I’d like to pay my respects to the traditional custodians of this land on which our zine was primarily put together: The Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung lands of the Kulin Nations in Naarm. I’d like to pay my respects to their elders past, present and their young leaders of today. And acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded and will never be ceded. I want to acknowledge that art, story telling and music have been here on this land 10s of thousands of years before today. 
So I’m going to talk a bit about, what the core of this event, this zine and this website that we’re going to share in the next 40minutes is.
Yes, this is apart of our student campaigning efforts for our ticket The People’s Press. And yes, we really want to win the student media office at the University of Melbourne. But for a moment I want to just put aside those politics. 

We’ve invited unimelb and non-unimelb people to this event because ultimately we just want to create a space to hold, breathe with, and celebrate the work that has gone into Imagined Communities. From what is over 40 contributors most of who we actually did not know or did not know too well before we started campaigning, and some of who never knew student media existed, or who were too scared to walk through those doors 

What we really want is to use media, music, writing, art and all other forms of creativity to create a genuine intersection in the loneliness that is COVID. We wanted this intersection to be equitable, that means meeting people where they’re at. We wanted that intersection point to be accessible, which means not putting expectations on what the contribution needs to look like, taking contributions big and small. And we wanted as much genuine representation of students and our lives as we could get. 
You’ll find there are memes in there, there are sneaky ethical screenshots of text messages of major COVID  moods, and there are also written pieces that will make you angry at the world and that will make you cry.  Miffy for example has a piece written in Chinese because that’s the language she’s most fluent in, and it’s been lovingly translated by Vivian Li, because we want to create a bridge of empathy between different student groups. Rai for example has had a huge workload, but also has genuine insight she wants to give, and so we did an interview format to lighten the load.

And the outcome, are voices and stories you wouldn’t have heard or known of otherwise. And the outcome is hopefully, you’ll all feel a bit closer together and laugh and cry over the same thing. 
Obviously, there is no set of knowledge that will automatically mean you are equip to facilitate the best equity, accessibility or representation. There is no tool kit that will automatically help you dehydrate the sea of whiteness. We can only keep experimenting and listening and trying.