Grenfell

• The arrival of the Bibby Stockholm barge at Portland Port, in Dorset, on July 18 2023, marks a new low in the UK government’s hostile immigration environment.
• The vessel is set to accommodate over 500 asylum seekers.
• My research shows that facilities built to house irregular migrants in Europe and beyond create a temporary infrastructure designed to be hostile.

Precarious space

• Journalists Lizzie Dearden and Martha McHardy have shown this means the asylum seekers housed there – for up to nine months – will have “less living space than an average parking bay”.
• This stands in contravention of international standards of a minimum 4.5m² of covered living space per person in cold climates, where more time is spent indoors.
• Locals are concerned already overstretched services in Portland, including GP practices, will not be able to cope with further pressure.
• The difficulty of escaping a vessel at sea could turn it into a death trap.

Performative hostility

• In 2015, Berlin officials began temporarily housing refugees in the former Tempelhof airport, a noisy, alienating industrial space, lacking in privacy and disconnected from the city.
• French authorities, meanwhile, opened the Centre Humanitaire Paris-Nord in Paris in 2016, temporary migrant housing in a disused train depot.
• Nicknamed la Bulle (the bubble) for its bulbous inflatable covering, this facility was noisy and claustrophobic, lacking in basic comforts.
• Like the barge in Portland Port, these facilities, placed in industrial sites, sit uncomfortably between hospitality and hostility.
• Rather than deterring asylum seekers, the Bibby Stockholm is potentially creating another hazard to them and to their hosting communities.

• Most of us know Henry Lawson and Judith Wright are icons of Australian literature.
• On AustLit, the Australian literature database, only ten of the 788 items on Lawson mention his deafness.
• Read more:
  Les Murray said his autism shaped his poetry – his late poems offer insights into his creative process

Henry Lawson: deafness inherent to his writing

• It is difficult to precisely describe his level of deafness from then on, but he needed anyone speaking to him to be close by and to face him.
• His deafness remained a key influence on his content and style throughout his 35-year writing career.
• He wrote about his own deafness in essays such as A Fragment of Autobiography, and poems such as The Soul of a Poet.
• Hearing people often make deafness a constant focus when they write deaf characters – but in his stories, he would often only mention a character’s deafness once.
• Deafness was also part of his writing style.

Judith Wright’s deafness: ‘creatively generative’

• Three years later, she was diagnosed with otosclerosis, a form of atypical bone growth within the middle ear that causes progressive hearing loss.
• Her deafness meant she was denied entry into the women’s forces during World War II.
• When the servicemen returned and her role became insecure, she made a critical decision, one directly informed by her deafness.
• Read more:
  Friday essay: Judith Wright in a new light

Ignoring disability has consequences

• And often the exceptions, like I Can Jump Puddles (1955) by Alan Marshall, who was partially paralysed as a result of childhood polio, are interpreted as narratives of overcoming disability – rather than the narrative of disability pride that they are.
• When they grow up to be publishers, teachers, librarians, editors, and booksellers, they unthinkingly pass this message on to the next generation by continuing to omit disability from Australian writing.
• The consequences of erasing disability from Australian literature are worse for disabled readers and writers.
• Like Lawson and Wright, renowned Australian poet Les Murray acknowledged his disability (autism) for decades before his death, starting in 1974.
• When we understand impairment as a complex condition rather than simply a deficit, we realise disability engenders creativity.

• The 24-minute film – which the artist captured by helicopter in December 2017, six months after the fire – rotates around the Grenfell Tower in silence.
• The fire at west London’s Grenfell Tower broke out in the early hours of the morning, on 14 June 2017.
• A government inquiry was launched, but the recommendations of the first phase of the report have yet to be implemented.
• McQueen’s project aims to ensure that Grenfell “lives on in the mind of the nation and the world long after the covering went up”.

• Click here , or visit https://kyotoprize-us.org/event-registration to reserve a seat at the Symposium’s speaking events, featuring the latest Kyoto Prize laureates:
  Technology: “Engineering Concepts Clarify Physical Law,” by Dr.
• Carver Mead, Wed., March 15, 10:00-11:30 a.m.-PDT, at UC San Diego.
• Mead serves as Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, at California Institute of Technology.
• Arts: “Indian Classical Music – Tradition and Beyond,” by Dr. Zakir Hussain, Fri., March 17, 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.-PDT, at UC San Diego.