Though music tends to be my most frequent form of auditory entertainment, podcasts offer a totally different experience that I really value. For me, podcasts are a form of “edutainment” where I can learn a bit, catch up on popculture, experience talented performances, or just have a few laughs.
The formats I find most compelling are either conversational or narrative. I mostly listen to humorous conversational pods from content creators I follow elsewhere on YouTube or other social media. Typically I listen to YouTubers’ pods like Ear Biscuits (from Good Mythical Morning) or The TryPod (from The Try Guys), occasionally for fun pop- and nerd-culture I tune in to ID10T with Chris Hardwick.
Narrative podcasts itch the entertainment scratch and I find myself listening to them multiple times over. I love the hilarious, serialized, NSFW narrative podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno or the three-act musical pod 36 Questions.
Within either the narrative or conversational podcasts, audio quality is something I’m immediately hyper-aware of. I love a good intro track that sets the mood and I’m neither here nor there on audio effects; just as the overall audio quality needs to be somewhat “professional” for me to not get distracted by it, I’d say the same for the effects. They can really help or ruin the podcast’s immersive experience.
My research focuses on neurodiversity representation in children’s literature (specifically middle grades prose and graphic novels intended for 8-12 year old readers). Scholarship is sparse on this reading level, let alone on anything focused on neurodiversity, so I’ve only come across one podcast–Books Between–that focuses on middle grade books. I’m excited for this course and for my forthcoming pod to highlight neurodiverse middle grade literature and hopefully be a source of some discourse within diverse children’s literature!