Washing Knives

Abstract

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 up in the everyday cycle of publication and communication, and how we might awaken to diverse purposes through seeing our purposes differently, if only for a moment. The piece asks us to “try on” scholarship as guerrilla art, and to consider what would happen if our work was an untethered public gift rather than a marooned, transactional experience shaped by the contours of academic business-as-usual.