole thing here. Take some time and look at all the wonderful papers in this issue and challenge your thinking about children, school, activism, resistance, agency, power and protest (and a whole lot more).

1. Academic publishing is funny. You can have something come out online in, say, early 2024, only to get a notification from ORCID that you have a new citation in 2026—and it is the same article. Because now it is really out. Like for real. So then I go back over all my posts here and my cv and my faculty annual report and I ask myself incredulously from the depths of menopause, “Did I know that article was out? Did I imagine it?”  Dear reader, she did not. It appears that Schrödinger’s Manuscript, which is both published and not published at the same time, has struck again.
   This is even more pronounced for arts-based publications and activities. Sometimes you can have a piece accepted for a show, then in a show, then in the show booklet, then published, at several different non-consecutive dates. Keeping one’s academic CV lined up with all those dates can be difficult. I have a very meanspirited colleague who once spent his one wild and precious life going through my cv and annual report to find what he interpreted as a date discrepancy in the billions of publications and shows and art things I am always trying to stay on top of because I am that productive. He then wrote a snarky note in the personnel committee minutes about how I was not being consistent in marking things as “in press” or “in production” because the dates seemed non-consecutive. Bruh. ↩︎

This semester I taught three classes that focused on arts-based scholarship. These included

• A first-year seminar on writing non-fiction comics, where first year students drafted, edited and produced high quality individual and collaborative zines on themes of their own choosing
• A junior level writing class, where students were encouraged to push themselves as writers by creating a range of arts-based, multi-modal texts in addition to more conventional texts. The students created zines, a collaborative text, and even some old-fashioned shoebox dioramas.
• My signature arts-based research seminar for students in the Commonwealth Honors College, where students developed mini-portfolios of arts-based work, artistic explorations and artist statements/manifestos

The Junior Year Writing students began the semester exploring nonconventional texts at the UMass museum of contemporary art, where they were able to meet the artists of the Over the River Collective who made the piece Tigh an Dain, or House of the Poem. They also viewed Tammy Nguyen’s The Political Uses of Madness and saw related selections from the Ellsberg Papers. This all contributed to their increasingly complex understanding of text.

I am very proud of the students and their high-quality work. Here are a few examples of what they all produced.