Digital Commons Network^™

For The Love Of: Book Review Of Radiophilia By Carolyn Birdsall, Lucia Vodanovic

RadioDoc Review

Radiophilia, the new book in The Study of Sound Series, discusses radio in the context of recent literature about affects and emotions. Informed by various traditions within media and cultural studies, and guided by the work of Lauren Berlant and Arjun Appudarai, it approaches ‘radiophilia’ -love for, or strong attachment to, radio—as a wide-reaching concept that includes groups practices and social moods and that can be practised in public spaces and communities, beyond interior and domestic set-ups.

On The Loss Of One Of Audio Documentary's Most Committed Advocates: Remembering Leslie Rosin, Sven Preger

RadioDoc Review

At that moment, I think Leslie was not only really happy, but even proud. It is Tuesday evening, 18 May 2021, and we are sitting together on a table in front of the stage in a studio at the German broadcaster, WDR. Not in front of the table, not next to the table, but on the table. Our legs are dangling and we let them dangle. Because we are really exhausted. The whole team is. We have just finished the last live event on stage and we’ve actually made it. Four days of the International Feature Conference in Cologne. Sven …

The Amplify Manifesto: Rewind, Replay, Reflect, Stacey Copeland, Hannah Mcgregor, Natalie Dusek

RadioDoc Review

We are the Amplify Podcast Network, a research project working to develop sustainable models for producing, peer-reviewing, and publishing scholarly podcasts. The Amplify Manifesto aims to capture the spirit of our network: playful, experimental, and multi-voiced. As a radically political written form, the manifesto provides a creative ground to communicate a set of ideals, goals, and intentions with purpose. In revisiting the manifesto for Radio Doc Review, we unpack the construction of the manifesto as sound-first multimodal scholarship.

Review - The Long Game: Aliya Soomro's Boxing Journey, Syeda Sana Batool

RadioDoc Review

The Long Game: Aliya Soomro's Boxing Journey" is a poignant and uplifting radio documentary that goes beyond the typical sports narrative. It offers an in-depth analysis of gender norms, societal obstacles, and human resilience, emphasizing the power of podcasting to promote distinct and marginalized voices.

A Responsible Parrhesia? A Review Of The Price Of Secrecy, Sara Tafakori

RadioDoc Review

The Price of Secrecy immerses the listener in stories of individual trauma, of child abuse and rape, yet also draws lessons from them of wider social significance. It includes moments of narrative catharsis, interspersed with repeated reminders that the stories are unfinished and open-ended—that the solutions lie out there, in social action, rather than in the stories themselves. The series also gestures towards structural critique, especially of ‘the legal constraints’ it identifies, yet it places greater importance on changing the wider culture through challenging the culture of secrecy and shame around victims’ stories of rape and abuse. This centrally means …

Nigeria's Untold Stories At A Moment Of Change: An Interview With Audio Storyteller Fayfay, Abigail Wincott

RadioDoc Review

Odudu Efe, known as FayFay, is a Lagos-based audio producer and sound designer and also the founder of NaijaPod Hub, a network dedicated to supporting audio producers and promoting high quality audio storytelling in Nigeria. This interview with FayFay shows how her career in many ways reflects the challenges and promise of Nigerian audio storytelling at this moment in time. Like many freelancers, she takes on branding and imaging, tidies up sound and produces studio-based talk podcasts. But increasingly she’s being commissioned to work on complex historical documentaries and documentary-dramas. And this for FayFay is key, because like others in …

The Feminist Community Of Podcast Producers In Brazil: Mapping The Profile Of Women, Aline Hack

RadioDoc Review

This paper goes beyond celebrating podcast growth in Brazil, analyzing 511 Brazilian podcast producers (2015-2020). Using a semi-structured form, the survey focuses on outlining the profile of female producers. Drawing from gender, cultural, and political science literature, it explores how producer presence aligns with intersectional practices in Brazilian feminisms. Results indicate that women podcast producers in Brazil mostly have a college degree, variable income and identify as feminist, contributing to a unified community that engages with and challenges the political and human rights agenda, expanding discourse through communication access.

Listening To News, A New Interaction Ritual: An Emotional Interaction Analysis Of Jump Into The Rabbit Hole, Yang Ding

RadioDoc Review

Objectivity and neutrality have always been the reporting principles followed by journalists. The emergence of audio news presents reality in an invisible way, blurring the boundary between emotion and truth. Jump into the Rabbit Hole[1], as one of the few in-depth news podcasts in China, brings immersive stories to the audience with immersive production. These stories help the audience better understand the truth of the news and also cultivate the habit of listening to the news. This paper examines how interaction rituals in news podcasts are carried out using the benefits of podcast platforms in the context of …

Some More Notes On Notes On A Scandal: Lessons From Producing Pakistan’S First True Crime Podcast, Tooba Masood Khan

RadioDoc Review

If a country’s podcast scene could be described as a vibe, Pakistan’s would be “dude bro”; that is, politically and culturally right-leaning masculinist narrative. The format is simple: like The Joe Rogan Experience which has over 15 million subscribers and over three billion views in Pakistan, there’s a host and a guest. In addition to Rogan, other popular pods are The Pakistan Experience, Pakistonomy, Thought Behind Things, Talks that Matter, Mooroo, The Pivot, Junaid Akram’s Podcast. The conversations usually revolve around the guest’s life, their political views, the economy – whether Pakistan will default or not, will …

Podcasting-As-Care, An Exercise In Diasporic Digital Media Activism, Zoha Zokaei

RadioDoc Review

This article draws on my experience of engaging in diasporic digital media activism on the issue of child sexual abuse in Iran, which culminated in the production of the Price of Secrecy podcast. I introduce the method of Podcasting-as-Care as a method of activism that brings notions of feminist care, activism and listening in a close conversation framed through podcasting. Without resorting to a top-down vision of activism where a notion of listening, i.e. how the victims should be listened to, is prescribed and exemplified, the Price of Secrecy podcast becomes an experience of listening to how victims are failed …

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Contributor Biographies And Editorial, Melissa Boyde, Sally Borrell

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2024 13(1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Contributor Biographies and Editorial.

Introduction: Animal Cultures, Laura Jean Mckay, Alexandra Mcewan, Clare Archer-Lean

Animal Studies Journal

Creative writing, transdisciplinary literary animal studies, and law-anthropology don’t often appear in the same sentence, but this interdisciplinary mingling is where we as editors meet in animal studies. We were particularly enthused by discussions that emerged during the Australasian Animal Studies Conference, held at the University of Sydney in November 2023, providing a rich source from which to consider the conference theme: ‘Animal Cultures’. Keynote speaker, Carol Gigliotti, wondered about the animal cultural research ideas that can be taken with us to ‘make lives better for animals, both wild and captive'.

Mateship With Animals: Writing Nonhuman Animals As Channels For Substitution And Expression, Carrie Tiffany

Animal Studies Journal

This paper reflects on my childhood fixation with nonhuman animals and considers my father’s relationship with the family dog as an example of a retreat to a traumatic wound. In my later work as a park ranger, I was confronted by the conditions by which certain nonhuman animals were categorised as those to be culled, or to be cared for. These memories, together with inspiration from Freud’s case studies, informed the writing of my second novel, Mateship with Birds. This novel is interested in what nonhuman animals might represent and where the divisions between nonhuman animal and human experience begin …

Birds Beyond Words: Fantastic Animals And Other Flights Of Imagination, Pattrice Jones

Animal Studies Journal

In ‘Nature in the Active Voice’, Val Plumwood called for a ‘thorough rethink’ of the logic of domination that has authorized both colonialism and the exploitation of animals (113). But this mandate creates a conundrum: that logic elevates mind over matter and cognition over emotion. If Audre Lorde was right that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (110), then we are unlikely to succeed in undermining that logic by rethinking it. We need practices that will expose the tedious nonsensicality of human supremacy while simultaneously awakening our capacities for empathy, imagination, and full-bodied ecological reasoning. Plumwood noted …

'Fire': An Australian Play Gives Voice To Animals Devastated By Catastrophic Bushfire, Rebecca Scollen

Animal Studies Journal

Animals on a grand scale are victims of climate change and of natural disaster. With no voice within human cultures, their plight can be silenced and forgotten once an extreme weather event is over and when media coverage of the devastation has ceased. The creative arts have an important role to play in raising public awareness of and empathy for animals impacted by natural disaster. This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the Australian play Fire by Scott Alderdice (2017), framed by Animal Studies perspectives. The voices of the animals in Fire, as expressed through language – dialogue and …

All The Animals: Short Fiction About Multispecies Families, Becky Tipper

Animal Studies Journal

The five-part short story ‘All the Animals’ imagines an array of animals who feature in the life of a fictional human family over many years. The story is inspired by qualitative research into human-animal relationships in families with children in Lisbon, Portugal. ‘All the Animals’ aims to offer a fictional ‘thick description’ of multispecies families in a particular time and place, but also to provide a reflection on the role of storytelling in human-animal entanglements.

[Review] Elizabeth Ellis, Australian Animal Law: Context And Critique. Sydney University Press, 2022. 390pp. Isbn 978-1743328514, A. P. A. Best

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Elizabeth Ellis, Australian Animal Law: Context and Critique. Sydney University Press, 2022. 390pp. ISBN 978-1743328514.

[Review] Susan Nance And Jennifer Marks, Editors. Bellwether Histories: Animals, Humans, And Us Environments In Crisis. Seattle: University Of Washington Press. 242 Pp. Isbn 9780295751429, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

163 [Review] Susan Nance and Jennifer Marks, editors. Bellwether Histories: Animals, Humans, and US Environments in Crisis. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 242 pp. ISBN 9780295751429.

‘Dresse-Toi!’ Perspectives On The (Re)Valorisation Of Nonhuman Animal Performers In Contemporary Circus, Franziska Trapp

Animal Studies Journal

It is the aim of this article to critically assess the (re)valorisation of nonhuman animals in contemporary circus. Though contemporary circus has declared itself to be an ‘animal-free’ artform, animals have been increasingly reappearing in contemporary circus performances over the past few years. In opposition to traditional circus, neither the presentation of the talents of nonhuman animals nor the demonstration of human power and dominance are the objective, rather, contemporary circus attempts to create critical and experimental artworks that function as social commentaries on the relation between humans and nonhuman animals.

This article is divided into three parts. The first …

Forest Birds On Pasture: Meddling Marketing And Conflicting Cultures, Natalie Lis

Animal Studies Journal

Chickens are problematically embedded in the West and Global North as farm animals. Structures built for containing chickens including henhouses, industrial poultry sheds, shading devices and mobile poultry sheds, place chickens – naturally forest birds – into pastoral farming settings that are at odds with natural chicken familial structures and behaviours. I assert that structures built for containing chickens influence human–chicken labour. I support this claim through an investigation of chicken labour at poultry farms. I advance the concept of labour in human–animal studies by looking at labour culture from sociology and labour history scholarship centred around humans. How humans …

[Review] Irus Braverman. Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime In Palestine-Israel. University Of Minnesota Press, 2023. 362 Pp, Isbn 978-1-5179-1526-1, Esther Alloun

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Irus Braverman. Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 362 pp, ISBN 978-1-5179-1526-1.

[Review] Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa. The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research Into Animal Life. Oakland, California: University Of California Press. 259 Pages. Isbn 9780520342347, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa. The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life. Oakland, California: University of California Press. 259 pages. ISBN 9780520342347.

Body Genres, Embodiment And Engagement: Second Person In Audio Storytelling, Riccardo Giacconi

RadioDoc Review

In the article, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” (1991), Linda Williams defines as body genres the film genres that are based on stimulating certain physical reactions in the bodies of spectators. These are fear (horror), sexual arousal (pornography), and tears (melodrama). All three genres share, “an apparent lack of proper aesthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion. We feel manipulated,” by them. The bodies of whoever watches these films are involved in an “involuntary mimicry” of the body on the screen. During a talk at the 2016 Third Coast Conference, radio producer Eleanor McDowall inquired about …

Call For Content: Crafted Audio, Narrative Podcasting And The Global South, Abigail Wincott, Aasiya Lodhi

RadioDoc Review

We’re seeking contributions for a special edition of RadioDoc Review on audio documentary, narrative podcasting or crafted audio in the Global South.

Intimacy, Inc., Robert S. Boynton

RadioDoc Review

Routledge’s new Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies is a follow up to its Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, published in 2000--precisely the moment when podcasting began to undermine radio’s audio hegemony. What if the transition from radio to podcasting is a paradigm shift, the new medium posing challenges different from radio, and closer to those faced by journalism, literature, and film? Siobhan McHugh's The Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories Through Sound represents a podcast-first, back to basics approach which approaches podcasting as a process, not a technology.

Sounding Out Stories: A Critical Analysis Of The Prince, How To Become A Dictator, The King Of Kowloon, Three Narrative Podcasts On Contemporary China, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

It’s unusual and welcome to see not one, but three, well-produced narrative podcasts made in the West about China. Hosted by female journalists with a Chinese background, all provide strong context on Chinese history and politics but focus essentially on an individual: The King of Kowloon (produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) memorialises an eccentric graffiti artist called Tsang Tsou-choi, his art seen in the context of Hong Kong’s shrinking democracy. Both The Prince (by The Economist) and How To Become A Dictator (by The Telegraph) zero in on Xi JinPing, President of the People’s Republic of …

The Greatest Menace Review: Living With Shadows Of The Past, Adrien Mccrory

RadioDoc Review

The Greatest Menace is an investigative podcast by Patrick Abboud and Simon Cunich which examines the history of Cooma Gaol, Australia’s experimental homosexual prison. The podcast explores a difficult and confronting piece of history, weaving together the past and the present as host Abboud attempts to uncover buried information about Cooma Gaol, the people incarcerated there and the people who operated it. This review explores the approaches taken by Abboud and Cunich to explore this history, mindful of the present-day impact that digging up these stories has on those involved. While investigating the prison’s past, Abboud interviews former prisoners, victims …

Toward A Third Podcasting: Activist Podcasting In An Age Of Social Justice Capitalism, Jess Shane

RadioDoc Review

A manifesto that provocatively argues for the rise of "Third Podcasting" patterned after Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's concept of "Third Cinema."

Audio Activism: A Discussion Of Mother Country Radicals, Zayd Dohrn

RadioDoc Review

This article is a transcript of a speaking event at Northwestern University, USA, in which producer Sarah Geis interviewed writer Zayd Dohrn and podcast producer Misha Euceph about their recent podcast Mother Country Radicals, which concerns the history of the Weather Underground, as well as Black Liberation more broadly, from the perspective of Dohrn, who grew up as a child of radicals from that period. Dohrn and Euceph explain the process and thinking they brought to the project and explore a few key moments that shaped the podcast, reflecting on the complicated relationship between family and activism.

Rhetorics Of Species Revivalism And Biotechnology – A Roundtable Dialogue, Eva Kasprzycka, Charlotte Wrigley, Adam Searle, Richard Twine

Animal Studies Journal

This informal dialogue contextualises and explores contemporary practices of nonhuman animal gene-modification in de-extinction projects. Looking at recent developments in biotechnology’s role in de-extinction sciences and industries, these interdisciplinary scholars scrutinise the neoliberal impetus driving ‘species revivalism’ in the wake of the Capitalocene. Critical examinations of species integrity, cryo-preservation, techno-optimism, rewilding initiatives and projects aimed at restoring extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth and bucardo are used to map some of the necessary restructuring of conservation policies and enterprises that could secure viably sustainable – and just – futures for nonhuman animals at risk of extinction. The authors question …