Sally Pirie

You guys. I’m so excited.

I was just invited to join the National Science Foundation Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledge and Science to lead the Storywork and Knowledge Mobilization Co-Lab. Of course I was humbled and honored and accepted immediately. Storywork, as most of you know, is my jam as a comics-based researcher. It’s what we do at CBR Lab. It’s what I do as a scholar. And now I get to contribute to more people doing it in the most high impact field of work I can imagine.

Established in 2023, NSF CBIKS is centered at UMass Amherst with university and Indigenous community partners across the United States and the globe.

NSF CBIKS’s research is fully community-driven, often conducted in rural areas located throughout the United States and globally, and carried out in full collaboration with our community partners. NSF CBIKS education components involve students at the pre-K–12, undergraduate, and graduate levels, training a skilled workforce to lead in the ethical braiding of knowledge systems, particularly Indigenous and Western knowledge. NSF CBIKS knowledge exchange activities provide workshops, training, and internships for policymakers and Tribal, state, and federal government agencies who manage and care for our nation’s lands, waters, and cultural places. NSF CBIKS brings together arts and storytelling as a means to make scientific research accessible for students, Indigenous communities, and diverse public and professional audiences. (this is from the website, here, which you should check out in its entirety)

Here’s a preview from the new 2nd edition of my data analysis book as a placeholder for now until there is a big fancy press release to share. But I promise more soon.

This is the best little anthropology book of the year.

You know it’s a wonderful day when you go to the mailbox and find one of those big, weird, not-quite-a-box cardboard mailers that can only come from an academic publisher. Yippee! It’s New Publication Day!

And it was in just this way that, yesterday, I received my own copy of Jenny Banh’s Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor and Consumption. I kind of already knew this book was coming, and I had already read the whole thing pre-press because Dr. Banh was kind enough to ask me to illustrate some of the chapters. But my cute little drawings of Disney mice aside (and they are cute), this is the best little anthropology of book of the year. It’s a slim, elegant volume at only 158 pages, but the writing packs that one-and-only Jenny Banh punch. There’s nobody writing in cultural studies or anthropology at the moment who speaks with her clear, critical, and sometimes wry and funny voice. Nobody. I was captured from the moment I read the first lines of the first draft chapter. Don’t get me wrong– it’s a damning account of the complex missteps that come together to create something that is not exactly the “happiest place on earth” — but it is also a luminous treatment of culture, dreams and corporate hamfistedness. And while many ethnographers have struggled to situate themselves and their insider/outsider status, Dr. Banh seamlessly integrates her personal narrative and voice into the text. It comes right home.

During a recent trip to Hong Kong I met a friend in a Lantau hotel where we were all but surrounded in little girls wearing Mickey and Minnie Mouse ears and flouncy antebellum party dresses– and I thought to myself, I bet I know where they are going. I have always loved Hong Kong (the best city in the world for so many reasons) because it was in this place I came to understand the concept of intersection. It’s what Dr. Banh brings to the fore with her brilliant analyses, her italicized asides, her winks and nods to the reader, her brilliant syntheses of art and science and social history. And most of all, I came away from reading this little jewel box of a book with a clear appreciation of the complexity, ragged edges, schlock, moonlight, ephemera, sweat and joy that come together when she says, “people are magic.”

Jenny is magic too. Read the whole thing.

“Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption examines the attempt to transplant Disney’s “happiest place on Earth” ethos to Hong Kong—with unhappy results. Focusing on the attempted localization/indigenization of this idea in a globalized transnational park, the book delves into the three-way dynamics of an American culture-corporation’s intentions, Hong Kong, China’s government investment and Hong Konger audience, and the Hong Kong Chinese locale. The triple actors introduce an especially complex case as two of the world’s most powerful entities, the nominally Communist state of China and corporate behemoth Disney, come together for a project in the third space of Hong Kong. The situation poses special challenges for Disney’s efforts to manage space, labor, and consumption to achieve local adaptation and business success. “

Folks, the Craigardan summer catalogue is out! You can check out the complete program here.

And beyond what the artists in residence get to do, there are lots of things on offer to the public, including classes, workshops and lectures. Here’s mine:

And look at all the amazing folks that will be working and teaching there! https://www.craigardan.org/artists

Have I mentioned how excited I am for my upcoming residency? So excited. My editors might be even more excited because it is possible I will get a big chunk of work done on my new (and overdue!) book while I am there . . .