The Sydney Review of Books are delighted to be partnering with the Writing and Society Research Centre and the Gender UNLIMITED* team at Western Sydney University to host the second Writing Gender public webinar to explore the role of writing in generating new knowledge and understandings around gender. This annual event aims to bring together Humanities and Arts practitioners into national conversations over advancing gender equity in the Higher Education sector.
This year Amani Haydar, Eloise Brook, Mykaela Saunders, Eda Gunaydin and Donna Abela will be in conversation. Writing Gender #2 considers how writing plays a significant role in making visible acts of cultural, physical and gendered violence against women and trans and gender diverse people, through both the telling of stories, and the re-witnessing of trauma. It explores such writing within contexts of cultural safety and healing, and the vital necessity of articulation, including the power of trauma-informed narratives to engender greater public awareness and instigate social action. It finally reflects on the potential toll of this repeated narrative re-visiting, especially in public spaces, including digital communities. What happens when trauma is the conduit to writing in the public sphere? What new kinds of violence can occur when trauma is mobilised through writing for public consumption?
A series of short essays by each of the speakers will be published in the SRB in the lead-up to the event.
Friday 9 September 2022
11am – 12.30pm AEST
Free, online via Zoom
RSVP essential, register on Eventbrite
Moderator
Donna Abela (she/her) is a playwright, dramaturge, and educator. She is the author of award-winning play, Jump For Jordan, which now features on the HSC Drama Syllabus. A long time writing teacher and mentor, most recently, Donna taught scriptwriting at Excelsia College, and the Page to Stage course at the National Theatre of Parramatta. She is a founding member, and co-chair, of PYT Fairfield, a founding member of the playwrights’ alliance 7-ON, and in 2016-2017, worked as a Narrative Writer with the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Panellists
Amani Haydar is an award-winning writer, visual artist, lawyer and advocate for women’s health and safety based in Western Sydney. Amani’s debut memoir The Mother Wound has been the recipient of multiple accolades, including the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. Amani is also the recipient of the 2021 UTS Faculty of Law Alumni Award, and was named Local Woman of the Year for Bankstown at the 2020 NSW Premier’s Woman of the Year Awards in recognition of her advocacy against domestic violence. As a distinguished visual artist, Amani is also a former Archibald Prize finalist.
Eloise Brook is a writer, advocate and academic. She is the Health and Communications Manager for the NSW Gender Centre, podcaster and public speaker. She has worked as a researcher and lecturer into public health policy and political science at Sydney University and Western Sydney University. Eloise has published on queer and TGD families in television, researched on public health and public policy around TGD people. She is currently the editor of Australia’s most well known transgender and Gender Diverse Magazine: POLARE.
Mykaela Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher, community researcher and the editor of This All Come Back Now, the world’s first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP). Mykaela has won the Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, the National Indigenous Story Award, the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Prize for Nonfiction and the University of Sydney’s Sister Alison Bush Graduate Medal for Indigenous Research.
Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist whose writing explores class, race, diaspora and Western Sydney. She has been a finalist for a Queensland Literary Award and the Scribe Non-Fiction Prize. Her debut essay collection Root & Branch is out now with NewSouth Publishing.