About

Indulge me for a moment of storytelling.

emmamegg.studio is a side project of mine - Em - a 30(ish) queer, neurodivergent, migrant woman

I grew up in Bulawayo, Harare and Boorloo then - like a young Australian cliche - ran away from my growing pains and followed a boy to London and Oxford then over to Naarm, which I left for a fellowship in Copenhagen but am now back to the city I hoped not to become so smug as its inhabitants about but couldn't help but join their hordes because it really is the best city on earth. My itinerant past matters to me because it has been a lifetime of moving through a world of places I am inhabiting but never really living in; a liminality that is a constant state of uncertainty always on the cusp of transformation but never quite reaching its climax. My third space has often been creation: with my hands, my words, my fickle and fiery imagination.

My precarity over many years has stopped me from allowing myself to inhabit the labels of a human engaged in doing; the labels the root of which is a verb: writer, storyteller, artist, creator, designer. The truth is that I feel not so much like an imposter as an incomplete narrator: I am each and all so how might I choose just one?

I find it easier to acknowledge my markers of identity - queer, neurodivergent, disabled, migrant - perhaps because the social definitions of such are (arguably) less subjective, although this hasn't always been the case. I was misdiagnosed with epilepsy at 15, and refused to identify as disabled with that diagnosis because no one ever really thought it fit. After my nearly 8 years of regular 12hr anticonvulsants I was lucky enough to have a video EEG at Royal Melbourne after which I was properly diagnosed with psychogenic seizures. I still prefer to acknowledge my seizures as the reason Bronte, my golden retriever pup, is usually with me because revealing her impact on my c-ptsd or social anxiety is not as well accepted.

Identity has been the focus of my academic life for over a decade now. At first, it was the dissonance I experienced in the narrative of the larrikin and the very narrow perception of Australian identity in the history books that did not accord with what I saw - or felt. Then it became the catchcry of identity politics used by those in power to reject any changes that might threaten their ignorance to their own identities. Over time it grew into a personal quest to understand intersectionality as it could be practically applied to the world.

Now, I am nearing the final year of my PhD candidature, which has in itself been a twisting tale. My love for a chaotically creative mixed metaphor is evident in its title:

Silver Bullets for Glass Ceilings: introducing the Vectors of Opportunity Framework (VoOF) to evaluate equitable opportunities for abnormative university students.

My ~ original contribution ~, if you will, is what I believe to be the world's first intersectional quantitative tool for data collection and analysis. I built this tool to illustrate (first to myself, then to the academy and policymakers) the causal relationship between identities and opportunity that relies on our experience of our characteristics: resources, culture; the everyday. My framework measures and models this experience in a neutral, disaggregated, dynamic manner that tells a complex - intersectional - story of identity's transformation into opportunity.

The world is changing, and for this work (that I am astronomically proud of) to have the potential impact it should I need to be perceived in the world. Sharing my creative chaos with the world is one way to begin my perception exposure therapy.

So welcome, and thank you, and I hope you have a wonderful day!