The seminar will take its start from Sally Priers article and comic “No, You Can’t Just Draw Cats: Drawing and Thinking About Gender-Diverse Human Bodies in Comics-Based Research” published 2025 in Journal of American Folklore, Volume 138, Number 550, Fall 2025, pp.444-457.
From there we will dive deep into how comic based art and research can be used in ethical and critical perspectives.
Dr. Sally Pirie (she/her/hers) is an anthropologist and visual artist. She was born and grew up in northern Japan before graduating from Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii and Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. She received her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she developed her research interests in comics-based research methods, gender diversity in childhood, and labor force feminization. She is currently Professor of Child and Family Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Master Artist and Director of the Comics-Based Research Lab at UMass and the Principal Investigator of the Gender Moxie Project. This longitudinal project, generously funded by the Spencer Foundation, focuses on transgender childhoods. She served as Editor-in-Chief of Anthropology and Education Quarterly for two editorial terms, concluding in 2019, was an Editor of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures from 2017 until 2024, and is currently Editor at Pedagogy, Culture and Society. She serves as a member of the editorial and/or executive boards of the British Educational Research Journal, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Qualitative Research, Anthropology and Humanism, Teachers and Teaching, and Folk, Knowledge, Place. Dr. Pirie’s comic-based research and other visual and comic artwork has been featured in juried exhibits at the University of Cambridge, Vienna University, the University of Hong Kong, Anglia Ruskin University, University College Cork, Wisteriahurst Museum, and Middlesex University. Her work is now on permanent legacy exhibit at the Universities of Cork and Middlesex. A recipient of the Charles M. Schulz Award for editorial cartoonists, she was also the 2020 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Morris and the 2021 recipient of the Grinnell College Alumni Award in recognition of her lifetime of public service. She was a 2024 Visiting Professor of Book Arts at Carleton Unversity, and the 2025 Teaching Fellow at the Craigardan International Artist Residence Program. Currently she is Storywork and Knowledge Mobilization Co-Lab Project Lead with the groundbreaking National Science Foundation Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledge and Science (CBIKS).
You can learn more about her work at www.sallypirie.com
EVERYDAY COMIC-ART NETWORK is a Comic-art Based Research (CBR) network focusing on civic engagement and social change through creating, reading and analyzing comic-art. The network is located HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
For more information se the homepage:
https://www.gu.se/en/research/everyday-comic-art-network
