Gravitas and Grace

Pirrie reinvigorates scholarly inquiry by celebrating our common humanity as a core value. By embracing the pleasures of encounters across lines of difference, she navigates between practices and principles; lived experience and propositional knowledge; light and shadow; clarity and complexity. The book offers hope to those who languish in the waterless deserts of the contemporary university, where the logic of the corporate trumps that of the corporeal. Pirrie presents an alternative vision of being and becoming in an educational realm distorted by normative expectations that enshrine individualism and competitive advantage as core values. She rejects forms of scholarship that are cold, bloodless, declarative and antagonistic. She suggests that it is not just the matter in hand that is important to us, but why it matters in the first place. Following Timothy Snyder, she considers freedom as a value rather than a matter of principle, rooted in expressions of sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality and solidarity.