A leading British academic will present a free public seminar and a public lecture on public service broadcasting at The University of Queensland next week.
Professor Georgina Born is a College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences; Reader in Sociology, Anthropology and Music and Official Fellow at Cambridge University.
She will present a public lecture for UQ`s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and the ARC Cultural Research Network entitled: Public Service Broadcasting – the last decade and the future: Lessons from the BBC and the UK on Thursday, July 27 at The Mayne Centre, University Drive, St Lucia at 5.30pm.
In this lecture Professor Born will discuss the BBC, which she says appears poised to emerge fighting fit from a decade of the most challenging transformations since its birth in the 1920s.
She will discuss how it has taken an unprecedentedly commercial direction and has undergone profound organisational changes, and how it has responded to the advent of digital media by embracing a range of digital activities.
Professor Born will discuss how the the BBC will fare in the future and the concern in going forward where there are four developments that evidence the BBC’s continuing subordination to political dictates.
The lecture will be chaired by Professor Graeme Turner, director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies.
Professor Born will also give a free seminar for the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and ARC Cultural Research Network entitled: Digitising Democracy: Digitisation, Pluralism, and Public Service Communications on Tuesday, July 25 at 2:00pm.
This seminar will discuss the absence of debate over the future of public service broadcasting in Britain. It will discuss the social and political potential of digital media – internet and digital tv – and their relation to public service communications; the rethinking of this in terms of pluralism and inequality. He will discuss several communicative vectors that might be required by a pluralist communicative democracy in light of the expanding range of possibilities offered by digital media.
The seminar will be held in the Social Sciences and Humanities Library Conference Room , Level 1, Duhig Building, University of Queensland, St Lucia Campus.
Members of the university community and the general public are invited to attend both the free public lecture and the free seminar with refreshments to follow.
Enquiries to Ms Rebecca Ralph, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies. Phone (07) 3346 9764, fax (07) 3365 7184, email admin.cccs@uq.edu.au
