Sally Campbell Pirie

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst

Transgender and nonbinary young adults report frequent parental rejection was linked to poor mental health. There are limited data about transgender and nonbinary young adult sibling relationships following disclosure or discovery of gender identity. The purpose of this analysis is to compare transgender and nonbinary young adults' perception of pa...

This piece of comics-based research (CBR) details the use of arts-based methods in ongoing research with young transgender or otherwise gender diverse children. Drawing from both the anthropology of childhood and draw–write–tell research in public health, the central innovation of this methodology hinges on gathering children’s narratives in a less...

Parents/caregivers of transgender and/or nonbinary (TNB) youth (those who identify with a different gender than the gender typically associated with their assigned sex) may experience secondary stigma related to their child’s TNB identity. However, parent/caregiver support is critical for TNB youth’s mental health. This study explored attitudes and...

In the world of maritime lore and practice, tattoos were both commemorative and magical. Sailors frequently tattooed the words H-OL- D F-A-S-T onto the skin above each knuckle in the hopes of strengthening their grasp on the ship’s rigging. It gave sailors an edge at saving their own lives when the winds would howl and the ship tossed wildly on the...

This paper presents data from a multi-year ethnography of a rural preschool in the United States in which children engaged in substantial free and structured imaginative play. An unexpected parent death during the course of the data collection period was followed by a spate of death-related play and storytelling by the children, with varied adult r...

Meet Lily: Hi! I'm Lily. I'm 12 years old and I'm going into junior high school next year. I have curly black hair like my dad and green eyes like my mom. It's been 170 days since school and life and shops and stuff all shut down and my little sister Chloe and I really REALLY want COVID to be over. We play dolls and read and go for walks but I also...

This comics-based research ( cbr ) piece focuses on the methodological awakenings that can result from disruption, insertion, and unruly publics. An anthropologist of childhood focusing on gender and preschool, the author reflects on how as anthropologists we often forget the locations of potential transformative power in our work as we are caught...

This chapter focuses on data from ongoing ethnographic research with young (age 3–11) transgender children and their supportive families in the United States. For the parents in the study, who are without exception cisgender, parenting trans children has been complicated by the experience of difference, questions of safety, and what Solomon (Far fr...

Resumo: Não apenas muitas garotinhas nos Estados Unidos e em outros lugares brincam de escolinha, mas, por vezes, ao crescerem, se tornam professoras, um ponto em que o relato de brincadeiras se escolinha assume uma nova função narrativa e discursiva. Por meio de teorias da narrativa e da performance e da análise de discurso, examinamos relatos de...

This essay describes how, as a scholar in gender diverse childhoods, I was collecting ethnographic data at the time of the 2016 election, and how this experience led to a series of jarring personal and professional transformations as a scholar writing for social justice. Not only did find that arts-based methods were particularly apt for capturing...

This chapter describes the author’s experience with a lost opportunity to learn about and from Hijra communities in India. While the author was forced to leave the field, and ethnography was ‘lost’ before it could truly begin, the author was able to learn from the experience and translate the questions and ideas generated there into a way to frame...

In recent years, there has been a surge of popular interest in the lives and experiences of transgender and gender diverse people. However, this interest has been disproportionately focused on adults and teens, on biomedical framing and persistent binarism, without paying attention to young transgender and gender diverse children's engagement with...

This article presents analyses from an ethnographic study of a rural preschool and the pretend play occurring there. While many studies in childhood have sought to understand children’s play from the perspective of the child player, these analyses focus on understanding adult constructions through the children’s play. By focusing on children’s pret...

While many contemporary popular cultural discourses in the USA recognise and commodify children as distinct persons engaging in the middle-class project of expressive individuation, much public and early educational policy has simultaneously intensified the control and regulation of children, children’s culture and children’s bodies and emotions in...

This paper employs data from from a multi-year, ethnographic study of children in a diverse public preschool to destabilize some of the claims of the “boy crisis” literature (Hoff-Somers, 2000). Focusing on fine-grained analyses of events in the study context, the authors illustrate the complexity of everyday interactions between female teachers an...

A history of framing the teaching of young children as a matter of ‘natural’ female aptitude has led a number of researchers and educators to oversimplify men's experiences as a foil or antidote to the ills of schooling. In this qualitative study of men, women, and ‘feminisation’ in early education and care environments, interview data (N = 4) are...

This article presents the experiences of three women who have chosen to move from secular, assimilated lives to lives characterized by the distinctive dress and practice associated with observant Islam, Orthodox Judaism, and Orthodox Christianity, respectively. All three relied upon informal, peer, and distance learning strategies for their religio...

For this literature review, the authors asked, “What is the role of gender in research about elementary-level women teachers and preservice teachers in the past 15 years, and what have scholars learned about the gendered nature of women’s experiences in elementary-level preservice and in-service teaching in that time?” To be eligible for inclusion,...