we each contain multitudes

I was invited to present the first of the year’s presentations for the Melbourne University Social Equity Institute, in partnership with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, series on displacement. I wanted to speak about how distorting the narratives around displacement are, and the tragedy they land us all in.

Being part of Adelaide Writers' Week 2021 was really rewarding. This event invited us to speak to the prompt "Unstable Ground"...

It felt so special to be part of Adelaide Writers' Week this year. I had a really great in conversation event, as well as a chance to participate in two other events, including this great idea for a book Relaunch event, in response to a year where the COVID-19 pandemic had quashed many author's chances to celebrate their book launches!

The revelation of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan is being understood through a confining lens of personal or organisational failings. There have been dismissals and apologies, and the path laid out for criminal prosecutions - but without stripping back past preceding layer upon layer of injustice, without broadening the lens to see the militarisation of distant lands as a manifestation of a persistent imperial mandate, then many of these actions and discussions are cursory and act to reinforce the massive power imbalance from which these travesties arise. We can't reverse the path of injustice, but we can choose to have a moment of reckoning, breaking past the confining narratives built on partial histories, thereby shifting who we collectively become.

In late September this year, the book I wrote about my family's restaurants and Afghan cuisine will be released. My aim was to write this book in a way that supersedes the distorted and impersonalised narratives associated with Afghanistan today.

Afghanistan today has been built upon narratives which depend upon the erasure of its vast history and the dehumanisation of its people.

On the 4th July 2019, I was invited as a speaker at the Newday annual event. The theme was to explore notions of leadership in a world that is rapidly changing.

Both the scale of, and the general response to, displacement and displaced people in our world today, I fear, reveals a deep laceration and dismembering in our collective spirit.

The power of the humanities today, lies in the degree to which it can facilitate our collective re-humanisation.

I want to talk about dismantling. And I want to talk about dismantling in relation to boundaries.

In the face of a horrid campaign against her, the former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Professor Gillian Triggs, used her position to tell the truth about children in detention, insisting that everyone has a right to have rights.

We must choose to stay open and not build walls in a world that is rapidly changing, and we should reject any attempts to regress to times gone by.

In its purest form, free from manipulation and bias, feminism should be a movement that has the fluidity and durability to represent the interests of all women, everywhere, regardless of their colour, ability or religious background.