Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 24 March
12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
How do we keep track of the stories that make up our lives? The repeated anecdotes among friends, the forgotten memories brought back by chance association, the family histories we’ve never heard before but that make so much sense when we do.
In another instalment of Mapping Culture, writer Alice Pung and Denise Chapman talk to Bec Kavanagh to discuss the way stories are told and passed on. In this interactive panel, writers and makers will share the stories they’ve collected and inherited, as well as the ones they’re currently shaping. Students are encouraged to bring along writing materials to work on their own stories during the experience.
This event will be followed by an introduction and visit to the Immigration Museum’s Becoming You exhibition, where participants will have the opportunity to reflect on the stories and moments that make up their own lives.
Presented in partnership with the Immigration Museum
These workshops are recommended for students in years 8-10
Featuring
Alice Pung
Alice Pung OAM is the author of the bestselling memoirs Unpolished Gem and Her Father’s Daughter, and the essay collection Close to Home, as well as the editor of the anthologies Growing Up Asian in Australia and My First Lesson. Her debut novel Laurinda won the Ethel Turner Prize at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her second novel, One Hundred Days, was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Award, and has been optioned into a film.
She is the current Artist in Residence at Janet Clarke Hall, the University of Melbourne, and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University's School of Media and Communication.
Alice was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services to literature in 2022.
View ProfileDenise Chapman
Dr Denise Chapman is a counternarrative storyteller, spoken word poet, and critical autoethnographer who lectures in children’s literature, early literacy, and inclusive children’s media at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Dr Chapman has served as a literacy specialist focused on critical media literacy in Australia, Fiji, and the United States. Denise uses oral stories, children’s literature, poetry, and digital images as counternarrative windows for social disruption and liberation. She is currently exploring preservice teachers experiences with diverse transmedia stories for children, and how teachers consider the impacts of diverse stories on children’s imagined possibilities. Collecting and analysing children’s literature, poetry, and short films centring the Global African experience serve as a favourite pastime for Denise.
Her most recent publication entitled 'The Crooked Room: Intersectional tap dancing, Academic Performing, and Negotiating Black, woman, Immigrant' is a critical poetic autoethnography that shares her wayfinding experience as an African American woman academic working in a White-privileged Australian university, trying to survive systems of oppression unacknowledged by those within the university space.
In an upcoming edited book by Dr Jeff Share entitled Ecowriting in Every Classroom, Denise discusses the freedoms and conscious-raising connections that stories lend to those experiencing oppression, as stories can help us fly.
Bec Kavanagh
Bec Kavanagh is a Melbourne-based writer and academic whose work examines the representation of women’s bodies in literature. She has appeared at the Melbourne and Sydney Writers Festivals and on Radio National’s Books and Arts Daily ...