Feature: UniSA Creative’s New Lecturer, Jessica White, speaks on why having a disability is not a deficit and her efforts in writing about environmental crisis

UniSA Creative’s newest Senior Lecturer, Doctor Jessica White, is a New South Wales writer and researcher with a passion for travelling and an ambition to use literature to change the way the world thinks about environmental crisis and disability. White discusses upcoming projects, her recent move to UniSA, and how her own disability has proven to be an incredible strength in her life. 

At the age of 4, White lost the majority of her hearing after being treated for bacterial meningitis. In the years that followed, White refused to allow her deafness to be a cause for dreaming small. At first, she turned to literature as an escape from the world that she had struggled to navigate. Social interaction became difficult and exhausting because she was unable to pick up on social cues and understand how to hold conversations.

“Mum and Dad had to role play conversations with me, because I couldn’t pick it up intuitively,” said White. “I was always reading because it was an escape, and I loved writing letters because that was a way for me to communicate with people that wasn’t taxing or confronting.”

Reading and letter writing evolved into the decision to study creative writing and English literature at Wollongong University. It was there that White truly began to develop her passion for exploring her experiences and thoughts through writing.

“At Wollongong, I started writing as a way of dealing with the frustrations of being deaf,” White recalled as she explained why storytelling has always felt important to her. “I am trying to communicate the problems I see around me. Environmental crisis is a big problem, so I always write about that, but social isolation, and the desire to connect with people, always comes through in my characters because my own formative experience was being isolated because of my deafness.”

White has spent her career exploring these ideas through essays, journal articles, poetry, short fiction and three award winning novels; including a hybrid memoir titled ‘Hearing Maud’ where White narrates her experiences of deafness from her early life through to establishing her writing career. 

“I want to change the way that people think about disability,” White said about her writing goals, “people think that disability is a burden, but I maintain that it is inherently creative because you constantly need to problem solve.”

It is true that White’s deafness did not become a deficit in her life, rather it is the strength that prepared her for a successful career in the creative industries.

White has needed to re-evaluate how able-bodied people are able to accomplish tasks and gather information in order to establish her own way of navigating and being successful within the world. Her life experiences have not only evolved her creative thinking skills but have given her the self-discipline and introspectiveness required of a successful writer. Without those formative experiences of finding solace within stories and connection through writing, White would not have the foundation that led her to the creative writing classes of Wollongong University and saw her through a Doctorate at the University of London.

Jessica White’s self-discipline and ability to overcome is once again proved in her passion for travel. Despite growing up to be very shy due to her difficulty in understanding social cues, White pushed herself to overcome that shyness by studying abroad at the University of California. White carries that love of new experiences with her all the way to her latest position at UniSA.

“I’m inspired by change,” said White when asked why she was excited to work for UniSA. “I like meeting new people and I haven’t spent time in South Australia before, so I thought this would be a nice challenge.”

White’s time at UniSA has also given her the ability to continue writing her 20-year work-in-progress, an ecobiography on Georgiana Molloy, Western Australia’s first female scientist.

“The term ecobiography was coined in the 1990’s,” explained White, “it focuses on the interaction of a person’s life with the environment.”

White hopes to tell an expansive tale about how Molloy’s exploration of the Australian bush developed into a passion for nature that reinvented Molloy’s sense of identity in the midst of an incredibly difficult life. Ultimately, it is a story that White hopes will emphasise our environmental crisis.

“If we lose the environment, we lose a part of ourselves. Not just physically, in the sense that we need oxygen to survive, but also psychically, we need to be surrounded by nature because it makes us who we are.”

White has always tried to communicate the puzzles she sees in the world through writing. Rewiring how the world thinks about disability has been one of the key puzzles of her career and this ecobiography will be her latest effort in the puzzle that is understanding environmental crisis.

Ultimately, White believes the goals for her research and writing can be summed into one message:

“If the trees die, we die, and disability is not a deficit.”