Tokenism
Tokenism

Tokenism

My TedX Talk: “Moving beyond the token minority” (at Macquarie University)

Popular culture —particularly film and TV—struggle to portray fictional worlds that reflect the diversity of the real one. In the push for more diverse storytelling, however, the task is not simply to tick boxes and represent minorities, but to normalise. More minority storytellers delivers a diversity of rich storytelling that goes beyond stereotypes and trauma tales.

Trauma Testaments and Creative Vertigo

It was a couple of years after September 11. But the Australian media had its Muslim spokespeople, and I had no desire to be a mouthpiece in this excruciating moment. So in my debut mainstream piece, I didn’t write about being Muslim in an increasingly Islamophobic world. I wrote of my struggles to transform the high of graduating with a challenging degree into a meaningful career, one where the pile of rejection letters grew so thick I went from paper clip to bulldog.