Welcome to my website!

Here you’ll find everything you need to know about my writing and research, past, present, and future.

If you’d like to commission me or to creatively collaborate on a project, then please message me via my contact form. I’d love to hear from you!

If you need to get in touch with me more generally, you can message me via my contact form. I’m always happy to connect with fellow scholars, writers, artists, and activists!

If you’re looking for publication details on my book, Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds (punctum books) and would like to set up an interview, talk, or discussion, then please message me via my contact form. I’m keen and eager to connect and join the conversation!

If you’re here by accident or via social media, I hope you’ll stick around awhile before heading on over to The Break where you’ll find me writing on popular and visual culture, storytelling, radical and civic imaginaries, worldmaking, coalition and movement building, DIY cultures, and media fandom/activism.

“International Wall in Belfast” by PPCC Antifa is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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About Me

site launch, May 2021

Hi! My name is Ellen Kirkpatrick. I’m an independent cultural studies scholar, writer, and activist. As you’ll see from my selected writings, my work explores and analyses intersections of popular and visual culture, (super)heroic imaginaries, media fan cultures, social injustice and oppression, grassroots movements and activism, and radical cultural production. Matters of situated (and transforming) bodies and identities — always intersectional — loom large in my work, grounded in analysing gendered and racialised systems of exploitation, oppression, and privilege (with an increasing focus on class, citizenship status, and coalition building). I’ve been researching and writing about these subjects for over a decade now, and looking back it’s clear that the animating themes of my work are:

advocating for the transformative power of the radical imagination and (counter)stories, in all their myriad forms;

fathoming and foregrounding strategies and tactics used to escape, survive, and un/make hostile worlds, real and imaginary; and

interrogating barriers to building international (diverse, inclusive) solidarity and securing system change, macro and micro

I described myself above as a scholar, writer, and activist, but that’s not entirely accurate. Seeing my fields of endeavour listed like that — dislocated, partitioned from each other — fails to represent the enmeshment of these positions. In reality, there is no space between them, no gap to cross, no breath to take. In my world, each position flows through and informs the others, always. Along with many other activist-writers, I not only believe that writing can be activism and advocacy, but that academic research too is — or can be — a vital part of our struggle for progressive social transformation.

Corporatized academe is behind me now — I’ve documented some of my experiences here — but I’m still using my cultural studies training and activist experience to contribute to debates and dialogues regarding the utility of creative forms of activism — writing, art, fannish, cryptographic, economic, and so on — in our fight to secure lasting, meaningful progressive social change. I wish now for my work to manifest to its readers as a love-filled intellectual adventure and a call to radical action.

Territories unmapped lie beyond the walls fast enclosing the academic commons. Entering this ‘undisciplined’ space, I want to break free of toxic academic values and working practices and disciplinary (and disciplining) conventions. I want to break down barriers between writing and activism, theory and practice, high and low culture, and scholastic and popular approaches to knowledge production. Centring subjugated knowledges — experiences, cultural artefacts, and so on — and bringing them together in unexpected ways, I want to encourage a radical refusal of the status quo, seeking always revolution not evolution. I want to meaningfully contribute to our cultural commons by producing readerly work more public-spirited and free-hearted than traditional academia usually allows, and that’s where my new publishing venture, The Break, comes into play.

I’ve written further about it here, but The Break is more than just a cultural newsletter; it’s an invitation to come for a dander through the (under)commons, an offbeat wandering, a wondering towards alternative horizons. And I don’t know about you, but I’m always ‘quite ready for another adventure…’.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

— e e cummings

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The Break

Launching on substack, 11 may, 2021

Launched in 2021, The Break is a newsletter housing my writings on cultural activism and organising, amongst other things. In this ever-evolving repository, you’ll find a regular supply of essays, reviews, profiles, vignettes and experimental writings, as well as some original photography. And I have plans to expand it to include other forms of critical and creative content, from dialogues and collaborations to guest contributions. Watch this space!

For the moment though, I want to explore and share my love of stories with you — and the stories behind the stories — especially those overlooked and outlawed within corporate media. And just like this love, my notion of what constitutes a ‘story’ is sweeping. It might be a fleeting look or gesture that captures my attention, or a media representation, a radical cosplay, a (mini)comic or zine, a vandalised wall painting, or an activist happening. (Hailing from Belfast, you’ll also notice a recurring engagement with legacies of partitions and ‘peace walls’, adversarial politics, and building solidarism within conflicted communities — local issues resonating globally.)

Sharing the news, intricacies, knowledges, and synergies of these snapshot stories and storytellers provides its own radical joy. But I’m attentive to the bigger story too. What do these stories tell us about the interlinking forces and fictions — neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, cisnormativity, anthropocentrism, to name but a few — (mis)shaping our world? And how will they help us escape, survive, and un/make it?

I’m talking here, of course, about the transformative power of storytelling. A universal activity capable of helping us reorient our relations (to each other and to the world), challenge the status quo, and incite (and effect) radical change.

Yet as I explore in The Break, transformative power is collaborative, not monologic. That is, it’s not enough to simply tell and share stories. To be revolutionary, they must be heard, felt, and — as all good consciousness-raising activists understand — absorbed into the mind and into the heart. Indeed, like all good stories, the story of activist-storytelling has more than one side: sharing, listening, responding. A dialogic, participatory process evoking call and response rituals, noted for their ability to connect storytellers — be they speakers, musicians, artists, cosplayers — with audiences, allowing the intangible to become tangible, the improbable possible. To hear the call of a (counter)story is to open and enter a transformative space of empathy, learning, and understanding. It is to create a position from which to better — more usefully — respond to the injustices, oppressions, and crises marking us and our world.

And this, if anything, is my hope for The Break. A space to rethink our ideas of what stories are — their forms, temporalities, textures, surfaces — and who gets to create them. But also, their utility in activism. Invoking — calling upon — the spectre of a radical reading room, I imagine The Break as a ‘from below’ space, ringing with unsung outlaw stories and subjugated knowledges. A critical celebration of all things radical, grassroots, and DIY. Through these encounters, I seek to enact and encourage a refusal, a rejection, a radical rebuttal of the toxic, hostile, and suicidal status quo. A response equal in measure to the power, love, and urgency pulsing through the call for international revolutionary action. And I would love it if you joined me in this break-out enterprise.

Subscribe to The Break today!

Some people have asked me why I chose to call my newsletter The Break. And, as perhaps expected, I’ve done so for a few reasons. To evoke the sense of breaking away from and breaking out towards, when thinking about my experiences with academe and this new venture.

But it also speaks to my deep love of the sea, especially its big waves, from Nazare to Pe’ahi and closer to home, beloved Mullaghmore. (I’m from an island, after all.)

I write more about it in a forthcoming essay, and about how the numinous sea speaks to the crises marking our existential condition.

Subscribe to The Break to find out more….

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Commission Me!

Opportunities…

Listed below are a selection of titles for pieces I have either written or would love to write. Please contact me for further details or to request full pitches. Likewise if you have an idea for a piece you’d like me to write. It’s always great to hear from editors and creative collaborators with ideas for future projects. Let’s get together and make it happen!

On Activism, International Solidarity, and Building Effective Social Movements

George Floyd and the Urgent Matter of Changing the World: The Radical Power of Bystander Footage, Monument Activism, and Effective Movement Building