Please join us on Thursday the 8th of August at 5:30 pm in Archway 1 to hear Stephen Davis on this this timely topic.

The Centre for the Book is delighted to host a provocative talk by investigative reporter, TV journalist and writer Stephen Davis.   The talk is entitled Faking It:  Understanding the Modern World of Truth Prevention, Fake News and Conspiracy Theories, He will be speaking about his new book, Truthteller, recently published by Exisle Publishing. The book “is an essential guide to how governments and corporations cover up murder, corruption and catastrophe, for teachers, students and concerned citizens who want to know the facts, not fake news. Using exclusive documents and interviews from a career as an award-winning reporter, editor, foreign correspondent and television producer, Stephen Davis reveals shocking details of deceptions from Brazil to Antarctica, London to Los Angeles.”

Stephen Davis has been on the front lines of journalism for three decades as an investigative reporter in TV, magazines and newspapers and as a leading journalism educator, trying to uphold the ideals of the fourth estate, and to inspire his students to do the same.  Along the way he has encountered lying politicians and corporate con men, spies and special forces soldiers, secret policemen and scared scientists. Among those who have tried to dissuade him from reporting his stories: men with Kalashnikovs, government lawyers, corporate PRs in fancy suits, senior police officers, billionaires, and newspaper owners. Davis has worked for The Sunday Times in both London and Los Angeles, been a war and foreign correspondent, a TV producer for 60 Minutes and 20/20, a newspaper editor, a documentary film maker for the BBC and Discovery, and has taught journalism to thousands of students from all over the world. He has won multiple awards for his investigative reporting, including a silver medal at the New York film and television awards, and has designed and run journalism degree programs in London, Sydney and Melbourne.

We hope you can join us for a different slant on the issue of what print can do in the world.

For anyone who missed the recent Careers column from the ODT, here is a brief interview with Donald about his life as Director of Special Collections.  He’s a busy man of many talents (and the article does not even mention his drum-playing).

ODT_QA

‘As a class, women seem always to have been too busy to say much about themselves. And sometimes it has seemed that the more worthwhile their deeds the less they said about them. Few women have had Boswells, though many should have’.
                                                        –Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, 1937

A woman’s role in society, until recently, has traditionally been as wife, mother, and caregiver. She is often remembered in history, overwhelmingly written by men, for her looks, her body, or her scandalous behaviour. Women make up at least half of the world’s population, but they occupy less than one percent of recorded history.

On June 21st the exhibition, The Female of the Species: A Celebration of Women in History, opened in the de Beer Gallery, Special Collections at the University of Otago. It will run through until the 13^th September.

Women have always been writers, inventors, mathematicians, health practitioners, artists, rebels, activists, and warriors, but their contributions to society have often been overlooked, fading into a background overshadowed by men. The exhibition will go some way towards addressing this lack of recognition for women in history.

Famous women appear, such as Cleopatra, Emmeline Pankhurst, Marie Curie, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Florence Nightingale, and Janet Frame. Other less familiar names are also highlighted, like Christine de Pisan, the 14^th century proto-feminist; Boudica, Queen of the Iceni; Hypatia, the ancient Greek mathematician; Ida Pfeiffer, the Austrian traveller; Mary Somerville, the scientist; Ann Radcliffe, the writer; Margaret Sanger, the birth control activist; Teuta, the pirate Queen; Charlotte Guillard, the Paris printer; and many more besides.

Venue: Special Collections, de Beer Gallery, 1st floor, Central University Library

Exhibition hours: 8.30 am to 5.00 pm.

For further information, please contact the curator Romilly Smith (romilly.smith@otago.ac.nz); Dr Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian (donald.kerr@otago.ac.nz)

[With apologies for the delayed posting; the blog editor has been on annual leave]