We’d like to congratulate our student, Shé Hawke, on her outstanding chapter in the recent international publication, Borders and Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness (2018).

We’d like to congratulate our student, Shé Hawke, on her outstanding chapter in the recent international publication, Borders and Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness (2018). The book takes a hard look at the world of borders we live in and the often lethal and devastating impact they have on human life for those caught between or find themselves on the outlier. It ultimately pushes us to think about these human constructs and ponder how we can do better.

Shé’s chapter, titled “Graft versus Host: Waters that Convey and Harbors that Reject Liminal Subjects”, provides thought-provoking insight into the status of asylum seekers in the Pacific. This work is both a sharp critique and careful analysis of global politics that often leave human beings fatally adrift on perilous seas, seen as too different to be ‘hosted’ by a new world.

Her account of the Children Overboard Affair, and the more fatal SIEV, is made more poignant by her analysis of the installation of the SIEV X memorial in Canberra’s Weston Park, Yarralumla. This memorial, she says, does such important reparative work as it symbolises the people’s need to ‘recognize and make knowable those perished lives’ to honour their passage through the world and acknowledge the grief of their families. She concludes with a haunting poem ‘Refugees’, a lyrical, fitting observation that sharing the world has long been an uneasy enterprise, but it is something we can and must get better at.

Shé Hawke has just completed her Graduate Diploma of Theology with St Mark’s National Theological Centre through the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University. She will be graduating with Distinction. She is currently working with chaplaincy at John James Hospital in Canberra. 

Borders and Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness is available for purchase online.