The career evolution of Britain’s best-known natural history filmmaker, Sir David Attenborough, will be the focus of a University of Queensland seminar on 30 April.
UQ Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies researcher Dr Morgan Richards will explore how complex environmental issues have been dealt with in Attenborough’s 50-year documentary-making career.
“This seminar asks how one of the most celebrated communicators of the natural world has shone a light on animals and the environment as objects of popular fascination and concern,” Dr Richards said.
The seminar will take the form of a public lecture and a question and answer session.
Clips and images will be referenced throughout the seminar, including archival footage from Disney’s 1951 true-life adventure film ‘Nature’s Half Acre’, and Attenborough’s landmark series ‘Life on Earth’ (1979) and ‘Frozen Planet’ (2011).
Dr Richards will discuss the complexities of environmental politics and scientific practice and the limits of existing approaches in wildlife film-making.
Seminar chair and UQ Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies Director Gay Hawkins said research and enquiry into climate change was important from a social perspective.
“Climate change is usually talked about in scientific and environmental terms,” Professor Hawkins said.
“For humanity to adequately address climate change we need to consider how science, nature, human culture and politics are all implicated in this issue.”
Event details:
What: Seminar: ‘Planet Attenborough: Wildlife Documentary and the Politics of Climate Change’
When: Tuesday 30April, 2:30pm-3:30pm
Where: Conference Room, Level 1, Duhig Library (#2), UQ St Lucia Campus
Admission: Free
To RSVP to this lecture and the reception to follow, contact Rebecca Ralph, r.ralph@uq.edu.au, (07) 3346 7407, by Wednesday, April 24.
Media: Lisa Summer-Hayes, (07) 3365 2632 or l.summerhayes@uq.edu.au.
Notes to editor
Dr Morgan Richards is a researcher in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at UQ, specialising in the environmental humanities and screen culture. She is interested in how documentary and factual television intersect with new media technologies. Her forthcoming book, Wild Visions: The Rise of Wildlife Documentary, traces more than 100 years of wildlife documentary-making in Britain.
Dr Richards is currently researching the Australian wildlife television industry for a new Screen Animals collaborative project with Professor Gay Hawkins.
