Palimpsest and seduction: The glass palace and white teeth

There is much critical commentary on the use of palimpsest as a metaphor in postcolonial writing for the violent imposition of colonial culture and indeed, this emphasis is warranted. Less noted, however, is the element of seduction involved in the concept of hegemonic control in colonial or imperial situations and in postcolonial fiction. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the use of these concepts in the popular and critically acclaimed postcolonial novels, Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2000) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). While palimpsest — as metaphor and technique — is evident in both, this essay argues that the idea of seduction plays an important part in the understanding and representation of complex colonial relationships in both novels

Disability-Related Questions for Administrative Datasets

High rates of unemployment among people with disability are long-standing and persistent problems worldwide. For public policy, estimates of prevalence and population profiles are required for designing support schemes such as Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme; for monitoring implementation of the United Nations Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and for monitoring service access, participation, and equity for people with disability in mainstream systems including employment. In the public sector, creating a succinct identifier for disability in administrative systems is a key challenge for public policy design and monitoring. This requires concise methods of identifying people with disability within systems, producing data comparable with population data to gauge accessibility and equity. We aimed to create disability-related questions of value to the purposes of an Australian state and contribute to literature on parsimonious and respectful disability identification for wider application. The research, completed in 2017, involved mapping and identification of key disability concepts for inclusion in new questions, focus groups to refine wording of new questions, and online surveys of employees evaluating two potential new question sets on the topic of disability and environment. Recommendations for new disability-related questions and possible new data collection processes are being considered and used by the leading state authority