SpokenWeb Podcast

S2-Episode 11

Revisiting “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”

This episode takes us back to a SpokenWeb Project panel presentation from April 2021: “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study.” This panel was organized by Jason Camlot and Stacey Copeland, and led by SpokenWeb Podcast host Hannah McGregor. It used the recently published volume, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry), as an opportunity to think about and discuss the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study – a subject central to the mission of the SpokenWeb Podcast.

In this episode of the podcast, Jason draws upon the recording of this event to revisit key moments: a presentation by Dario Llinares about the main theses of the book and his reflections on how the landscape of research around podcasting is rapidly developing; brief position papers from respondents Stacey Copeland (SFU), Elena Razlogova (Concordia U), Kim Fox (American University in Cairo), Michael O’Driscoll (U Alberta) and Deanna Fong (Concordia U); and questions and participation from event attendees. You can watch the full event as a Zoom recording on the SpokenWeb Project’s Archive of the Present: https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/podcasting-as-a-field-of-critical-study-20-april-2021/

Here’s a note from Jason about making the episode and using the Korg Monotron to score it:

In editing and producing this episode, my goal was to capture the feeling and flow of the original panel presentations and discussion, while speeding up the pace a bit, and creating new thematic sections and transitions, where necessary. To mark transitions between thematic sections I decided to compose some sounds using a lo fi instrument, the Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer. This little device has just a few knobs, switches, and touch ribbon keyboard, but can generate a vast range of sounds. It is simple, DIY and accessible (anyone can play it), yet it also suggests endless possibilities of sound, pacing, tone and mood; just like podcasting! It was also just there, sitting on my desk, ready at hand. For these reasons, I felt the Monotron was an appropriate instrument to use for scoring this collaborative discussion about podcasting as a critical medium.

Voices Heard in this Episode:

Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, Deanna Fong, Kim Fox, Dario Llinares, Michael O’Driscoll, Elena Razlogova, Jason Camlot, and attendees of the event.

00:18	SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music.	[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.
00:18	Hannah McGregor:	What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: Intro Music] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. As you, our listeners, may well know at this point, we’re a podcast created by and grounded in the scholarly research of the SpokenWeb project community. It’s natural, then that we’re interested in how podcasting is generally being taken up as a tool, talked about, and studied in academic spaces. It may seem surprising that this is happening, that podcasting is being studied as a form of scholarly production, as an important new mode of knowledge making and sharing. An episode of your favorite podcast feels and sounds so different from the written journal articles and conference papers traditionally used to share academic knowledge. What does it mean when podcasters engage with, infiltrate, maybe mess with and transform the way the production and dissemination of knowledge happens in the academic sphere and what critical work is currently being done to understand the impact that podcasting is having on specialized fields of research, scholarship and teaching?
01:49	Hannah McGregor:	Jason Camlot is the director of the SpokenWeb project and he’s helped us think through pieces of this question in past episodes of the podcast. In our episodes, ‘Ideas have feelings, too: Voice, Feeling and Rhetoric in Podcasting’ and ‘Cylinder Talks: Podcasting in Literary Sound Studies’, Jason, and his co-producers took us into the university classroom and showed us how students are using podcasting as a tool for critical analysis and communication. Scenes from these episodes demonstrate the emotional and intellectual depth and merit that podcasting has when used as a teaching method and research tool, and raise questions about what podcasting is doing in scholarly contexts. When Dario Llinares invited Stacey and Jason to discuss their cylinder talks episode for his own New Aural Cultures podcast, they got to talking and thinking that it would be fun to organize a panel with a bunch of scholar podcasters to consider the current state of podcasts studies. Is podcasts studies emerging as an actual disciplinary field of study in the way that film studies and radio studies have established themselves in the academy?
02:57	Hannah McGregor:	What does it mean to define podcasting as a distinct field of critical study? Is that something we really want to do? Jason and Stacey went on to organize the panel. They invited Dario to provide some opening remarks based on arguments he first outlined in his co-edited collection, Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media. Stacey acted as a respondent along with Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, Michael O’Driscoll, and Deanna Fong, each of whom had something unique to say in response to the core question: what is podcasting as a field of critical study? In this new episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Jason has selected and arranged key parts of a conversation that was first heard live on Zoom on April 20th, 2021 in a virtual panel called “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. I, Hannah, hosted the panel and you’ll hear my voice alongside some of my esteemed colleagues who are deeply engaged in thinking about podcasting as a powerful medium of scholarly inquiry. So let’s get on with the episode, [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music. ] “Revisiting ‘Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study’”. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]
04:12	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	[Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.] And what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies?
04:17	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	How are shows categorized? How are they discovered across different platforms?
04:21	Elena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	A new stage of podcasting, the industrialization of podcasting.
04:25	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I want to challenge you to be more open and inclusive.
04:29	Deanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech, as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio and Hindenburg.
04:36	Michael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	We felt a clear tension between ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast.
04:44	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I hope the audience get in on this. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer.]
04:51	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Hi, everyone. Welcome to “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”. My name is Hannah McGregor, and I am going to be moderating the conversation today. For those who don’t know me, I am a professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University, as well as a podcaster as is the case with, I think basically everybody on this panel. I’d like to begin by acknowledging that I’m speaking to you from the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. I think in this era of digital events, it’s harder than ever to ground ourselves in the places where we live and work and play, but it’s also more crucial than ever to think about where our knowledge comes from. And that includes recognizing whose territory we’re residing on, for those of us who are living on Turtle Island. So I would like to encourage you to add your own territory acknowledgment in the chat if you would like to do so, or just pop into the chat and say hi to the assembled group and tell us where you’re coming from. We’ve got quite [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] an international gathering here today.[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]
06:06	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Onto the event itself: Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study builds on the recent volume podcasting, New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, and Richard Berry, to think and engage in discussion about the emergence of podcasting as a field of critical study. We are going to begin with some comments from Dario about the book, followed by brief position papers from respondents, Stacey Copeland, Elena Razlogova, Kim Fox, and Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. So first up, Dario Llinares is principal lecturer in contemporary screen media at the University of Brighton, and of course co-editor of Podcasting New Aural Cultures and Digital Media and co-producer of the accompanying podcast, New Aural Cultures. Note: this is a SpokenWeb panel that is also co-sponsored by the Media History Research Center at Concordia. So thanks so much from Concordia – to Concordia for helping us to put this together. That is all of the housekeeping stuff, so now I will stop talking and we will hear from Dario up first. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]
07:19	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Thanks, Hannah, very much appreciated. And thanks to Jason and Stacey for inviting me and for setting everything up [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and welcome to everybody. Glad you could join us. I was thinking about how to prepare for this event and since taking up podcasting, whenever I’ve given a lecture or a talk in another university or a conference paper, I’ve used only loose notes, usually just bullet points comprised of prompts that point me in the direction of what I want to talk about. This move away from writing a script and reading it out was actually one of the effects of podcasting – one of the effects that it had on my academic practice. So learning how to edit, hearing over and over again, the foibles of how I presented myself orally and how content came out as a result reminded me how much meaning is created and received differently through the speech that articulates thoughts in the moment. Rather than speech that is pre-prepared.
08:19	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	However, on the other hand, if you’re riffing the speaker and listener have to deal with all the hesitations, the repetitions, the mis-speakings, and the possibility that one’s immediate thoughts actually don’t really amount to very much. So, today I’ve prepared a written text, as you can probably tell. And the reason I’ve done this is to try to articulate some of the ideas and questions that influenced the development of the book that I edited with Neil and with Richard: Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media – particularly with regards to what we might mean, what we do, and what is the agenda when we talk about podcasts studies. The book as a whole was an attempt to draw out and articulate the ways in which we as editors and the authors were making sense of the impact of podcasting practice, to recognize its significance in the cultural landscape because of these practices, and, in turn, an encouragement to think reflectively as to why this significance needs to be examined.
09:18	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	To put a name on this, Podcast Studies, was a call to engage with the possible parameters through which critical study could be done. Perhaps the most profound development since the book came out has been the extent to which podcasting, particularly in the United States, is discussed as an industry. The journalistic, popular cultural, and professional production narratives are overtly concerned with monetization, audience expansion, and corporate infrastructure. The focus on this from a critical standpoint is, and should continue to be central to popcast studies. The question of what podcasting is, which probably everyone here is engaged with in some form, is in many ways the foundational question of Podcast Studies, and I’ve tried as many of us have to intellectualize that through research, analysis and self-reflection. But in the end it still does remain somewhat personal and ineffable. Because of this, the introduction to the book does read are speculative. “Are people thinking the same way about this media as we are?” is the question we were implicitly asking ourselves.
10:25	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	In order to try and schematize what we lay out in the book – I’m thinking about the myriad research I’ve read or listened to in the proceeding few years after the book was published – I offer now three interrelated strands that might help to engage with what Podcast Studies is doing conceptually. These are notionally and intentionally broad in scope. So I ask you for a little of what Malcolm Gladwell calls conditionality in your interpretation of this. These strands are communication, knowledge, and identity. To complicate matters though, I think these three categories can each be broken down in terms of the interrelationship between structure, form, and content. So in terms of communication, we may think of the structures that not only make podcasting feasible, but have manifested what we think of now as an identifiable and discreet medium. This might incorporate technological elements, such as RSS and iTunes, audio recording technology, podcaster apps, podcatcher apps, but also social media and internet functionality.
11:28	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	How do these structures foster processes of production, distribution, and reception that we identify specifically as podcasting? Communication forms may relate to the aesthetic artifact itself. What do podcasts sound like? Are podcasting forms the same as genres? Aurally, what makes a podcast different from radio or, for example, from a piece of recorded audio that is simply accessible online? How might we consider the experience of listening, both in terms of apparatus the mechanics of how we listen and affect? – and I’m thinking here about the thorny issue of intimacy. Communication content engages with what a podcast episode and series is about. Interestingly, that area of research may look to leave the mechanics of podcasting behind. But isn’t an analysis of a podcast or podcasting that discusses content only – is that really Podcast Studies? To me, we have to think about this in a synergistic fashion. How does structure, form, and content merge in ways that allow us to engage with how podcasts work as a medium?
12:35	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Knowledge, the second strand, reflects on how we might understand the impact of podcasting philosophically or epistemologically. For example, in terms of the structures of knowledge, to offer a student a podcast to listen to, rather than a journal article to read should make us reflect on how knowledge is made available to us and what function does it serve. If we organize our lives around listening to podcasts, how does what we listen to reflect our exposure to knowledge, and then how we might disseminate that knowledge further? It’s clear that a key element of Podcast Studies relates to its pedagogic use. So how might podcasting as a form of knowledge creation help students in the understanding and application of their own learning? What does it offer both in conceptual knowledge and in terms of skills-knowledge? I’m very much interested in the speech, text image relationship. In that context, how universities, the media, and politics frames knowledge is fundamental to the cultural zeitgeist.
13:38	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Podcast Studies needs to contextualize podcasting at heart of this, particularly where speech and knowledge is being fought over ideologically. A critique of big technology companies and their content gatekeeping analytics program decision-making is another question of knowledge structure, form, and content that we also want to investigate. The third strand, identity, relates to what we ask ourselves in terms of who our podcast producers, podcast listeners, and podcast fans. Furthermore, what do podcasts tell us about the lives of the individuals and groups they represent? Structurally, we can think about the demographics of producers and listeners, but a more vital question might be: how do individual subjects or community groups formulate a sense of self through podcasting? What might be the barriers to entry, even considering how we might assume the relative ease of access, there are many cultural, social and economic obstacles to creation, production, and even listening. We doubtedly want to consider and critique the replication of hierarchies of power based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, et cetera. In terms of forms of identity, we might consider the crucial element of the voice.
14:49	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	How might we analyze the voice as a key tool in podcasting? It’s texture, it’s timbre, it’s materiality, to be sure, but how does the disembodied voice then materialize a sense of embodiedness through its use in podcasting? Podcast Studies must consider what it means to have a voice and to be listened to. And in this sense, it has to advocate openness, equality, and diversity through its structure, form, and content. Of course, we need to think about Podcast Studies in relation to other disciplinary fields. In the introduction to the book that the relationship with radio was a key element, but the need for us was to interrogate and assumed filial relationship. Should Podcast Studies look to disassociate itself from the history, culture, and aesthetics of radio? No, of course not. It really can’t. But if there is to be a usefulness to Podcast Studies, there has to be a criteria of autonomy.
15:43	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Even if we acknowledge that the very term podcasting is a flash of journalistic serendipity. We need to analyze the important influences of other forms of mediums that make podcasting the flexible, hybridized, liminal medium it’s been described as. This brings us to sound [Start Sound Effect: Echoes] itself, and the overlaps with sound orientated disciplines: sound study, sound arts, audiology, musicology are all areas in which Podcast Studies can take methodological and conceptual influence. Indeed, there is an interesting question with regards to how Podcast Studies should articulate the centrality of sound. The nature of sound on an ontological level, may be fundamentally of interest to Podcast Studies analysis. In turn, the recording, editing and production of sound could be envisaged as key to a particular angle of research. Furthermore, the cultural impact, psychological effects, and phenomenological shaping of our material experience through sound might be at the heart of Podcast Studies concerns. [End Sound Effect: Echoes] One of my favourite podcasts recent times was Hannah and Jason and the team at SpokenWeb – their episode on “How we are Listening Now”. Does podcasting make us listen to the world and therefore experience it in specific ways?
16:57	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	However, it is vital that podcasting has a focus on criticality from whatever perspective or approach acknowledges the essential sound artifact or process as a podcast. This, to me, is true of individual podcast criticism, audience research, industry analysis, cultural studies, or media technology. What gives the focus of research it’s “podcastiness” is the cornerstone of the discipline – and I’m still not a hundred percent sure whether I like that word. This may require the researcher to expand, extend, or challenge notions of what a podcast is. And therefore, we must accept and reflect that the parameters of podcasting ontology will continue to be a contested area. Thinking about the impact of one’s own practice of podcasting should also be central to Podcast Studies. But that leads to the question: should Podcast Studies academics be actively using the medium? I guess this argument depends on how much you see the discipline of Podcast Studies needing to push an agenda that podcasting and other forms of non-traditional media practice should be recognized as being both a research tool and a method of dissemination that doesn’t have to default back to the text as a guarantee of rigor.
18:10	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	This requires us to challenge the mechanisms, both material and structural, of closed source access, publishing and peer review traditions, and attitudes to the very nature of knowledge and learning and their ideological function within academia. Finally, I argue in the book that podcasting sits in a liminal space, not exactly conforming wholly with producers or consumers, with professionals or amateurs, with teachers or students, with interviewers or interviewees. I think it’s important that we see Podcast Studies challenging the traditional status quo, but also reflecting on its place in relation to the highly uncertain digital future that we are all inculcated in. We all know podcasting is great, but that cannot remain an uncontested assumption. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]
19:16	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Our first respondent is Stacey. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Stacey Copeland is a Joseph Bombardier PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication here in Vancouver, Canada, where her research engages with feminist media oral histories and sound archives.
19:35	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Oh, great. Alright. So, thank you Dario. That was really informative and got me tweaking some of the things and thoughts that I brought to the conversation today. So in revisiting the collection, which I have of course my copy fresh, you can kind of see through the background that I’ve chosen to exist in today. I was brought back to the moment I first received the call for chapters back in 2016, a fresh faced master’s student at the time navigating my new found identity formation as a media scholar and a queer feminist. My gender and media studies professor at the time, Dr. Susan Driver, recommended I submit a course paper I’d written about The Heart, which I fangirl over all the time, as a proposal for the book. It seems so long ago now, 2016, a time when there was still a need to argue for the importance of sound as a valuable field of study. Podcasting was still so new in popular culture and podcasts studies, even newer, not quite yet a field of its own back then, and some would argue it still isn’t. Podcast Studies feels like it will always still be emerging.
20:52	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	There’s a sense of newness about it that I, and many others, including Dario, would argue is key to the very ethos of the medium itself. A newness defined on the oldness of other media forms, particularly radio. As Lisa Gitelman so eloquently writes on the newness of new media, quote “This overdetermined sense of reaching the end of a media history is probably what accounts for the oddly perennial newness of today’s new media. ” Unquote. Podcasting is a new media with an old history. And the same can be said about Podcast Studies as an emergent academic field. Now I’m less concerned with defining podcasting as its own unique medium of study, as separate from radio or other media forms, and more interested in the ways in which the growth of interest in podcasting has opened up new or renewed conversations around mediated, spatial politics, platformization, sonic narrative form, and the role of sound-based media in shaping our subjective everyday experiences. In short, how identity and community, knowledge and power, power play out in the podcast arena.
22:03	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	So I’m intrigued by some of the correlations and overarching themes that Dario has invited us to consider today. Now, what I particularly love about this collection and Dario’s work on podcasting, is that it straddles the two worlds of theory and practice. I truly do believe as scholars, we learn just as much, if not more, by embedding ourselves into the practical aspects of our field of study. Sometimes I’ve learned – something I’ve learned really through my time in radio and podcasts communities and something I continue to practice in my academic work. In the introduction to this collection, Dario, Neil and Richard write, quote, “podcasting imbued in us the enthusiasm of possibility.” And we see this term possibility spark again in Dario’s opening remarks. This line really sticks with me, drawing me back to the forever newness so key to podcast culture. Possibility, a sentiment we often hear in relation to podcasting, listeners and producers alike can hear this possibility, the potentials for podcasting to give space to voices unheard in the mainstream, to engage deeply with niche audiences, and communities across the globe.
23:20	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Still, by approaching the sentiment of possibility with a critical ear, I would argue we must also consider the increasing constraints of the platforms on which podcasting takes place. We’re seeing major giants like Spotify and Netflix now enter the podcasting race. And these are important questions to consider. Echoing Dario’s early remarks on structure in relation to communication, knowledge, and identity, this is one of the key differences we can consider that defines podcasting from other mediums is it’s distribution and discoverability through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, and more. Podcasts studies provides a grounding, a community in which to study these platforms and algorithms so deeply entangled in key questions of identity and representation, of possibility. How are shows categorized? How were they discovered across different platforms? And how is this changing now that podcasting has truly entered the mainstream? How long will this sentiment of possibility last and how true is it in practice? In a talk I gave at SCMS last month, I mentioned how in 2019, a search for “queer” as a term on Apple Podcast actually assumed that I was searching for the word queen, which was really opening my eyes to just how interesting these tools can be in study, who they are built for, and how.
24:39	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Did queer not exist as a search term? Or was this a tongue-in-cheek joke coded into the platform by a fellow queer? So, all of this said, I still believe in this sentiment of possibility Dario, Neil, and Richard first wrote about. And as researchers, makers, and listeners, by establishing podcasting as a serious object of study, a cultural practice, we play a key role in shaping how this possibility unfolds into action. So as you scroll through your podcast feed today, I invite you to consider the age old critical question: what do you hear? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].
25:24	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Thank you so much, Stacey. Our next respondent is Elena Razlogova. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Elena Razlogova is an associate professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, though she is not coming to us from Montreal today, she’s coming to us from Moscow. She is also the author of The Listeners Voice: Early Radio and the American Public, and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture”, an issue of the Radical History Review.
25:57	Elena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Thank you very much. It’s great to be here. I was happy to be invited to participate on this panel. By the way, my background is my parents’ kitchen – that’s why it’s blurred. I’m in Moscow right now and I can’t have a fake background for some reason. So I was really happy to be invited to this panel because I’m a radio historian, rather than a full-on Podcast Studies person –so I’m kind of an interloper here. I’m most excited about podcasting as a fantastic teaching and public dissemination medium. And in my field history, especially, there’s a great variety of podcasts out there that demonstrate to historians alternative ways to tell stories about the past. From Nate DiMeo’s 10-minute Memory Palace that uses dramatic music and sound effects to tell stories about individuals in history, to Hardcore History where just one dude, Dan Carlin rants about history for over three hours at a time. You get professional historians like Jill Lepore and outsiders like Malcolm Gladwell, and you get 99% Invisible, a great podcast about the history of design, as well as More Perfect about the American Supreme court. And all of that is history. I have assigned podcast making in both undergraduate and graduate courses as group work and individual work.
27:15	Elena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	And podcasts as a term assignment introduces a creative element to coursework. It makes students think about sound effects, diegetic non-diabetic music, proper ways to intro and outro the narrative as well. After making the podcast, they no longer think of interviews as an optional research method. And writing for speaking, as Dario mentioned, writing for speaking aloud makes them better writers as well. So I’m looking at podcasting as a practitioner rather than simply an academic. And I also should say that I actually didn’t ever publish a podcast, but I work as well – I volunteer on campus radio, so I do a little bit of radio. So reading the introduction to the book, and the book itself, several chapters, it’s amazing how much podcasting has advanced since the years since its publication. It may no longer be a liminal medium, and it’s harder to argue for liminality today, than in 2018, because Spotify, for example, has this whole stable of gated podcasts, including the Michelle Obama podcasts.
28:20	Elena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Jeremy Moore calls this new stage of podcasts the industrialization of podcasting, where standards, and barriers for entry are much higher and it is more difficult to stand out, as other speakers already mentioned. And research on platformization of podcasting aligns with studies of music streaming and algorithmic recommendations in general. So, I hate to come back to the point, to the question whether podcasting is radio or not, but as a radio historian, I have to come back to it. In the introduction, authors focused on BBC and NPR as radio counterpoint to podcasting. But I would like to come back to independent radio broadcasting rather than large scale government sponsored networks. A few features of independent radio broadcasting seem lost to podcasting, but perhaps can be recovered, such as real-time possibility for community organizing, the critique of commercialism, and border-crossing that pirate, low power, and community radio offers. For radio, national borders matter in a different way.
29:29	Elena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	And here I’m thinking of Black power activist, Robert Williams broadcasting his Radio Free Dixie from Cuba in the 60s to the still segregated American South, or more recently, Christina Dunbar-Hester’s work on low RFM radio service to local communities, or in [inaudible] Garcia’s work on Spanish-language radio warning of anti-immigration rates via real-time call ins. As well, independent shows and hosts often migrate to podcasting in a sort of “brain drain”. And here I’m thinking of Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show, or Benjamin Walker’s Care of Everything, both migrated from audience supported station WFMU. Or more locally, a show called Audio Smart, that started at CKUT at McGill University, and then was taken from the station and turned it into a podcast. So my question is: compared to these local community radio forums, how do we recover in podcasting the forms of solidarity and activism that these alternative radio forms have been doing and perhaps alternative or independent podcasting is the answer? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]
30:40	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Amazing. Thank you so much, Elena. Next up is Kim Fox. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] Kim Fox is a professor of practice in the department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo, where she primarily teaches audio production and other journalism courses. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer].
31:04	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Thank you, Hannah. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] I’m really excited to be a part of this and thank you all. I really want to add something very important and build on the conversations that we’re hoping to have here. So thank you for having me a part of this discussion about the current digital cultural phenomenon that we know very closely as podcasting. And I’ve decided to freestyle a little bit, so I’m sure that I will not take up my full time, but perhaps I can get that time back at the end. I do want to kind of build on what Stacey was saying in terms of – about the listening and more or less like where to from here? In this short time, since the book has been published, we see this huge gap in terms of what has happened.
31:48	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021::	I mean, there’s a huge gap in terms of what happened between now and last year, but where the future could go is more symposia like this, where we’re able to have these conversations that are really important, especially as we try to redirect the lens of what is podcasting? You know, and what is Podcast Studies specifically? And I’m also thinking about this multicultural lens. I’m thinking about the women’s centeredness of it, or perhaps a lack of it. And of course, LGBTQ issues, other marginalized communities, who we would think there would be a space for them in this independent world, but as we see the commercialization and capitalism that’s involved in podcasting, that perhaps they too will get left behind with this new platform and in the academic look at the platforms. I’d also like to add about the kind of research that we are seeing in the field.
32:50	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	And there is a lot of cultural, there is a lot of critical, which is great. Perhaps we want to look at, how do we diversify that? And especially when I start to think about: what will be the Podcast Studies canon? Surely some of those people are in the room. Thank you, Richard Berry. But we’re also thinking about how much more depth will that have and what will that look like? Because we also see from the past what the history of theory, for example, in many fields, if you’re thinking about classical social thought and how do we grab a hold of the field now to help decolonize before it becomes something that we want to avoid that has already happened? Also, we want to think about the critical production that we’re aiming to produce, and looking at it in terms of, is this an opportunity for us to again, make a concerted change? I really liked the points that were made about the embodiment and disembodiment of voices. Again, that’s something that is very valuable to us. But as I wrap up, I do want to say, I want to challenge you as media scholars to be more open and inclusive in your future research. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] So that’s both in terms of content and in collaboration. Thank you.
34:31	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Thank you so much, Kim. Our final respondents are Michael O’Driscoll and Deanna Fong. [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]. Michael O’Driscoll is a professor in the department of English and Film Studies in the faculty of arts who teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories, including material cultural studies. And finally, Deanna Fong is a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, also in Montreal where her research project towards an ethics of listening in literary study intersects the fields of oral history and literature through an investigation of interviewing and listening practices.
35:17	Michael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Thank you so much, Hannah. Deanna and I would like to use our platform to share our recent experience in producing an episode for the SpokenWeb Podcast series. The episode was launched in early April and was titled “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word.” We’re interested in particular in talking about podcasting as a form of self-reflective critical practice and reflecting on our experiences during this collaboration. We entered into producing this podcast with a specific meta-critical goal, listening attentively to our conversations about listening. We did so with certain presuppositions about the imbrication of theory and practice as mutually constitutive activities. And we did so with a focus on listening through an ethical lens, asking particular questions about how we listen, why we listen, the material conditions of that activity, and with attention to the conventions of listening within the constraints of podcast production. The episode was an open-ended experiment that involved recorded and non-recorded dialogues with scholars who perform, gather, curate, and analyze spoken word performance across a range of audio textual genres. The queer cabaret performance, the oral history interview, the circulation of an archive of Indigenous creators, and scholarly engagements with spoken word recordings.
36:39	Michael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Throughout, we felt a clear tension between our own ideals about ethical practices of listening and the immediate requirements of producing a podcast within the affordances of the medium and the conventions of possible podcast genres. We listened as our interviewees represented their own practices of listening and worked to achieve a certain attunement to the convolutions of critique. And I mean critique in the truest self-reflexive sense of that term, with an openness to difference, to the incalculable, and to the indeterminacy sees this scenario provoked.
37:16	Deanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	So for me, coming from a background in oral history and literary study, particularly a study of sounded poetry, making this podcast was an important meta-critical experiment that deepened my understanding of my research goals and methods in these fields. Listening has always been at the forefront of my work and as an attendant theoretical concern, paying attention to how we listen, what we listen for and the different modes of listening that are occasioned when we shift contexts from readings to interviews, when we speak of genre or from live events to digital and analog recordings when you speak of media. One of the fascinating outcomes of our foray into the podcasting world was new forms of deep, and I would argue ethical, listening that it invited at every stage of production. Before recording the interviews with our respondents, Michael and I had informal unrecorded conversations with them, both to create a level of comfort and intimacy –there’s that word again – but also to zero in on what we wanted to talk about in the interview.
38:10	Deanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	This genre of interviewing differed from the meandering type of life story interview that I’m used to conducting. As Michael suggested in our conversations leading up to this panel, what we were listening for in this case was expertise in lieu of, or at least in addition to experience. Our listening practices continued as we edited and transcribed interviews shaping them into a continuous, or at least resonant narrative. I don’t think I’ve ever been so deeply attuned to another person’s speech as when I was pouring over the transcripts or sequencing the segments of audio inHindenburg, adding an extra two seconds, pause to let an idea, breathe or editing a sentence to best reflect the speaker’s line of thought – with their permission of course. Underlying each of these editorial decisions is a complex set of ethical questions. How we represent the speakers who give us their ideas and voices, but also how we connect with and create a listening environment for an imagined audience. On the other side, the podcast’s extensive engagement with the voice gave us multiple opportunities to critically reflect on our own practices as scholars and carry those observations forward until the other academic work that we do.
39:15	Michael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Perhaps one of the most provocative moments in the podcast is our conversation with Simon Fraser University scholar, Clinton Burnham, who proposed that while listening is without doubt an ethical imperative, it does not always in and of itself constitute an unalloyed good. That is, Clint reminded us the position of one who listens –and you might think here of judges, priests, analysts – is structurally configured as a position of mastery, a master position in which what is received is put back into circulation in a revalued – you might think extracted refined, reprocessed – form of judgment, absolution, cure and so on. You might extend this insight into all forms of listening, especially those in which a listener, however well meaning, receives the disclosures of those who have been harmed in some fashion. The unaddressed question here is how a listener might disavow, or acknowledge, or act in response to that structural configuration, and how listeners constitute themselves across a range of listening practices.
40:21	Michael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	And I’m thinking having just listened to Kim’s words that this has perhaps particular resonance with the call to decolonize and diversify. One of our thoughts on this front is that if podcasting remains yet in its formative stages of development, and that question is on the table right now, if podcasting is a germinal cultural practice, studying offers enormous possibility and a little shout out here to Stacey and Dario, even while constrained by its own ideological and historical horizons, the process of podcast production offers rich opportunities for such ethical engagements, born of the very contradictions inherent in this cultural practice. And furthermore, we might ask ourselves whether this kind of self-reflexivity is germane to the practice of podcasting: do we all listen to our listening? Or whether podcasting is itself, a field of cultural production that has only begun to engage [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] in a practice of self-reflexive critical collaboration?
41:33	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Amazing, thank you both so much. There were [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] a lot of really beautiful threads that were weaving through that and a really interesting conversation already starting in the chat about canonicity, which I think is really fascinating. So maybe we can start the round table conversation there thinking about the sort of idea of canonicity. So Dario, maybe you can start us off on this idea: is it time for a podcasting studies canon?
42:05	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question specifically. I mean, I think what’s interesting is whenever you’re talking about canons, these are sort of not neutrally organic developments, but they are an outcome of the – both the structures and the people who are defining what is being talked about, what is being written about, what is the focus of interest. So I think that the idea of there is a group of scholars or a group of works that are going to be forwarded as part of the canon will happen because of the way that universities look to define these are the works that we need to be engaging with. So the question then becomes, how does everybody – as Kim was talking about – how do we open up the possibilities of access, both in an academic sense, and also in a production sense for podcasting to be this inclusive area where we do podcasting, we talk about podcasting, and we self-reflect on how it represents people? And then the analysis of that will hopefully naturally come out as not being a problematic, bounded kind of canonical approach or set of texts. Now, maybe I’m – maybe that’s slightly naive. You know, maybe we need to make that happen more. I guess that’s both– that’s my first sort of opening gambit now on that I suppose.
43:38	Elena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I’m really interested in the possibility of an audio cannon. I think Richard Barry mentioned it in the chat because it is a time – and I agree that canon is a terrible word in the sense that it’s always about exclusion. And then it needs to be always attacked and reconsidered, but starting it, it’s kind of exciting to look back three years or five and already knowing what was important. So I wonder what you guys would think. What would you put there?
44:07	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Thoughts? What would you put into an audio canon? It’s a fascinating question, I think particularly for folks who teach podcasting, is the sort of the incredibly lateral world of podcasting as a medium, the sort of deep niche listening practices make it difficult to establish shared objects of study that conversations can circulate around.
44:31	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I mean, by audio canon, Elena, do you mean specifically pieces of audio that we would use to create canon over texts or both?
44:39	Elena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	No, more like a mixtape of podcasts to share with other people.
44:45	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I love that. I love that – we should record them onto tapes.
44:48	Elena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	It’s what the kids call a playlist. So yeah, mixed tape is old school [Laughs].
44:53	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Mixed tape is good. It creates this awareness of looking back – the history of old media and the new media. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] [Sound Effect: Creaking Wood]
45:08	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I wonder if we might [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] – one of the things that was really striking to me about the sort of overlap between all of our panelists’ comments was about the relationship between practice and theory of Podcast Studies. And Laurie has put the question really well in the chat here, that it is important for podcast academics to also be practitioners and Dario your point that that may be more so than for other media. Laurie would like you to expand on that, but I would also love to hear from the rest of the panel about how you think about the relationship between practice and theory in podcasts studies and whether that feels – I think particularly if people coming in from, from different disciplinary perspectives – how’s that different from the relationship between theory and practice in film studies, or in literary studies, or in radio studies, which are all media-engaged disciplines.
46:03	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	That was just kind of born out of experience. And when I was doing podcasting, it was making me look at the way I write and the way I speak, not just in an objective sense, but also the identity of that. But the difference, say between something like film, which is the background that I came from, probably is just for the fact that film has 120 years behind it –
46:23	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	[Laughs].
46:23	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	–and therefore there’s 120 years of people saying what film is, and you don’t have to start a film studies essay by having to – three or four pages explaining what you think film is –.
46:38	Several Voices:	[Laughs]
46:38	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	– in a way, whereas a lot of Podcast Studies papers do because we’re still arguing about it. So, I think maybe that’s where my assertion that having a practical sense of podcasting leads you to a wider understanding of what it is at this point.
46:55	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Yeah. It’s really, hasn’t been my position for some time, especially coming from a radio background that I find when people who don’t have that background, they really do teach it from a perspective of like, well, that’s not how it works. Like that’s not how news is made. And once you’re in the room and you know how the meat is made, then you kind of have a better insight and your positionality is so much more informed than your previous self. And also think about this, when anthropologists embed in communities, there’s a reason there’s a certain observation level that takes place from that perspective. And so when I’m trying to coach students into producing audio, storytelling, and podcasts, it really comes from a place of, I know this process and I can help you develop this story into something – into something really interesting. So I think having that practicality under your belt is really useful and it’s something that everyone should venture into, even on a short series, a podcast, or just an interview podcast, whatever. I think everyone should have that experience.
47:58	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	So this is a great conversation to have and something that I’m constantly engaging with in my own work. And I think it’s interesting to think about it in the broader sense of media studies as well. So as a media studies scholar, documentary researchers for instance, have been making their own media for a very, very long time. And that’s a field I look to quite often for what that might look like in the podcasting realm as well, both radio documentary and film documentary. And I think what those fields can tell us is podcasting is an interesting place to bring together practice and theory, because it’s also a medium that is very much grounded in a personal practice, in an individual researcher. Even when we’re thinking about large podcast productions, teams are still realistically quite small, maybe five or six people who are actively working on a podcast series together. These aren’t the same as a large Hollywood film production, which would be a much more difficult thing for a scholar to, well get the funds to do, but also the resources and people to actually put it together. So thinking about podcasting, I think in relation to film and radio documentary is quite useful in this way. And we see, of course, people like Siobhán McHugh writing about this. And we need to look to those scholars for some answers around this connection as well.
49:17	Michael O’Driscoll, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I just wanted to throw a term into the conversation because I think I’d be really interested in hearing what people think about it. And I keep thinking, as I’m listening to you, keep thinking about the concept and the practice of research creation and I’ll do a shout out to my colleague, Natalie Loveless, who has an amazing book called How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation. I think in many ways there are a whole set of well articulated practices and theories coming from colleagues in the creative and performing arts about what it means to bring practice and theory together in this way in a manner that is very much about the production of research and insights through this. And I think there might be some real opportunity there for thinking about how podcasting might itself constitute a form of research creation.
50:09	Deanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Great point, Mike. Yeah, because for myself, I’m coming to the field with this kind of wide-eyed naivete, in that I really, I think only listened to a podcast for the first time in maybe the last six months, before embarking on making my own. [Laughs] But I think as I was trying to suggest in our response, that so many of those ethical decisions, that one makes that one is really attuned to, come from those editorial decisions of figuring out like, oh if we have four guests, do we need to balance things out? What parts of all of these incredible interviews do we keep in? Do we put music beneath people’s speech? Does it enhance the experience that their words? Is it music that they ultimately hate and want to change? Like all of these very, very small material decisions matter in how we’re representing other people’s voices. And, for me, that’s just absolutely essential in grappling with those ethical considerations on a material level.
51:09	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Yeah. And there’s wonderful – it’s a beautiful chat and there’s I think really, really significant sort of amplification of those questions of materiality. It’s a great point here from Jennifer Lynn Stover about the way that a focus on practice could become another form of gatekeeping. Because access to the possibility to even experiment in audio composition goes hand in hand with certain material conditions. And it does seem like there is an interesting overlap between this question about practice and this question about canonization, which has to do with what forms and genres and styles and structures to be introduced to our students as the way that podcasts are made. That there is possibility for implicitly creating canons through how we ourselves practice podcast making, or teach podcast making. So these all – just a beautifully tangled [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] set of questions.
52:24	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Let’s let the audience get in on this.
52:25	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ve got a couple of questions sort of flagged here. So are there sort of emerging recognized genre forums in the podcasting world and where is the experimental genre-defying work happening?
52:42	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Well, I know that PhD student Anne [Inaudible] – I don’t know if she’s here, Anne – but she’s doing work on the genres and forms, which is interesting because I think what she’s talking about is the way in which traditional genre categories related to things like film and television music don’t really work in the same way for podcasting as they do for those media. So there’s a kind of layering of how you would have to think about podcasts in terms of taxonomies and categorizations like that. And I think it’s just indicative as well of the difficulty of that whole process in the way that Apple podcasts, when it did its revamp just seemed to add to the problem.
53:25	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	[Laughs].
53:25	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	[Laughs]. I think. So, yeah. I mean, I think it’s an, it’s an interesting question about, about genre distinctions in terms of podcasting.
53:32	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I really appreciate that you brought up Anne, Dario because Anne and I have had some really great conversations around this, and Kim’s been in many of those conversations as well as part of our podcast PhDs group. And we’ve been talking a lot about genre, about how we define podcast genre, and how we approach storytelling and narration. And for me, because I guess because my media studies background, I do see quite a lot of correlation between a genre’s set up in TV, film, radio being really just pushed onto podcasting because it’s what’s familiar already. That said, because podcasting is really this messy mishmash network of all of these different media forms put together, we do of course see experimental work being done as well is just less talked about, as we see in all other media forms as well. It’s really about where the money is, and those are the podcasts that we see and hear, versus maybe some more experimental work that’s being done. And I’d encourage anyone interested to maybe look more into soundscape composition work and experimental radio for where those ideas are really coming from.
54:43	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Richard Barry has suggested three – a sort of typology of podcasting here, which is narrative, conversation, and experimental, which I think is a really sort of interesting non-generic way to break down the world of podcasting. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]
55:06	Elena Razlogova, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I was wondering [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] what is the space of the critical writing in podcasting, not academic writing, but critical writing. There is some, there are recommendation articles and magazines, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be the place to make the marginal mainstream, because that’s how mainstream manual music happened in particular decades. Not always, but occasionally it does happen that music journalism drives certain genres to prominence. And I think as academics we could participate in that kind of boundary crossing activity.
55:44	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	A good site is somewhere like Bello Collective as a starting point for that. They do pieces that –they do kind of recommendations in terms of kinds of lists and stuff, but there is some what you call journalistic longer form critical writing about podcasts. What’s interesting is that the – it is people who are just interested in podcasting doing the writing as well as producers and some academics. I think the difficulty is if you look at long form journalism in film, again, that is now contracting, it’s all short form listicles type stuff or academia. I mean –and especially the pandemic that sort of, the idea of the long form magazine [Inaudible] all these kinds of things, they’re managing to survive, but it’s such a small kind of base. So I think, again, it’s in terms of academics doing that and just generally producers, whoever’s interested in podcasting, is kind of having to do it off your own back.
56:42	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I was just adding in the chat, how I know that there are some journals that are – not only will the journal have a podcast, but in the physical journal, they are accepting podcast reviews as you would with a book review. So that’s one way to get sort of a critical look or maybe a critical conversation going about a specific podcast or series or something like that. And of course, Radio Doc Review, which was mentioned in the chat as well.
57:06	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Yeah. It’s interesting to think about that historical formation that, is it anything about podcasting that doesn’t lend itself to long form critical analysis, or is it just the way the emergence of podcasting aligned with the sort of disappearance of that particular form of critical writing from our media landscape? [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]
57:21	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	[End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] There is a question in the chat that I actually think will be useful probably for a number of the folks here. This is from Devin Bait. They say, “I noticed that the word intimacy was brought up a couple of times and seemed to carry some weight: why? I’m brand new to Podcast Studies.” [Laughs] Which I love –that I’m brand new. Why is intimacy spoken with such a tremble?
57:54	Stacey Copeland, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I mean, I’m happy to start. [Speaks closer to the microphone] Is it better if I speak like this? Is this a bit more intimate for our particular talk of intimacy? So I put in the chat, I actively avoided using the term intimacy in my provocation today, and that was intentional. So the word intimacy gets thrown around so much in the discussion of podcasting and there’s great work being done by scholars like Alan [Inaudible], who’s just finished up their PhD on podcast intimacies specifically. And we see this term used in radio as well, but less so in public broadcast radio and the kind of radio that reaches out to the masses and more so radio and podcasts that are speaking to you as an individual listener, the individual you in your ears. And that has created some really interesting scholarship around the relationship between headphone listening and intimacy with podcasts and even deep into discussions of how podcasts are produced, among producers as well, being produced for headphones to kind of create this internal sense of a voice in your head, in the experience of listening to podcasts. So there is a ton you can dig into in relation to the term podcasting and intimacy together. But maybe that’ll start off the panel on the subject.
59:25	Dario Llinares, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	When you actually sort of get down to it, what do you really mean when you’re talking about intimacy? And I think with people that are writing a paper and they’re setting out criteria of what they understand by intimacy is fine. Just get on with it! It’s when it’s like oh, podcasts are an intimate medium. That’s too broad and a little bit too problematic, I think.
59:46	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	I’ll add to that from a bit of a different perspective and maybe this comes from my radio days, but I really got used to the Zoom world and especially all of these black squares, because I just feel like I’m on the radio. And, who’s really listening? Who am I talking to? And occasionally with Zoom, someone will talk back, but with students at eight in the morning, you’re usually just talking to the ether. So that sort of dynamic in that intimacy, when we think about the famous phrase from NPR in their “driveway moments” that either it’s in that car radio space or if you’re wearing earbuds and it is like Dario and Stacey mentioned that – the tenor of the voice, what is it that really makes us feel connected?
1:00:31	Kim Fox, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	And even when teaching podcasting and teaching audio storytelling, you’re writing in a certain kind of way, there’s a writing for radio style and that you’re writing for one person, potentially. I tell students now about design thinking, you’re designing this prototype of a listener and then you’re going to talk to that listener so that you really create this connection. So that’s a little bit of what I think about intimacy and podcasting and radio.
1:01:01	Deanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Yeah. Well, I will say for my part on the idea of physical intimacy I definitely affected a calming ASMR lady voice for my podcast [Laughs] which I don’t know why, but it seemed like the thing to do. But on a more social level, I would say the most interesting thing that came out of our podcast was all of the forms of intimacy that happened outside of the episode, that spilled over the container of the episode. Which are the many conversations that we had with the interviewers, getting in touch with bill bisset and Maria Campbell who had excerpts of audio in the podcast, knowing that they were listening to the podcast. So I think actually if we look at the podcast, not necessarily as contained within the media form itself, but as a broader set of social practices, then we get into this really sort of exciting territory of community building and social intimacy, which to me, I think is probably the most exciting part.
1:02:06	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Yeah. I love that emphasis. That makes me think back to what Elena was saying about pirate radio practices and the possibility of community [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] formation. And how do we build for community in this asynchronous medium? There has been a wonderful conversation [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer] and links and resources shared in the chat here. Thank you again so much to all of our wonderful panelists. [Start Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]
1:02:42	Jason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Can everyone on mute and say goodbye? So that’ll be some good sound for the podcast.
1:02:46	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	Everybody unmute! We need 46 goodbyes. Let’s go.
1:02:50	Jason Camlot, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	[Laughs]
1:03:01	Various voices:	Goodbye! [Laughs] Bye!
1:03:06	Hannah McGregor, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	[Laughs] Love this audio. Love it.
1:03:07	Deanna Fong, Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study, April 20, 2021:	It’s a sound poem if I ever heard one.
1:03:07	Various voices::	[Laughs] [End Music: Korg Monotron Analogue Ribbon Synthesizer]
1:03:07	SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:	[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]
1:03:26	Hannah McGregor:	SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb project director, Jason Camlot of Concordia University. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. A special thanks to Stacey Copeland, Deanna Fong, Kim Fox, Dario Llinares, Michael O’Driscoll, and Elena Razlova for their contributions to the panel discussion featured in this episode. To find out more about SpokeWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] From all of us at spoken web, thanks for listening to season two of this SpokenWeb Podcast, and we hope you’re ready for season three, coming soon with brand new episodes from the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]

Jason Camlot

Jason Camlot (SpokenWeb director) is Professor in the Department of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His critical works include Phonopoetics (Stanford 2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (2008), and the co-edited collections, CanLit Across Media (2019) and Language Acts (2007). He is also the author of five collections of poetry, Attention All Typewriters, The Animal Library, The Debaucher, What the World Said, and Vlarf.

SpokenWeb Podcast

S2-Episode 11

Revisiting “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”

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SpokenWeb Podcast

S2-Episode 11

Revisiting “Podcasting as a Field of Critical Study”

August 2, 2021

Produced byJason Camlot

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Jason Camlot

Produced by
Jason Camlot