About the event

The perceptions of rhino horn as medicine for various ailments and as an object of wealth, power and desire spans both the West and the East. These perceptions that drive demand is reflected in the news and the news outputs of conservation groups. Perhaps indicative of this, African rhinos have repeatedly been hunted to the brink of extinction and returned. The fight to save them is happening again. This talk discusses Dr Michael Smith’s media criminology research on enforcement and behaviour change campaigns to fight the rhino horn trade in Vietnam. It draws on research both journalistic and academic. 

About the speaker

Michael Smith has a PhD in journalism and is a media criminologist and adjunct research fellow with the Griffith Criminology Institute in Brisbane Australia. His research focus in the last year as a Visiting Researcher at the Oxford Centre for Socio Legal Studies has been on international cooperation to fight the rhino horn trade in Vietnam. He first became interested in the rhino horn trade when he visited Vietnam’s Cat Tien National Park in 2010 as a journalist. He discovered a scandalous trade in rhino horn from South Africa to Vietnam. It was about to spiral out of control. Since Cat Tien, he has written several award-winning longform investigative pieces about the demand in Vietnam and the poaching frenzy in South Africa and has published in academic journals and books.

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