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IN-PERSON LECTURE
Green Foundation Ireland, in collaboration with the Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate Action, invite you to participate in an afternoon in-person lecture, which will be chaired by JOHN BARRY, Professor of Green Political Economy at Queen’s University Belfast:
Narratives of Green Growth and
Degrowth in Popular Hollywood Film
WEDNESDAY 7 OCTOBER 2026 – 14:00 to 16:00 (Irish time)
(registration starts at 13:45)
Venue:
Room 1/003, School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast
27 University Square, Belfast, BT7 1NN.
GETTING THERE
Our lecture will take place in the School of Creative Arts, Queen’s University Belfast at 27 University Square, Belfast, BT7 1NN.
The School of Creative Arts is easy to reach. From Belfast city centre, you can take a train from Belfast Grand Central Station (formerly Great Victoria Street Station) to Botanic Station. Here is a map of how to get from Botanic Station to our venue – it will take approximately 5 minutes to walk.
QUB have produced Getting Here which details various ways of finding your way to Queen’s University Belfast.
As always at our events,
an important part will be the
Q&A session which will allow full
participation by those attending.
About Our Guest Lecturer
PAT BRERETON
Pat is Emeritus Professor at Dublin City University and is Chair of Green Foundation Ireland (GFI). His latest book is Farming in Ireland: Crisis and Climate – An Oral History from the Irish Midlands (Wordwell, 2026).
Over much of his academic career, Pat has remained preoccupied with how fictional (and documentary) narratives serve to address the climate emergency. Alongside breaching so many planetary boundaries, film and media must address the dilemma of Western over-consumption and the consequent need for economic degrowth – or at least some form of green growth, which the EU have been promoting up to recently. This economic turn remains counter-intuitive for many in the film business, being ostensibly premised on mass production and conspicuous consumption. Yet, he tentatively argues that Hollywood’s ongoing fixation with ‘saving the planet’ is especially evident through cautionary science fiction storylines that often call attention to problems around over-consumption and the urgent need for degrowth. Examples used to illustrate the lecture include WALL-E, Downsizing, the Avatar franchise and the Netflix hit, Don’t Look Up.
Serving as a structural mechanism or machine for simultaneously staging and containing ecological anxiety (Jameson 1978), eco-science fiction blockbusters can, at the same time, foreground various environmental cautionary tales to help actively engage audiences. Reflecting on his doctoral thesis, Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema (Intellect Books, 2004), Pat will re-examine these canonical texts, together with more recent iterations, to assess Hollywood’s ongoing environmental influence over the intervening decades in reflecting the sometimes-covert seepage of radical environmental representations around degrowth.
TICKET DETAILS
While admission is FREE to this event, registration is REQUIRED. Please secure your place by booking here.
THEME
As we breach so many planetary boundaries, film and media must address the dilemma of western over-consumption and the resulting need for economic degrowth – or at least some form of green growth, which the EU has been promoting up to recently.
This can be illustrated by Hollywood’s ongoing fixation with ‘saving the planet’ and cautionary science fiction storylines that often call attention to problems around over-consumption and the urgent need for degrowth. Examples used to illustrate the lecture include WALL-E, Downsizing, the Avatar franchise and the Netflix hit, Don’t Look Up.