Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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.

Economies Of Extinction: Animals, Labour, And Inheritance In The Longleaf Pine Forests Of The Us South, Nathaniel Otjen

Animal Studies Journal

Despite mounting critiques, extinction continues to be framed as a unidirectional problem where humans, through acts of negligence and intent, lead nonhuman species to their demise. In addition to universalizing the actors and processes involved, unidirectional approaches overlook the ways nonhuman beings participate in the extinction of others and the ways extinction continues to impact multispecies communities long after the violent event or the death of an endling. With its focus on how nonhuman animals experience and navigate violence, the field of critical animal studies can illustrate how nonhuman animals contribute to extinction events and how extinction unfolds across distinct …

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”.

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 …

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 …

Empathy, Ethics And Aesthetics In Love + Radio, Michelle Macklem

RadioDoc Review

The podcast Love + Radio thrives on cultivating a kind of emotional tightrope, where the listener wavers from curiosity to contempt to empathy. The episodes “Jack and Ellen” and “The Living Room” have stark differences, particularly in terms of sound design, but their aesthetic and production values have a coherency that is exemplary of Love + Radio’s style. Sound is used to distinguish between ‘Ellen’, the subject, and ‘Jack’ her paedo-baiting alter ego. ‘Jack’ is created by pitch-shifting the voice of ‘Ellen’ down, instantly giving the story intrigue and also alluding to the clandestine nature of their work. “Jack and …

Criminal: Journalistic Rigour, Gothic Tales And Philosophical Heft, Jason Loviglio

RadioDoc Review

Like many of the shows in PRX’s Radiotopia catalogue of podcasts, Criminal’s sensibility and sound partake of the US public radio formula made famous by This American Life: journalistic rigour and gothic yarns. The show tells “stories of people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or got caught somewhere in the middle”. But it’s moved beyond mere crime journalism to something that aspires to a bit more philosophical heft. Most of the stories unspool through the elegant co-narration between host Phoebe Judge and each episode’s central protagonist. The effect is almost always seamless, thanks to the expert mixing of …

From The Limbo Zone Of Transmissions: Gregory Whitehead’S "On The Shore Dimly Seen", Virginia Madsen

RadioDoc Review

In this review-essay, Virginia Madsen enters the polyphonous 'limbo zone of transmissions' created by Gregory Whitehead's most recent 'performed documentary' and radio provocation, "On the shore dimly seen". This composed voicing, drawn from verbatim texts courtesy of WikiLeaks and the dysfunctionality of America's Guantanamo Bay, is heard as a fortuitous chance encounter with a medium – and as an increasingly rare listening 'detour' while Madsen is on the road. This essay is thus both a reflection upon the nature of the radio offered here, the chance listening experience to work of this kind, and upon the distinctive body of work …

Anne Sexton's Environmental Animality, Dan A. Wylie Prof

Animal Studies Journal

What does it mean to study the intersection of environment, animals and literature, at this juncture in human history? How might it manifest at the level of an individual poet’s work, with what consequences? This paper approaches these questions through the poetry of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, Anne Sexton. Sexton’s poetry has been exhaustively studied for its psychological dimensions and forcefulness, for her treatment of madness, suicide, and family relationships in particular. Despite a high density of animal imagery, this animal element is conventionally skimmed over. This article argues that animal presences constitute a minor but unavoidable strand amongst the …

Turning Seventy, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

The author's ruminations on the occasion of him reaching the age of 70 years old.

Little War On The Prairie: An Auto-Critique, John Biewen

RadioDoc Review

Using RadioDoc Review’s suggested criteria for evaluating a radio documentary, John Biewen delivers an auto-critique of his own program, Little War on the Prairie. It tells the story of the U.S.-Dakota War, a bloody Plains Indian war that broke out in the summer of 1862 in southern Minnesota. That six-week conflict took the lives of hundreds of people, perhaps a thousand, a larger death toll than in the better-known bloodlettings at Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee. Most of the dead were white settlers, though the U.S. government’s reprisals in the aftermath of the war killed up to several …

The Hospital Always Wins: Review 2, Michelle Boyd

RadioDoc Review

This documentary raises crucial questions about our definitions of mental health and healing as well as the meaning of forgiveness. It also illustrates how an individual’s ability to extract themselves from the grip of institutional power is highly dependent on luck and money and privilege. Perhaps most importantly, this piece gives voice, in a complex, respectful manner, to Ibrahim and other schizophrenics whose struggles remain buried and ignored. One element that is missing from this story is an account of how race complicates this unequal power dynamic. Ibrahim is black… “Hospital’s” impact might have been even wider had …

The Hospital Always Wins: Review 1, Sharon Davis

RadioDoc Review

This documentary gives a graphic and challenging insight into the thinking of a schizophrenic mind. But whose story is it, producer Laura Starecheski’s or mental inpatient Issa Ibrahim’s? The process of recording a documentary over such a long period of time (ten years) is tough and always difficult to negotiate. What starts out as a journalistic exercise becomes something very different as your relationship develops over time with the people you are recording. Here, it’s the narrator who drives the story on, weaving in and out of the interviews and actuality, and it’s the strength of the writing that compels …

Norman Corwin's The Lonesome Train (Decca Recording) 1944, David K. Dunaway

RadioDoc Review

The Lonesome Train, the cantata for radio with words by Millard Lampell, music by Earl Robinson, and directed by Norman Corwin, probably originated in a dilapidated brownstone on lower Sixth Avenue in Manhattan: The Almanac House, a radical commune for music organisers in Greenwich Village, including Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Corwin is widely regarded as a guru of thoughtful radio producers, a poet-laureate of radio. From 1936, when he helped create WQXR-FM in New York City (later, voice of the New York Times) to his death 75 years later, Norman Corwin managed to be simultaneously commercial, popular, …

Norman Corwin's The Lonesome Train (Live Broadcast) Cbs 1944: A Critical Reflection, Tim Crook

RadioDoc Review

The Lonesome Train was a commercial half-hour ‘ballad opera’ or folk cantata, transmitted in 1944, about the funeral train bearing President Abraham Lincoln’s body home after his assassination in the Ford Theatre of Washington D.C. in 1865. This became culturally resonant in 1945 on the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the Decca recording of the show became a sort of ‘media requiem’, played over and over again on US radio stations. The live production, directed by Norman Corwin, is a hybrid between drama and documentary, but goes further with its use of music and poetry… perhaps a musical …