1a: Listening Journal
Suggested deadline: November 7
It’s kind of hard to make a podcast if you don’t have a good sense of what you want your work to sound like. In this first week, we’re going to explore some options for scholarly podcasting and you’re going to spend some time reflecting on what you like and don’t like.
Your job this week is just to listen to podcasts! Try to find a range of different styles (we have some suggestions below) and look for podcasts with a scholarly angle that might match your own discipline or approach. We also want you to keep a listening journal to track your preferences.
When you’re ready, make sure you’re logged in to the site.
To add a new Post
- Click the Posts menu option
- Click the Add New link underneath (or hover your cursor over the Posts menu option and click the Add new link in the fly-out menu).
- Follow the prompts to upload your content. If you’re brand-new to WordPress, you can review our instructions for posting content here.
- Important: make sure you choose “Journal” for the post category; this will aggregate your post alongside other participants on the Journal post page. Here’s a little more about how categories work.
Suggested Podcasts
Here are some shows favoured by folks on our team:
Interview format: Secret Feminist Agenda was a peer-reviewed podcast about feminist issues made by Hannah MacGregor, an assistant professor of publishing at Simon Fraser University.
Documentary format: Crackdown is a SSHRC-funded podcast documenting the war on drugs from the perspective of drug user journalists.
Conversational format: Métis in Space is a podcast by Indigenous academics Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowell, critiquing Indigenous representations in popular culture (especially sci-fi and fantasy).
There are more suggestions posted over at the Amplify Podcast Network blog, and we have been crowdsourcing the favourite shows of folks taking this course here. And you can, of course, download the podcatcher of your choice and spend some time exploring the options available there.
Suggested Writing Prompts
- What format was most compelling for you to listen to?
- What kinds of production choices — music, effects, segments — do you like, and which turn you off?
- What conventions seem to emerge in podcasts related to your discipline or that you want to emulate?
- What podcast couldn’t you find to listen to — and do you want to make it? What might that look like?
In the Fall 2022 iteration of this course, Week 1 Assignments are due on November 7. You can sign up to join our live discussion of Week 1 by clicking here. And whenever you are accessing this course, we offer support via our Mattermost Team, which you can join by clicking here.