Image

Sally Pirie, professor of education and director of the Comics-based Research Lab (CBR Lab) at UMass Amherst, recently returned from the University of Vienna (WU), where she co-hosted the arts- and comics-based research exhibit, “Fostering a Sense of Belonging for Higher Education Staff and Students with Caring Responsibilities: What Works.” 

Pirie and Marie-Pierre Moreau of Anglia Ruskin University, who collaborated on the research project, hosted a talk about carework and comics-based research with WU students, faculty and the community at the “exhibit vernissage” and conducted two workshops including one on how to do comics-based research. Pirie and Moreau’s work was also featured in the international newspaper, “Die Presse.”

The exhibition, funded by a grant from the U.K.’s Advance HE, was launched in February at the 2024 Athena Swan President’s Symposium at the University College Cork, Ireland. The exhibit has been shown at Anglia Ruskin University in East Anglia, U.K., London, England—where it is on permanent exhibit at Middlesex University—and in Cambridge, Dublin, Paris and most recently in Hong Kong.

Image

“It is wonderful to see so much international interest in comics-based research,” says Pirie, an anthropologist of childhood and qualitative methodologist and coordinator of the Children, Families and Schools Program. “There’s so much acceptance for branching out from conventional scholarship and valuing our space, specifically comics-based scholarship. I'm just thrilled with the visibility and attention and the support of this work, in particular by a grant from Advance HE, which is a British higher education granting organization specifically interested in equity.”

Pirie explains the project’s goal, saying, “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 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.”

The CBR Lab uses comics-based and other creative methodologies to solve problems, generate solutions, conduct innovative inquiry and imagine wider creative dissemination and research outputs in the humanities and social and natural sciences. 

More information is available on the CBR Lab website.