New ALIVE Article: Before the Microphone

I’m pleased to share my new article published through The ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation: Before the Microphone: On Knowledge, Migration, and the Quiet Work of Translation.

This piece is part of my writer-in-residence series with ALIVE; a national research translation initiative based at the University of Melbourne that brings together researchers, practitioners, and people with lived/living experience to strengthen how mental health knowledge is understood and applied.

The article sits with a question that has followed me for some time: where does knowledge actually begin?

Often, it begins long before podiums, qualifications, policy conversations, or professional recognition. It begins in earlier rooms; caregiving, grief, migration, silence, and the ordinary discipline of learning to remain present beside suffering. This piece traces how that kind of knowledge is formed, and what happens when it later enters professional and institutional spaces.

Why this ALIVE article matters

There is a tension here that continues to shape my work.

Some of the deepest forms of knowing are formed outside formal systems; in families, in hardship, in cultural crossings, and in the quiet responsibilities people carry without language for what they are learning. Yet institutions tend to recognise knowledge more readily once it has been translated into familiar forms; research, credentials, frameworks, and professional language.

That tension is not abstract for me.

My own life has been shaped by caregiving, migration, grief, and lived/living experience. Over time, I have found myself returning to the distance between the origin of knowledge and the point at which it becomes legible to systems. This article stays with that distance; what translation makes possible, what it changes, and what it leaves behind.

What readers will find in this ALIVE article

In Before the Microphone, I return to a moment that unsettled me more than I expected; standing at a conference podium and noticing people writing down what I was saying.

The disruption was not about confidence or preparation. It was the recognition that what the room was hearing had roots elsewhere; in a home shaped by disability, illness, emotional pain, and the quiet rituals of care.

The article traces how that early education was deepened by grief and later reshaped by migration. It considers what happens when private, embodied, culturally situated knowledge is translated into forms institutions can recognise and circulate. It also sits with a quieter question; how authority is formed, and why some forms of knowledge are heard only after they have been reframed.

If you have ever had to translate your life into language that systems could understand, this piece may resonate.

You can read the full article here

I’m grateful to ALIVE for creating space for this kind of writing; writing that makes room for complexity, memory, and the quieter forms of knowledge that often sit beneath professional life.

Based in Perth, WA, LEXs provides telehealth counselling across Australia for individuals, couples, and NDIS participants. Services extend to Social Work supervision, Peer Work supervision, training, and keynote speaking on men’s mental health, CaLD community wellbeing, and culturally responsive suicide prevention; helping people and organisations make mental-health care more compassionate, inclusive, and effective. LEXs provides services across Australia, supporting clients in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and beyond. To learn more about our work across Australia, visit LEXs' services.