Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

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."

From Statement To Purpose: An Interview With Bill Siemering, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This article is an interview between RadioDoc Review Editor Neil Verma and Bill Siemering, founding Director of Programming at National Public Radio and lifelong proponent of public radio. Siemering and Verma discuss Siemering's role at the founding of NPR, his earlymcareer in Wisconsin, WHYY Philadelphia, WBFO and KCCM, as well as his enduring work in community radio development in Africa.

The View From Somewhere: A Review, Robert S. Boynton

RadioDoc Review

Lewis Raven Wallace was fired from Marketplace for questioning the mainstream media's conception of journalistic neutrality. He developed his critique in his 2019 book, The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, a podcast of the same name, and in several ancillary products. Wallace concludes that “objectivity is a false ideal that upholds the status quo”, and news judgement has less to do with objective criteria than with “who controls the narrative, whose narratives matter, and how the appearance of mattering is created in a society rife with entrenched inequality”.

Tools Of Rescue: A Review Of Silencio Para Rescatar: Documental Sonoro, Sonia Robles

RadioDoc Review

In this audio documentary, Mexican cultural promoter and sound artist Abraham Chavelas recounts rescue activities in which he took part after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake rattled Mexico on 19 September 2017. Answering a call for help, Chavelas was assigned to a collapsed factory where an unknown number of undocumented Asian and Central American women working as seamstresses were trapped under the rubble. For two days, he aided rescue efforts by using a high-tech microphone to help determine whether or not there was life under piles of concrete, glass and debris. Chavelas used the audio he gathered before the Mexican Marines …

Mysteries Solved And Unsolved In The Search For The Missing Cryptoqueen, Claudia Calhoun

RadioDoc Review

The Missing Cryptoqueen, produced for BBC Sounds by Jamie Bartlett and Georgia Catt, investigates the cryptocurrency scam fronted by Dr. Ruja Ignatova, self-described “cryptoqueen.” The series benefits from the engrossing complexity of a sprawling conspiracy: The podcasters travel across continents to find both the scammers and their victims, making important stops in the U.K., Germany, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Uganda. The series also benefits from its own breathless narration, which keeps listeners in the present-tense of the storytelling. This was an especially compelling series for the large audience who listened as the weekly episodes were released, as the series integrated …

Editorial: Subjectivity And Objectivity In Storytelling Podcasts, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

In this issue, storytelling podcasts and audio works from the US, UK, Australia and Canada receive in-depth critiques from expert reviewers in Latin America, Australia and the UK. The subjectivity-objectivity spectrum is one focus, along with ethics and aesthetics.

Consent: Objectivity And The Aesthetics Of Re-Enactment In Locative Audio Journalism About A Sexual Assault Trial, Jeanti St Clair

RadioDoc Review

Consent – walk the walk, a geo-locative audio documentary walk in St. John’s, Canada, explores a 2017 sexual assault trial that led to days of protests in the Newfoundland city: an on-duty police officer is charged with sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman he drove home from the town’s nightclub precinct. Producers Chris Brookes and Emily Deming’s work of ‘landscape journalism’ was designed to highlight the tension between popular and legal understandings of the term ‘consent’ in sexual assaults. While the audio walk is a compelling place-based listening experience, Consent raises issues around the impact of dramatised re-enactment in the …

Radio Revolten: 30 Days Of Radio Art - Book Review, Colin Black

RadioDoc Review

Radio Revolten: 30 Days of Radio Art documents the Radio Revolten international radio art festival that took place took place during October 2016 in Halle, Germany. It is a densely rich book that explores aspects of radio beyond the format, beyond time schedules and beyond podcast ratings, while still aiming to build a sense of community. It is reviewed by internationally acclaimed Australian sound artist Colin Black.

Skywriting – Making Radio Waves By Robyn Ravlich: Book Review, Mike Ladd

RadioDoc Review

Robyn Ravlich’s Skywriting - making radio waves is partly an extended dissertation on feature-making and radio art, and partly an autobiography of this acclaimed Australian audio feature maker from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It is reviewed by Mike Ladd, poet, audio producer and an erstwhile ABC colleague.

In The Dark – Pushing The Boundaries Of True Crime, Sharon Davis

RadioDoc Review

True crime podcasts are a burgeoning genre. As journalists and storytellers, how do we balance the pursuit of justice and our responsibility to the victims with the demand to tell a gripping tale? As listeners, are we using the pain of others for our own entertainment? In the Dark podcast (Seasons 1 and 2) takes us beyond a vicarious fascination with true crime stories into a forensic and essential look at deep-rooted biases, corruption and systemic failures that prevent justice from being served.

The first season (2016) investigates the 1989 kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling In …

The Feelings Frontier: A Review Of No Feeling Is Final, Britta Jorgensen

RadioDoc Review

No Feeling is Final faces a two-fold “feelings frontier” in an age of extreme podcast intimacy and empathy: navigating (1) how to convey the kind of deeply personal “big feelings” that are still often seen as off-limits and (2) how to maintain a hyper-awareness about the listener’s feelings. Taking place almost entirely within her mind, No Feeling is Final is a six-part memoir show about host Honor Eastly’s experiences struggling with mental health and what one mental health professional diagnoses as “too many feelings – about four times as many as the average person”. The ongoing tension between creating resonance …

Have You Heard George’S Podcast (It's A True Original), Hugh Levinson

RadioDoc Review

The podcast, Have You Heard George’s Podcast, is a true original. Made by George Mpanga, who goes by the stage name of George the Poet, it won five awards at the 2018 British Podcast Awards – in fiction and non-fiction categories. The son of Ugandan immigrants, George went to an elite state school in north London before taking a degree at Cambridge.

The podcast takes on big themes - empowering George’s community, self-belief, crime, drugs, racism, inequality and international politics. Stylistically, the eight-part series is a mash-up: poetry, sketches, interviews, archive, music, performance and sometimes off-mike chat with his …

One Story, Told Week By Week: Episodic Podcast Storytelling And The Habitat, Charlotte De Beauvoir

RadioDoc Review

The rise and success of podcasting introduced episodic storytelling in the world of non-fiction sound narrative. Delivering a story in different entries is very different from producing a one-off piece. What concrete implications does this have for the narrative? And what keeps an audience listening to a podcast, episode through episode? This article offers some answers to these questions via a case study of The Habitat, a 2018 podcast by the American network Gimlet.

Down But Not Out: Tara And George And The Boundaries Of Subjectivity., Hamish Sewell

RadioDoc Review

Set on the streets of London, amidst the snarl of traffic and the clip of passers by, this work is a biographical sound portrait of two homeless people, Tara and George. It is a testament to the parlous state of homelessness in the UK today and is masterful in its execution.

To this work, producer and host Audrey Gillan brings a quality of frank disclosure and decency. Relationships between producers and their subjects are contentious, due to an inherent power differential. Gillan neither portrays Tara and George as archetypes nor as helpless and needy. She knows she is the one …

Serial, Season Three: From Feeling To Structure, Jason Loviglio

RadioDoc Review

From the start, host and reporter Sarah Koenig presents the 2018 season of Serial as a corrective to the universe-in-a-grain-of-sand approach typical of earlier seasons and much of the work of This American Life, from which Serial spun off. In a thematic departure, Koenig sets out to tell the story of structures, rather than merely structure a story. The first character is a “cluster of concrete towers” in downtown Cleveland, called the Justice Center, a name we’ll quickly come to understand as ironic, if not Orwellian. Host Sarah Koenig describes the structure as “hideous but practical”. Koenig and company …

Editorial: Transnational Audio Storytelling: Writing The Common Language Of Sound, Laura Romero, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Editorial on a special transnational issue of RadioDoc Review, curated by Dr Laura Romero and co-edited by A/Prof Siobhan McHugh. The issue features mainly sound-rich European works in languages other than English, critiqued by reviewers from four continents. It also showcases invited articles on mainstream podcasts, The Shadows (audio fiction) and Serial Season Three (crafted documentary) .

Failure As Liberation: A Critical Analysis Of Rilo Chmielorz’ Artistic Feature “Scheitern Ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme” (Failure Is. An Inventory), Ania Mauruschat

RadioDoc Review

This essay is a critical analysis, interpretation and assessment of the feature “Scheitern ist. Eine Bestandsaufnahme”(2016), by the German artist Rilo Chmielorz,which explores failure as a taboo subject in neoliberal societies that worship the ideology of success and progress.

This study deconstructs this unique feature to its various parts and looks at the feature as a whole in terms of the concept of “polyphonic narration” that the Russian literature and art scholar and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) derived from the poetics of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). It shows how the level of content (life stories of failure, experts …

Pillow, Talk: Kaitlin Prest’S The Shadows And The Elements Of Modern Audio Fiction, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This essay is a study of The Shadows (2018), a series produced by Kaitlin Prest and Phoebe Wang for CBC Podcasts. I situate the work in the framework of Prest’s career after her podcast The Heart, and argue that The Shadows crystallises a set of conventions about “audio fiction” that set it apart from “audio drama,” “radio features” and other similar forms, at least at this particular historical moment. These conventions include: the embrace of naive themes; a preference for retroversion or 'queer temporality'; a focus on body sound; multiplication in mixing and editing that comes across as a …

Prix Europa: The European Broadcasting Festival 2018 - Radio Documentary And Feature Trends, Forms And Topics., Natalia Kowalska

RadioDoc Review

This article surveys a range of European audio features and documentaries selected for the prestigious Prix Europa 2018. Works critiqued come from Italy, UK, France, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic. the Netherlands and Belgium. The winner was The Upside Down, made by Gianluca Stazi and Giuseppe Casu and produced by Radio Televisione Italiana, RAI Radio 3 and Tratti Documentari. The jury described it as a “timeless story about the dignity and spirituality of work. Patiently, it leads us deep into the recesses of the natural world and the human soul. We heard a real musical experience composed of natural sounds …

Listening To Our Inner Breath: The Acoustic Architecture Of Avec Le Vent (With The Wind), Laura Romero

RadioDoc Review

Avec Le Vent (With the Wind) is a radio art composition directed, edited and mixed by Jeanne Debarsy, about the story of exile and memories of three Armenian people living in Brussels and Paris. This review is an attempt to describe how the author breaks with verbal discourse to create an experience of transportation for listeners, through the musical use of layers of breaths coming from the characters and the sound effects caused by instruments of wind, such as the duduk, a potent symbol of Armenia. It is a poetic approach to the experience of uprooting and …

Moving, Belonging, And Sorrow In ‘A Very Different Time’ By Phil Smith, Silvia Viñas

RadioDoc Review

Phil Smith’s A Very Different Time weaves poetry, music, ambience and snapshots of stories in an audio piece about movement, nostalgia, change and sorrow. It includes the voices of people he met while living in Berlin: a West African refugee; a musician and academic from the United States; a Syrian refugee escaping war; an academic of Italian/German citizenship; and a German musician who moved from a small town to the city. To this stream of voices, Smith adds layers of music, different beats, street sounds, distortion, the ambience that recall the words – valleys, mountains, water and islands –and a …

Intimate Moments: Dispelling The Cancer Myth With Real Life - Summer Rain By Nanna Hauge Kristensen., Sophie Townsend

RadioDoc Review

Nanna Hauge Kristensen’s Summer Rain is a small piece in length and in scope. It is intimate, almost fragmentary. It is simply a story of a woman, who is a mother, and a daughter, and who has cancer; a woman undergoing treatment, and raising her child, and dealing with the ramifications of what cancer treatment means. An anthropologist by training, Kristensen’s observational, almost distanced approach style, allows us to glimpse her life, but also to feel it. There is something very empirical about what she’s doing in this piece, and she allows us no room to pretend that her cancer …

“Qualia”: The Subjective Qualities Of Sound As Experience Of The Self, Vanessa Ribeiro Rodrigues

RadioDoc Review

How do we construct the perception of the world and Others through sounds? How are we able to express the myriad of feelings inside ourselves into an intelligible structure in order to be understood? What is the amount of interference in the way we express those [translated] feelings? These are some of the subtle questions raised by “Qualia”, a five-episode radio feature by Spanish artist and performer Charo Calvo, aired in 2016 by ABC Radio National’s Soundproof show in Australia.

The name “Qualia” evokes the philosophical theory of an internal and subjective component of sense and mental perceptions, which are …

Editorial: How Women Are Reclaiming Their Power In The Podcast Sphere, Siobhán Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

This issue considers intimate stories, mostly by women - particularly germane in this era of #MeToo.

Mothers And Daughters In The Digital Private Era: Review Of “A Life Sentence: Victims, Offenders, Justice And My Mother” By Samantha Broun And Jay Allison And “Mariya” By Mariya Karimjee, Kaitlin Prest, And Mitra Kaboli., Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita

RadioDoc Review

The conditions of contemporary soundwork have sparked an extraordinary flowering of intimate storytelling, much of it told by women. Freed from the bonds of technology, scale, and forms of support and distribution that keep traditional radio relentlessly mainstream, the new “digital privacy” of the last fifteen years has allowed new kinds of stories to be told: or rather, has allowed some of the oldest stories in the world to finally be spoken aloud. In both “Mariya” and “A Life Sentence” sexual violence against women is portrayed in all its complexity, tragedy, and terrible familiarity.

In “A Life Sentence,” Samantha Broun …

Bowraville And Phoebe's Fall: Award-Winning Australian Podcasts From The Media Formerly Known As Print, Wendy Carlisle

RadioDoc Review

Digital technology has democratised the audio storytelling space in a quite profound way. This article compares two major podcast investigations produced by established Australian newspaper mastheads: Bowraville by The Australian, and Phoebe’s Fall by The Age. Bowraville examines the unsolved murders of three Aboriginal children in the 1990s – all of whom came from the same small town. Phoebe’s Fall investigates the bizarre death in a garbage chute of a luxury Melbourne apartment building of 24-year-old Phoebe Handsjuk and her troubled relationship with her much older boyfriend.

In depicting what have been described as the three essential ingredients of …