Digital Humanities Commons^™

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 …

Space On Par: A Short Performance For One Performer, Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

Space on Par is a short performance text that uses gentle humour to communicate an alternative perspective on how open space is used by humans and nonhuman animals, in this instance a golf course. If playing golf for enjoyment is puzzling behaviour for a nonhuman observer, it can emphasise human refusal to recognise the physical and spatial rights of other species and their needs for survival. The effort to educate about the treatment of animals can include theatrical characters who blur the species identities to make a point, and Space on Par inverts the invisibility of the gaze of the …

If Animals Could Talk: Reflection On The Dutch Party For Animals In Student Assignments, Helen Kopnina

Animal Studies Journal

This article explores how concern about animal welfare and animal rights relates to ecological citizenship by discussing student assignments written about the Dutch Party for Animals or PvdD. ‘Animal welfare’, ‘animal rights’, and ‘ecological citizenship’ perspectives offer insights into strategic choices of eco-representatives and animal rights/welfare advocates as well as educators. The assignments balance animal issues with socio-economic ones, explore the relationship between sustainability and ethics, and attribute responsibility for unsustainable or unethical practices. Analysis of student assignments reveals nuanced positions on the anthropocentrism-ecocentrism continuum, showing students’ ability to critically rethink their place within larger environmental systems. Some students demonstrated …

‘Animals Are Their Best Advocates’: Interspecies Relations, Embodied Actions, And Entangled Activism, Gonzalo Villanueva

Animal Studies Journal

Since 1986, the Coalition Against Duck Shooting (CADS) has sought to ban the practice of recreational duck hunting across Australia. Campaigners have developed techniques to disrupt shooters, rescue injured water birds, and gain media coverage. The campaign is underpinned by embodied processes that engage empathy, emotion, affect, and cognition. Seeking to understand human-animal interrelations, I conducted multispecies autoethnographic research, during which I participated as an activist-scholar in the anti-duck shooting campaign for nearly three months. Drawing on feminist philosopher Lori Gruen and others, this article conceptualises ‘entangled activism’ and argues that embodied actions arise from interspecies interrelations. This article demonstrates …

[Review] Jacob Bull, Tora Holmberg And Cecilia Åsberg, Editors, Animal Places: Lively Cartographies Of Human-Animal Relations. Routledge, 2018. 276pp, Zoei Sutton

Animal Studies Journal

It’s 2016 and rats are ‘taking over’ in Malmö, Sweden. Forced out of the sewers by flooding, the sight of usually-hidden rats now visible on streets and playgrounds (not to mention their dead bodies in the river) has humans calling for sanitation through eradication to ‘restore’ social order. In daring to exist ‘out of place’ in their search for food the rats ‘turn from tolerated, illegitimate, but invisible waste-workers, to ‘trash animals’ (1). This dramatic scene which opens Animal Places ‘shows how space, place and human-animal relations intersect, thereby producing diversity of effect, boundary work and political action’ (1). Building …

[Review] James Hevia, Animal Labor And Colonial Warfare. Chicago University Press, 2018. 328pp, Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

James Hevia’s very accomplished history, Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare, actually contains more than one history. A history of the military’s reliance on nonhuman animal (animal) labour emerges from a history of the administrative procedures of a British colonial regime. Some years ago, I went searching for this type of animal history to contextualize colonial war re-enactments with circus and menagerie animals. Hevia provides statistical information about the animals involved in colonial military ventures, breaking down the figures by species and compiling total numbers and percentages. He develops an in-depth analysis of the monumental scale of animal deployment – the …

Animal Liberation: Pathways To Politics, Paola Cavalieri

Animal Studies Journal

After making its appearance in analytic moral philosophy at the beginning the 1970s, the animal cause in its modern form – that is, as a challenge to human supremacism and as a defense of interspecies egalitarianism – is recently undergoing a profound change thanks to the advent of new political approaches. Politics now dominates the intellectual scene in at least three main forms: as the devising of new social arrangements, as a critique of the prevailing order, and as an emancipatory project. It will lie with the contemporary animal liberation movement to explore these alternatives in order to definitely assert …

Animal Abuse And Advocating For The Carceral: Critiquing Animal Abuse Registries, Jessica Ison

Animal Studies Journal

Animal activism has an increasing focus on carceral based punishment that argues for animal abuse to be harshly prosecuted. One of the emerging trends is advocating for Animal Abuse Registries similar to the US-style of Sex Offender Registry. This paper challenges the effectiveness and suitability of these Animal Abuse Registries through a critical reflection on Sex Offender Registries. As a result of this, Animal Abuse Registries are extrapolated to be ineffective and perhaps damaging to animals and animal advocacy. The contention that arises from this paper is what constitutes animal cruelty in a society that has industrial slaughter? Further, the …

The Cow Project: Analytical And Representational Dilemmas Of Dairy Farmers’ Conceptions Of Cruelty And Kindness, Nik Taylor, Heather Fraser

Animal Studies Journal

This paper explores different conceptions of cruelty and kindness as they relate to the Australian dairy industry. Findings are drawn from the Dairy Farming Wellbeing Project: 2017- 18, which we affectionately call The Cow Project (also see thecowproject.com.au).1 Funded by Animals Australia, this study was designed to consider the many issues affecting the health and wellbeing of dairy farmers, their families, cows, calves, and to a more limited extent, bulls. The primary objective was to investigate whether farmers themselves identified (potential) links between their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of their farmed animals. A total of 29 qualitative interviews were …

‘Fishing For Fun’: The Politics Of Recreational Fishing, Dinesh Wadiwel

Animal Studies Journal

In this paper, I will seek to understand the peculiar politics of recreational fishing. While I will draw from international research, my focus here will be the problem as it is understood within Australia, a wealthy nation with high standards of living and relatively high participation rates in recreational fishing. The paper explores the conceptual issues that surround how we understand and frame recreational fishing as a form of hunting, drawing on Australian research to understand the extent and characteristics of this enterprise. The second section explores the institutional and epistemic dimensions of recreational fishing. I finally examine how animal …

Remembering The Huia: Extinction And Nostalgia In A Bird World, Cameron Boyle

Animal Studies Journal

This paper examines the role of nostalgia in practices of remembering the Huia, an extinct bird endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand. It suggests that nostalgia for the Huia specifically, and New Zealand's indigenous birds more generally, has occurred as both restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. It argues that the former problematically looks to recreate a past world in which birds flourished. In contrast, the paintings of Bill Hammond and the sound art of Sally Ann McIntyre are drawn on to explore the potential of reflective nostalgia for remembering the Huia, and New Zealand's extinct indigenous birds more generally, in a …

Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (1): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Notes On Contributors, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Notes on Contributors.

Is There A Turtle In This Text? Animals In The Internet Of Robots And Things, Nicola J. Evans, Alison Rotha Moore

Animal Studies Journal

This essay looks at the paradigm shift underway in human relations with artefacts from an animal studies perspective. As the Internet of Things (IoT) produces objects that are smart, sensate and agentive, how does this impact the continuing struggle for recognition of these same qualities in nonhuman animals? As humans acquire new digital companions in the form of therapeutic robots, what happens to perceptions of other ‘companion species’? Nonhuman animals are ubiquitous in IoT discourse as researchers draw on animal metaphors, models and analogies to think through the social and ethical implications of these new technologies. Focusing on representative texts …

First Dog, Last Dog: New Intertextual Short Fictions About Canis Lupus Familiaris, A. Frances Johnson

Animal Studies Journal

The double short story sequence ‘First Dog, Last Dog’ explores interdependencies between domesticated animals and humans. The first story, ‘The Death of the First Dog’, re-reads and quotes from Homer’s The Odyssey and the encounter between Odysseus and his aged hunting dog Argos. Its companion piece, ‘The Carrying’, is set in a speculative future. Exploiting qualities of the Borghesian fable, both tales are interspecies tales of love and loss. This work was read at the 2018 Melbourne Writers Festival ‘Animal Church’ event curated by Dr Laura McKay.

Life And Death With Horses: Gillian Mears’ Novel Foal’S Bread, Deborah Wardle

Animal Studies Journal

Gillian Mears’ novel Foal’s Bread (2011) invites an examination of horses in fiction, opening a platform for exploring the horse in Australian literature from a zoocritical perspective. This paper argues that writing horses into stories involves addressing, indeed flouting the ‘sin’ of anthropomorphism. The problems and paradoxes of ascribing subjectivity to fictional equine characters are discussed. The death of the main equine character, Magpie, is framed as a site of disregard, an example of human disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals. Using excerpts from the award-wining novel, Foal’s Bread, as well as examples from other equine literature, the …

Greyhounds And Racing Industry Participants: A Look At The New South Wales Greyhound Racing Community, Justine Groizard

Animal Studies Journal

Subsequent to the exposure of live baiting and animal cruelty within the NSW greyhound racing industry in 2015, a public debate emerged about animal welfare, oppression and exploitation. It resulted in a community outcry, an inquiry into live baiting and animal welfare within the industry and a proposed ban of greyhound racing in the state of NSW. Whilst the proposed ban of greyhound racing was celebrated amongst animal activists, it was met with a mixture of sadness, shock and animosity from people from within the industry. Many of the people within the greyhound racing community felt stigmatised and discriminated against, …

[Review] Sue Coe, Zooicide: Seeing Cruelty, Demanding Abolition. With An Essay By Stephen F. Eisenman Ak Press, 2018. 128pp, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

Eisenman imagines, in 2050, in a scenario devoutly to be wished and striven for, that animals are no longer ill-treated in zoos, factory farms or laboratories. His informative essay substantiates debates in animal ethics, historically and in art, relating the ‘thingification’ of animals to colonial notions of ‘racial’ superiority. Sue Coe’s work, he demonstrates, comes from a long history of protest against the treatment of animals in zoos and menageries. Like John Berger in Why Look at Animals? (Penguin, 2009), he connects zoos with money-making, dismissing the claims that zoos are geared for conservation. Eisenman regards Sue Coe as the …

‘Let’S Find Out! What Do I Make?’ [Review] Kathryn Gillespie, The Cow With Ear Tag #1389. University Of Chicago Press, 2018. 272pp, Hayley Singer

Animal Studies Journal

I’m halfway through Kathryn Gillespie’s book when it hits me. This enormous shadow lake of sadness I’ve been walking around with – it’s dairy. It’s the electric prods that move cows through pens. It’s the endless stream of bovine bodies flowing around the world. It’s the ginormous global wet market of milk and semen. It’s the aftermath of shotgun blasts delivered to immobile cows, to fugitive cows, still ringing in my ears. It’s the call of mothers and children separated at auction yards. It’s that we’re living in a context of (almost) compulsory dairy consumption. It’s that writing about the …

[Review] Michael Lundblad, Editor, Animalities: Literary And Cultural Studies Beyond The Human. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. 249pp, Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

Lundblad’s introduction defines and separates human-animal studies, animality studies and posthumanism. While there are perhaps more cross-overs than Lundblad suggests, the introduction provides a lucid discussion of these fields, sub-fields and their provenance. In addition, each essay in Animalities locates its analysis in relation to these categorizations. Cary Wolfe’s essay on ‘The Poetics of Extinction’ considers the case of Martha, an individual, named passenger pigeon who was the last of her species, partly via Michael Pestel’s installation which memorialises her and seems to offer some hope that she might live again. Neel Ahuja continues with the spectre of extinction and …

Many Happy Returns: Eradication, Re-Wilding And The Case Of Lord Howe Island, Helen Tiffin

Animal Studies Journal

Colonialist concepts continue to drive Parks and Wildlife/ Conservation Department policies and practices in Australia and other settler colonies. In the case of Australia, returning the country to its pre- European invasion (pristine) condition becomes policy dictate, even where the often draconian implementations of these parameters prove unsuitable or even dangerous. And the notion of restoring Australian ecosystems to their pre-1788 condition is closely linked to the fetishisation of species purity. Australia has one of the world's highest extinction rates, and conservation of what remains is obviously of paramount importance. But the emphasis on eradication of so-called ‘pest’ species can …

Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (2): Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Contributor Biographies, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2019 8 (1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Notes on Contributors.