Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

La Revolte Des Prostituées/The Sex Workers Revolt: A Dual Analysis, Sean Prpick, Maud Beaulieu

RadioDoc Review

This documentary chronicles how hundreds of French sex workers went on strike in 1975 and occupied five Catholic churches to protest against police abuse and government closure of their workplace. Forty years on, Australian producer, academic and sex worker rights researcher Eurydice Aroney revisits the Lyon cathedral occupied by the women with the full blessing of its cleric, Père Blanc, now ninety years old. Interviews with Blanc and some of the original sex worker protesters are interwoven with archival material to make a compelling audio story, selected as a finalist for the UK In The Dark award (2015).

This work …

‘Swansong’ And ‘ Losing Yourself’: Meditations On Life, Death And The Liminal, Cristal Duhaime

RadioDoc Review

This article considers two very personal audio documentaries that reflect on love and identity via the liminal space between life and death. Swansong, by award-winning UK radio producer Hana Walker-Brown, is set in a hospital, as Hana and her father bear witness to her grandmother’s dying and celebrate her joyful life. Losing Yourself, by US producer Ibby Caputo, is a revelatory account of dealing with a cancer diagnosis.

Swansong is a picture of a person fondly remembered but Hana elevates it beyond eulogy into a multi-layered meditation. Her grandmother Joan’s voice flutters in and out of ethereal recreations of …

Intrigue: Murder In The Lucky Holiday Hotel – A Greek Tragedy In China, Sonya Song

RadioDoc Review

Following the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, President Xi Jinping has rendered himself the omnipotent ruler of one fifth of the world’s population. Xi has defeated his political rivals with no mercy; among them was a rising political star, Bo Xilai, who was shot down in 2012 and is now in prison. Bo has been nearly forgotten – until early this year when his dramatic life and political battle were revived by Carrie Gracie with her brilliant BBC podcast series, Intrigue: Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel.

Although as a Chinese native I followed …

Intrigue: Murder In The Lucky Holiday Hotel – A Chinese House Of Cards Meets Agatha Christie., Drew Ambrose

RadioDoc Review

Intrigue: Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel is a podcast that is Agatha Christie meets House of Cards with an Oriental twist. It tells the story of the downfall of Bo Xilai, a once powerful and charismatic politician, who could have eclipsed current President Xi Jingping as a future leader of China if the cards fell his way. Despite the challenges of reporting in China, BBC China Editor Carrie Gracie is able to explain with clarity the tale of money, sex and power than unravelled Bo Xilai.

Gracie guides us through her five-part series with clear knowledge of her beat …

Editorial: Podcasting As The New Space For Crafted Audio, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Editorial Overview

The Arts Of Amnesia: The Case For Audio Drama, Part Two, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This article examines what the relationship between audio drama and radio drama might illuminate about both forms. Drawing on some 40 podcasts and other audio forms that take a serial structure, I explore the rise of audio drama podcasts since 2015 and situate them in both a more recent historical context since the late 1990s and in a broader history stretching back to the first Golden Age of radio. By listening closely to key works on Serendipity, Homecoming and other podcasts, I argue that contemporary audio has profound potential to change both how we listen and how we relate …

The Arts Of Amnesia: The Case For Audio Drama, Part One, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This article examines what the relationship between audio drama and radio drama might illuminate about both forms. Drawing on some 40 podcasts and other audio forms that take a serial structure, I explore the rise of audio drama podcasts since 2015 and situate them in both a more recent historical context since the late 1990s and in a broader history stretching back to the first Golden Age of radio. By listening closely to key works on Serendipity, Homecoming and other podcasts, I argue that contemporary audio has profound potential to change both how we listen and how we relate …

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 …

The Eternal Present: The Untold And Short Cuts Series, Bbc Radio 4., Lyn Gallacher

RadioDoc Review

The present tense is THE powerful first lesson in radio grammar. But so is telling the truth. What happens then, when these two butt up against one another and call each other’s bluff?

‘The Untold’ is a half-hour BBC radio series dedicated to ‘documenting the untold dramas of 21^st century Britain’. The episode, Songs of the Bothy Balladeer, like all the stories in this series, is personal. This whole production can only be made with a high degree of cooperation from all its subjects. Indeed some of them nominate themselves. It means that we, the audience, are …

Animal Studies Journal 2017 6 (2): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Notes On Contributors, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2017 6 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Notes on Contributors.

[Performance Review] Species Blindness: Is There A Role For A Quoll?, Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

There is an anomaly in responses to some live performance that features animal identities and the human effort to provide sanctuary and protect endangered species. The animals might be central to its purpose and yet receive a perfunctory acknowledgement in reviews or not be mentioned. Reviews reflect audience responses and I first noticed this effect in reviews of Jenny Kemp’s Kitten in 2010 which was strongly concerned with issues of animal survival. I have been noting examples since. One recent example is provided by Hannie Rayson’s Extinction, whereby the tiger quoll seems to be dismissed as a plot device rather …

Duties To Socialise With Domesticated Animals: Farmed Animal Sanctuaries As Frontiers Of Friendship, Guy Scotton

Animal Studies Journal

I argue that humans have a duty to socialise with domesticated animals, especially members of farmed animal species: to make efforts to include them in our social lives in circumstances that make friendships possible. Put another way, domesticated animals have a claim to opportunities to befriend humans, in addition to (and constrained by) a basic welfare-related right to socialise with members of their own and other species. This is because i) domesticated animals are in a currently unjust scheme of social cooperation with, and dependence upon, humans; and ii) ongoing human moral attention and ‘social capital’, of which personal friendships …

Condors In A Cage, Camila Cossío

Animal Studies Journal

Annie was carried away by a 13,000-lb. elephant during a Circo Hermanos Salamanca performance in Mexico City. Anabella La Bella was a Namibian-born orphaned elephant who had been auctioned off, transported from Southern Africa to the Mexican Valley as special, oversized cargo, and forced to perform among the dirt and the lights and the ¡Órale! of Mexico City. During the Circo Hermanos Salamanca performance, Annie and her sister tried, with exceeding effort, to seem calm as the trapeze artists swung themselves in the air, floating above them with no apparent sense of mortality. Annie remembered the scene in Batman Forever …

Introduction: Interrogating Captive Freedom: The Possibilities And Limits Of Animal Sanctuaries, Elan Abrell

Animal Studies Journal

In the last few decades, animal sanctuaries have proliferated around the world as advocates for animals have sought to save them from a wide array of contexts in which they are exploited, harmed, or killed by human actions. Sanctuaries take different forms and employ different approaches to animal care, varying in accordance to the kinds of species they save and the arenas of human animal-use they challenge. A non-exhaustive list of kinds of animal sanctuaries includes sanctuaries for farmed animal (rescued from agricultural contexts), ‘exotic’ animals (such as elephants or big cats, often rescued from being kept as pets or …

A Guide For Modern Sanctuaries With Examples From A Captive Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Amy Fultz

Animal Studies Journal

As the need for animal sanctuaries continues to grow, and the numbers of species being housed increases, there is a desire from both current and future sanctuaries for guidance. Guidance from those with experience in the sanctuary, ethics, and animal welfare communities is important and helpful to the founders of new sanctuaries as well as current sanctuaries that may struggle with their identity. I will discuss some of the many definitions of sanctuary, and encourage organizations to consider which definition is the best fit for them. The ethos and philosophy a sanctuary embraces are likely to guide best practices, and …

[Review] Ann-Sofie Lönngren. Following The Animal: Power, Agency, And Human-Animal Transformations In Modern, Northern-European Literature, Henrietta Mondry

Animal Studies Journal

This timely book deals with the theme of human-animal transformations in modern literature from Europe’s northernmost part, all of which are structured by power and agency in relation to the Western tradition’s human/animal divide. The figure of transformation simultaneously contains subversive and conservative potential because the transformation can be voluntary and liberating or forced, oppressive and degrading. This means that human-animal transformation in literature is about agency, change and politics. The purpose of the book is to bring out the tension between the anthropocentric and more-thananthropocentric worlds imbedded in the figure of human-animal transformation.

[Review] Dinesh Wadiwel. The War Against Animals, Philip Armstrong

Animal Studies Journal

Are humans at war with nonhuman animals, either literally or metaphorically? What might it mean for human-animal studies – and for human-animal relations – to say so? Responding to these questions with considerable eloquence and by drawing upon a wide range of references – including 19thcentury theories of war, Continental theory, actor-network theory, and animal rights philosophy – Dinesh Wadiwel produces an argument that surprises, provokes and enlightens.

Selecting Candidates For De-Extinction And Resurrection: Mammoths, Lenin’S Tomb And Neo-Eurasianism, Henrietta Mondry

Animal Studies Journal

My paper explores links between the human and animal candidates for resurrection and deextinction and focuses on the aspect of nationalist agenda in application to both species. I explore the intersection between the scientific and symbolic agendas in the resurrection and de-extinction discourse. I interpret the ideological underpinnings of the current developments in the woolly mammoth de-extinction in the Russian Federation in parallel to the theme of resurrection of historically-important personalities in contemporary Russian fiction of magical historicist bent. My particular focus is on the role of Neo- Eurasianist thinking in the choice of the candidates for resurrection and de-extinction, …

Making Sense? Visual Cultures Of De-Extinction And The Anthropocentric Archive, Rosie Ibbotson

Animal Studies Journal

This article examines the operations of visual representations within discourses advocating deextinction. Images have significant agency within these debates, yet their roles, and the assumptions they naturalise, have not been critiqued. Demonstrating the affective, triumphant and subversive potentials of these representations, this article then turns to the implications of relying on images made by and for humans within the expressly multispecies space of de-extinction. Discourses around de-extinction tend to place undue weight not just on how candidate species look(ed), but on how they appear to human eyes after the mediating processes of representation, and the notion of recreating a nonhuman …

We Are Not Equals: Socio-Cognitive Dimensions Of Lion/Human Relationships, Marcus Baynes-Rock, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Animal Studies Journal

This article documents a peaceful, albeit tense relationship between Ju/’hoan and lions in the Nyae Nyae region of the Kalahari during the 1950s.1 Unlike contexts where lions kill livestock and people and are persecuted in return, the Ju/’hoan and lions of the Nyae Nyae shared waterholes without conflict. The recorded and oral histories, and cultural traditions of the Ju/’hoan suggest that this peaceful relationship had evolved over centuries. Lions were recognised as powerful creatures but unlike hyenas and leopards in the region, they were not killers of humans. Lions were seen as social superiors, and addressed with respect but this …

[Review] Robert Garner And Siobhan O’Sullivan (Eds). The Political Turn In Animal Ethics. Rowman And Littlefield, 2016., Will Kymlicka

Animal Studies Journal

In the 40 years since Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, philosophers have developed a rich and sophisticated literature on the ethics of how we treat animals. Much of this literature has implicitly assumed that our ethical duties to animals are a matter of public responsibility, not merely personal ethics. While modern societies operate with a division of moral labour – leaving some ethical responsibilities to individuals while others fall upon the state – animal ethicists have typically assumed that our most important ethical responsibilities to animals are indeed a legitimate matter for public regulation and state law.

[Review] Peta Tait. Fighting Nature: Travelling Menageries, Animal Acts And War Shows. Sydney University Press, 2016., Nigel Rothfels

Animal Studies Journal

On October 23, 1903, William Temple Hornaday, the director of the New York Zoological Park, wrote to a Mr C. L. Williams, then responsible for ‘Hagenbeck’s Animal Show,’ which was touring the United States. At the time, the show was to be seen at the Grand Opera House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but it was missing one of its star performers, the famous lion-tiger hybrid ‘Prince’ who had been part of the show for over a decade, making his debut in the United States as part of Hagenbeck’s exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Prince was in …

Painting With Horses Towards Interspecies Response-Ability: Non-Human Charisma As Material Affect, Madeleine Boyd

Animal Studies Journal

Leading up to the 2014 Melbourne Cup three communication modes were employed by unrelated horse welfare activists to raise awareness of cruelty in the racing industry. The intention to increase empathy with horses ties together these efforts, which are characterised as written, visual and immersive. This paper uses the lens of Jamie Lorimer’s three types of non-human charisma to consider the potential for each communication mode to achieve the goal of change towards interspecies response-ability. Charisma is considered in this paper to be a form of material-affect within new materialism that offers a more complex tool for analysis than the …

A Practice Theory Framework For Understanding Vegan Transition, Richard Twine

Animal Studies Journal

A shift in the social norm of meat consumption is a transition that is repeatedly called for in climate change policy discourse. Yet this rarely sets out practically how such reduction might be achieved and, surprisingly, has yet to look to vegans as a knowledge resource. In drawing upon interview data with 40 UK vegans this article outlines an initial framework toward the greater normalisation of plant-based eating via attentiveness to the elements of vegan practice. These vegan narratives illustrate how the practice is already working for a small section of the UK population. In adopting a practice theory approach, …

Animal Studies Journal 2017 6 (1): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Notes On Contributors, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2017 6 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Notes on Contributors and Editorial.

Provocations From The Field - Extinction, Encountering And The Exigencies Of Forgetting, Rick De Vos

Animal Studies Journal

Stories of species extinction interpellate and legitimate each other, accumulating, in a discrete and synchronous order, a coherent history of extinction that allows them to be utilised in scientific and historical discourses as authoritative signs. These stories also translate and inscribe social and cultural encounters, however, where groups of different human and nonhuman animals interacted and made sense of these interactions. Great auks, for example, possess stories that exceed the overdetermining official account of their extinction, having endured for at least one hundred thousand years learning and passing on the skills to live and flourish in the North Atlantic, co-existing …

The Unnaturalness Objection To De-Extinction: A Critical Evaluation, Carolyn Mason

Animal Studies Journal

De-extinction of species has been criticised for being unnatural, as have the techniques that might be used to accomplish de-extinction. This objection of unnaturalness will be dismissed by those who claim that everything that humans do is natural, by those who claim that naturalness is a social construct, and by those who argue that ethical concerns arising from considerations of unnaturalness rest on a failure properly to distinguish facts from values. However, none of these criticisms of the objection of unnaturalness is convincing, for reasons I will explain in this paper. The objection of unnaturalness might be motivated by concerns …

On The Authenticity Of De-Extinct Organisms, And The Genesis Argument, Douglas Campbell

Animal Studies Journal

Are the methods of synthetic biology capable of recreating authentic living members of an extinct species? An analogy with the restoration of destroyed natural landscapes suggests not. The restored version of a natural landscape will typically lack much of the aesthetic value of the original landscape because of the different historical processes that created it – processes that involved human intentions and actions, rather than natural forces acting over millennia. By the same token, it would appear that synthetically recreated versions of extinct natural organisms will also be less aesthetically valuable than the originals; that they will be, in some …