Episodes

Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025) contains 18 chapters written by scholars who podcast or use podcasting in their academic or teaching endeavours. Their insights contribute to our understanding of what the discipline of podcast studies is and can be. We asked the authors to pair up with another contributor to discuss their respective chapters, creating an opportunity to find synergies and insights through conversation. In this episode, Dr. Jasmine Har...

The Podcast Studies Podcast hosts Lori and Dario have finally published their edited volume Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025). The book contains 18 chapters written by scholars who podcast or use podcasting in their academic or teaching endeavours. Their insights contribute to our understanding of what the discipline of podcast studies is and can be. We asked our authors to pair up with another contributor to discuss their respective chapters, creatin...

Lori Beckstead chats with Ian M. Cook about his recent book entitled Scholarly Podcasting: Why, What, How? We hear from some of the scholars who podcast whom Ian interviewed for the book and talk about why podcasting is an attractive way of doing and disseminating research for so many scholars. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcaststudiespodcast/message

For this episode, Dario spoke to the freelance podcast producer Jess Shane. Jess works largely in audio documentary although you can hear her work cutting across various fields, genres and themes. Jess came to our attention due an article she wrote for RadioDoc review entitled Towards a Third Podcasting: Activist Podcasting in the Age of Social Justice Podcasting. This piqued Dario’s interest, particularly because it clearly borrows from the seminal film studies article called Towards a Third Ci...

The Podcast Studies Podcast returns after over a year's hiatus. In this first episode in a new season we bring you a hybrid recorded session from the ICA pre-conference focused specifically on Podcast Studies. Lori hosts the episode and quizes Dario on his deconstruction of "The Podcast Space". In the first chapter of the upcoming book Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory, Dario explores the way in which Podcast Studies scholars deploy the term "space" to amalgamate various different physical/c...

Robert Gutsche, is a leading scholar in the field of Journalism Studies where he applies critical cultural theory to investigate issues of power in journalism. He is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Critical Digital Media Practice at Lancaster University in the UK and Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Informatics at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania. As a journalist, his work appeared in The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Guardian, and various other regional and loc...

Prof. Mack Hagood, author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self Control and producer of Phantom Power, joins Dario to discuss sound studies and scholarly podcasting. Phantom Power is a benchmark academic podcast in terms of acoustic form and scholarly depth. Its focus is on the sonic arts and humanities and the show utilises all the myriad affordances of sound to explore scholarship and sound art. Mack and Dario unpack the joys and labors of academic podcasting, discussing the production process and the...

How well do podcasts work as a medium for scholarly peer review? In the previous episode, Hannah McGregor and Ian M. Cook provided peer review on Lori Beckstead's draft chapter Context is King: Podcast Packaging and Paratexts. Now we're following up to discuss how well we think this method went. Dario Llinares leads us in a discussion about the affordances and limitations of doing scholarly peer review in the context of a podcast. Jess is also here with recommendations for a peer reviewed and a ...

Host Lori Beckstead submits her draft chapter Context is King: Podcast Packaging and Paratexts for a real-time peer review on this podcast. Peer reviewers Hannah McGregor and Ian M. Cook give their impressions and suggestions, unpacking Lori's theoretical framework looking at the various media surrounding the podcast audio through the lens of Gerard Genette's paratext theory. We've recorded this episode as an experiment to see whether it's feasible to conduct peer review of a written manuscript ...

We're excited to share a podcast submitted to us by Robin Davies, Professor of Media Studies at Vancouver Island University. Originally broadcast as a radio program on CHLY FM in Nanaimo, British Columbia, it features a series of short podcasts that were created as a cross-disciplinary assignment between Criminology students taught by Professor Lauren Mayes and Media Studies students taught by Professor Davies. Discussing diverse topics from the over-incarceration of Indigenous Peoples to the stigma surrounding drug users, these short podcasts are interspersed with reflections and feedback from the students who created them. The students tell us how the assignment was more meaningful to them because they were collaborating on work that would be broadcast and distributed as a podcast which would make their work accessible to listeners beyond the classroom. This collaborative practice exemplifies how podcasting can be utilised as a pedagogical tool to engender creative practice, critica…

In this episode, Dario talks to Terry Lee. Terry is Senior Tutor in Radio & Audio at the University of Bedfordshire and is also responsible for the award-winning Radio LaB 97.1FM. He has had a long career in independent and commercial radio including managing Norwich's Future radio. In 2018, he started Fantastic Noise a podcast primarily aimed at students studying radio, and featuring the experienced voices of radio professionals and experts. Along with talking about the formation and production...

How about a podcast that creates itself? Or an episode that changes each time you newly download it? Generative podcasts, created with programming, AI, and dynamic insertion technologies are not yet commonplace, but could they be? Lori speaks to Jeff Emtman and Martin Zaltz Austwick, creators of Neutrinowatch, about how and why they created this generative podcast and how it disrupts expectations of how listeners 'use' podcasts as well as how podcast platforms serve them up. And our friendly nei...

PhDCasting aims to be research through podcasting practice. Jerry Padfield documents his personal reflections of a journey through a PhD at Falmouth University, researching #podcasting and #CommunityRadio practice for wellbeing. The podcast talks about the experience of completing a PhD, from the perspective of a research student: the milestones, the emotional highs and lows, and also becomes a research tool in itself, interrogating the embodied knowledge within the practice. Each episode also f...

Welcome to the first episode of the new season of The Podcast Studies Podcast (formerly New Aural Cultures). We are absolutely delighted to have Dr. Reginold Royston on the show, whose article Podcasts and New Orality in the African Mediascape is the focus of the discussion. A transcript of this episode is available. Dr. Royston is a media anthropologist and digital humanities researcher, jointly appointed in the School of Information (formerly SLIS) and the Department of African Cultural ...

Bias in the news is a hot topic and is the focus of News in Context, a weekly podcast discussing the issues that impact how information is delivered, how we consume it, and how that affects our interactions with each other. In this episode, Prof. Lori Beckstead talks to creator and host of News in Context Dr. Gina Baleria. A former broadcast and digital journalist, Gina now teaches journalism, media writing, & digital content creation and delivery at Sonoma State University. In this wide-ranging conversation, issues covered include: navigating information in the Digital Age, audio journalistic forms, the role of the journalist in news, control of media content, economic considerations of podcast journalism, and much more. Dario introduces the episode with some reflections on the end of the academic year, continuing research and life generally, offers a few Podcast Studies recommendations, and outlines some news about a 'rebranding' of New Aural Cultures that is coming for the new a…

Dario is joined in this episode by two of the leading lights of Podcast Studies to discuss some of the major changes in podcasting infrastructure and their implications. Apple’s decision to add a mechanism for paid subscriptions to its podcasting architecture is a move that is arguably as significant as when the iTunes first specified podcasting in its audio listening directory. In a recent article in The Conversation co-written by John Sullivan (Professor of Media and Communication, Muhlenberg ...

The role of early career researchers is absolutely fundamental to the emergence and future development of “Podcast Studies”. And today I’m delighted to be joined by two such scholars whose own research is expanding the horizons of how podcasting is being theorized and analysed, AND, who are providing organisation, leadership & support for other ECRs in podcasting. This is particularly in light of their recent organisation of an International Graduate Symposium on Emerging in Podcast Studies. Dar...

In this episode, it was my pleasure to discuss politics, podcasting and the media more broadly with one of the top political commentators in the country Steve Richards. Steve is the host of Rock and Roll politics, a podcast that showcases his talent for the single voice monologue and we discuss this format, Steve's personal inspiration - the historian and broadcaster A.J.P. Taylor - and how it differs from dialogue and panel formats in production and delivery. We analyse the audience for Rock an...

PhDCasting aims to be research through podcasting practice. Jerry Padfield documents his personal reflections of a journey through a PhD at Falmouth University, researching #podcasting and #CommunityRadio practice for wellbeing. The podcast talks about the experience of completing a PhD, from the perspective of a research student: the milestones, the emotional highs and lows, and also becomes a research tool in itself, interrogating the embodied knowledge within the practice. Each episode also f...

Today Dario talk to PhD student studying at the University of Paris, Ella Waldmann, about her recently published article From Storytelling to Story Listening: How the Hit Podcast S-Town Reconfigured the Production and Reception of Narrative Non-Fiction. We discuss the literary aesthetics and structures of the show, the storytelling devices used to shape an experience that explicitly calls to the novel as modernist form. We speculate on whether this is an example of podcasting attempted to assert...

In this episode, Dario talks to a producer and host with his finger on the pulse of the American podcasting landscape, Matty Staudt. Matty has been obsessed with audio broadcasting since childhood, listening to seminal shows such as Bob and Ray's morning show and Dr Demento. Moving into radio at the first opportunity Matty quickly became an an on-air host, morning show lead and executive producer at stations as WJFK in Washington DC, WNEW in New York City, Alice Radio (KLLC) and Live 105 (KITS) ...

In this episode, New Aural Cultures is delighted to be collaborating with the SpokenWeb podcast. Produced by a collective of researchers who are dedicated to the discovery and preservation of sonic artefacts that have captured literary events of the past, SpokenWeb is both a vital resource for the analysis of the spoken word history in Canada and beyond, and a vital intervention into the present and future of literary performance, communication and knowledge exchange from critical and pedagogica...

I spoke to Galen Beebe who is a contributing editor at Bello Collective. Bello Collective is a website that is dedicated to writing about podcasting that focuses on criticism. Made up of a diverse team of writers, curators, podcasters and fans who are all passionate about the power of audio, they publishes analysis of specific podcasts, innovations in technology and journalism, and highlight shows that are worth listening to. It’s really a great hub for discourse about podcasts that goes beyond ...

Alyssa Chafee is the co-producer and host of the Vagina Museum podcast which explores, in a playful yet in-depth tone, the cultural history and symbolism of what is still remains a taboo subject. Alyssa talks to Dario about her MA thesis in science podcasting audiences, he work with the Vagina Museum, and the idea and development of the podcast. Also under discussion is the podcast as a tool of education and awareness raising, how to challenge myths around taboo subjects, and the value of humour...