Podcasting in Academia: A critical look at its potential and discussing a new book, Podcast Studies
Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Recorded on 11/04/2024
Posted in The Authority File
Episode 405
The Authority File is no stranger to discussing podcasts. Despite the Spider-Man meme of it all, podcasting works as an effective tool to talk through the medium’s pedagogical, cultural, and academic applications. Our guests for November’s series—podcast hosts and producers themselves—are familiar with this hall of mirrors, dropping by to discuss their forthcoming edited collection, Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory.
This month, we chat with academic and podcaster Dario Llinares and Lori Beckstead, Associate Professor of sound media in the RTA School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University, on their goal to define—or, at least, lay some parameters around—Podcast Studies. Explaining the rise of podcasting in the research community, Dario and Lori explore how podcasts can both reject and fall within academia’s traditional guardrails for scholarship. Further, they dig into the personal touch of using one’s voice to discuss research, how faculty use podcasts in the classroom, and the accessibility of the medium.
In the first episode of this four-part series, Dario and Lori trace their paths to editing Podcast Studies and becoming podcasters. In addition, they outline the book’s objectives to characterize the Podcast Studies discipline, highlight podcasts’ academic and non-academic uses, and include diverse, global perspectives and methodologies. Last, our guests reflect on the process of gathering the book chapters and their intent to invert the “Theory into Practice” phrase commonly seen on monographs in the book title.
About the guests:
Dario Llinares
Academic and Podcaster
Dario Llinares is an academic and podcaster whose research has focused on a range of cinema- and media-related themes. He has published on the status and practice of cinema-going in the digital age, the aesthetics of postmodern film, representations of masculinity in prison cinema, and podcasting as a media technology. He is the co-founder and co-host of the podcasts The Cinematologists and The Podcast Studies Podcast and co-editor of Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media (2018).
Lori Beckstead
Associate Professor, RTA School of Media
Toronto Metropolitan University
Lori Beckstead is an Associate Professor of sound media in the RTA School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada. She is coauthor of Podcast or Perish: Peer Review and Knowledge Creation for the 21st Century (2024) and co-host/co-producer of The Podcast Studies Podcast.
Enjoy the conversation? Listen to the rest of the series:
- Defining Podcast Studies: Challenging the traditional principles of scholarly communication
- Academic Podcasting in Action: Pedagogical practices and appeal to general audiences
- The Future of Academic Podcasting: Establishing its importance and uses in scholarly communication
Check out our previous series with Wilfrid Laurier University Press:
– Exploring Ecologies in Practice and Environmental Humanities
– Outlining the “Big, Big Tent” of Comics Studies
– The Contemporary Leonard Cohen
– Creative Disruption in Scholarship
– Performing Female Blackness
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