Issue Details: First known date: 2015... 2015 Villawood : Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre
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Notes

  • Includes embedded artworks by inhabitants of Villawood Detention Centre.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Shipping News Australia : Medium , 2015 14578348 2015 website

    Crowd-funded by GetUp members in 2015, The Shipping News was conceived as citizen journalism, which would enable increased awareness of Australia's immigration detention policies, despite the tightening of press visas to Nauru.

    Australia : Medium , 2015
    Note:

    Posted 17 April 2015.

Works about this Work

“On Their Own Terms” : Agency, Advocacy and Representation in Refugee Webcomics Shannon Sandford , 2024 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 48 no. 2 2024; (p. 194-208)
'In Australia, refugees remain on the margins of the public imaginary as subjects of aversion, erasure and suspicion. The unknowability of the foreign Other carries sharp political dimensions borne out in policies of strict border control and mandatory detention that have restricted public access to the voices and stories of refugees for over two decades. However, recent life narratives by refugees provide an antidote to this dominant discourse, by testifying to the traumatic precariousness of living in detention and confronting readers with unflinching visual displays of subjects often silenced and invisible. Safdar Ahmed’s Walkley Award–winning documentary webcomic, Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre (2015), documents the lives, experiences and drawings of detainees in Sydney’s Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. This article reads Villawood as an example of the vital rhetorical and representative work done by webcomics to expose the violences of Australia’s border spaces and put the personal stories of detainees in dialogue with vast audiences online. By attending to the collaborative and mediated process of its construction, this article maps the critical literacies needed to interpret webcomics as testimony and considers what this medium might offer life narrative studies and the project of ethical witnessing more broadly.' (Publication abstract)
Zines of Rupture : Theorising Migration Studies Using Comics by Racialised Migrants and Refugees Daniella Trimboli , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Continuum : Journal of Media and Cultural Studies , vol. 36 no. 6 2022; (p. 936-953)

'Much research has been carried out on the discursive dehumanization of non-Anglo Celtic migrants to Australia – especially refugees and asylum seekers. However, this discourse also has an affective dimension that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, ‘stick’, impressing upon non-white migrants at a corporeal level. Depictions of self and Other in comic zines such as Where Do I Belong? by Silent Army, Villawood: Notes from a Detention Centre by Safdar Ahmed, and The Refugee Art Project’s zine collection clearly demonstrate the ways in which the body is implicated in narratives about migration and asylum. This paper argues that the comic zine medium also allows for ‘something else’ to surface; namely, an excess with an interruptive rhythm. This excess is posited here as a type of ‘diasporic intimacy’—a dystopic and unsuspecting affective force that disrupts the temporal and spatial rhythms of everyday life. By harnessing diasporic intimacies, the comic zines discussed here redeploy sticky and toxic discourses about migration and asylum, creating space for the migrant body to resist and reassemble.' (Publication abstract)

Cultural Diversity and Australian Comics Golnar Nabizadeh , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Folio : Stories of Contemporary Australian Comics , December 2021;
y separately published work icon Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels Golnar Nabizadeh , London : Routledge , 2019 27121916 2019 multi chapter work criticism

'This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: ‘How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?’, ‘How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?’, and ‘How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?

'The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression – at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international – in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Ten of Australia’s Best Literary Comics Gabriel Clark , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 11 September 2018;

'With news that the Man Booker Prize long list includes a graphic novel for the first time, the spotlight is on comics as a literary form. That’s a welcome development; the comic is one of the oldest kinds of storytelling we have and a powerful artform.' (Introduction)

Ten of Australia’s Best Literary Comics Gabriel Clark , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 11 September 2018;

'With news that the Man Booker Prize long list includes a graphic novel for the first time, the spotlight is on comics as a literary form. That’s a welcome development; the comic is one of the oldest kinds of storytelling we have and a powerful artform.' (Introduction)

Zines of Rupture : Theorising Migration Studies Using Comics by Racialised Migrants and Refugees Daniella Trimboli , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Continuum : Journal of Media and Cultural Studies , vol. 36 no. 6 2022; (p. 936-953)

'Much research has been carried out on the discursive dehumanization of non-Anglo Celtic migrants to Australia – especially refugees and asylum seekers. However, this discourse also has an affective dimension that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, ‘stick’, impressing upon non-white migrants at a corporeal level. Depictions of self and Other in comic zines such as Where Do I Belong? by Silent Army, Villawood: Notes from a Detention Centre by Safdar Ahmed, and The Refugee Art Project’s zine collection clearly demonstrate the ways in which the body is implicated in narratives about migration and asylum. This paper argues that the comic zine medium also allows for ‘something else’ to surface; namely, an excess with an interruptive rhythm. This excess is posited here as a type of ‘diasporic intimacy’—a dystopic and unsuspecting affective force that disrupts the temporal and spatial rhythms of everyday life. By harnessing diasporic intimacies, the comic zines discussed here redeploy sticky and toxic discourses about migration and asylum, creating space for the migrant body to resist and reassemble.' (Publication abstract)

Cultural Diversity and Australian Comics Golnar Nabizadeh , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Folio : Stories of Contemporary Australian Comics , December 2021;
y separately published work icon Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels Golnar Nabizadeh , London : Routledge , 2019 27121916 2019 multi chapter work criticism

'This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: ‘How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?’, ‘How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?’, and ‘How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?

'The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression – at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international – in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

“On Their Own Terms” : Agency, Advocacy and Representation in Refugee Webcomics Shannon Sandford , 2024 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 48 no. 2 2024; (p. 194-208)
'In Australia, refugees remain on the margins of the public imaginary as subjects of aversion, erasure and suspicion. The unknowability of the foreign Other carries sharp political dimensions borne out in policies of strict border control and mandatory detention that have restricted public access to the voices and stories of refugees for over two decades. However, recent life narratives by refugees provide an antidote to this dominant discourse, by testifying to the traumatic precariousness of living in detention and confronting readers with unflinching visual displays of subjects often silenced and invisible. Safdar Ahmed’s Walkley Award–winning documentary webcomic, Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre (2015), documents the lives, experiences and drawings of detainees in Sydney’s Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. This article reads Villawood as an example of the vital rhetorical and representative work done by webcomics to expose the violences of Australia’s border spaces and put the personal stories of detainees in dialogue with vast audiences online. By attending to the collaborative and mediated process of its construction, this article maps the critical literacies needed to interpret webcomics as testimony and considers what this medium might offer life narrative studies and the project of ethical witnessing more broadly.' (Publication abstract)
Last amended 12 Sep 2018 16:08:22
Subjects:
  • Villawood, Bankstown area, Sydney Southwest, Sydney, New South Wales,
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