June 25, 2024

Griffith University, Brisbane

Deadline: March 15, 2024

Dear ECREA colleagues,

We are delighted to announce a PODCAST STUDIES ROUNDTABLE to be held at Griffith University, Brisbane on 25 June 2024 – a pre-conference to IAMCR24 in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Roundtable is a bridging event between two major international conferences held in Oceania: ICA 2024 (20 – 24 June, Gold Coast, Australia) and IAMCR24 (30 June – 4 July, Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand).

This one-day event is a rare chance for international podcast researchers and practitioner-academics (pracademics) to share ideas, develop collaborations, float projects, showcase research and commune. 

Please send Expressions of Interest/Abstracts by 15 MARCH (Deadline extended)

BACKGROUND:

Now two decades old, podcasting is an exuberant medium where new voices can literally be found every day. As a powerful communications tool that is largely unregulated and unusually accessible, it warrants deep scholarly scrutiny. Increasing platformisation by companies like Spotify and Audible requires urgent critical analysis, to assess their impact on diversity, creativity and alternative voices. The mainstreaming of the medium is also changing business models. Podcast studies are burgeoning across a range of fields from media and communications to criminology and gender studies. But the voices and sounds of the Global South are largely missing from this discourse.

This Roundtable aims to provoke arguments and debate on such absences and to foment research that will reframe our thinking on the potential and power structures of podcasting today.  As the close parasocial relationship of podcast hosts and listeners shows, podcasting is remarkably good at ‘weaving people together’, the theme of this IAMCR event. The Roundtable builds on the first-ever podcast studies pre-conference held at ICA Toronto 2023 and is sponsored by the IAMCR Working Group MARS (Music, Audio, Radio and Sound), the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), the University of Tasmania and Macquarie University, Australia. 

INFO: https://iamcr.org/christchurch2024/MAR-conf

CONVENORS:

Hon Associate Prof Siobhan McHugh, Macquarie University, Sydney/University of Wollongong

Prof Mia Lindgren, University of Tasmania

CO-ORGANISERS:

Lea Redfern, lecturer, University of Sydney

Dylan Bird, PhD candidate, University of Tasmania

Warm regards,

Siobhan

SIOBHÁN MCHUGH  Honorary Associate Professor, Journalism, School of the Arts, English and the Media, Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities | University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia |M +61 404817165 | Twitter @mchughsiobhan | Founding Editor,  RadioDoc Review| MY RESEARCH    ORCID ID

Author, The Power of Podcasting: telling stories through sound, UNSW Press/ Columbia University Press 2022. 

Consulting Producer, The Greatest Menace podcast: about a ‘gay prison’ experiment in Australia (2022), Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism 2022, Best Social Justice Podcast, New York Festivals, Grand Prix Award and Podcast of the Year, Drum Media Online Awards (UK 2023), Australian International Documentary Conference 2023, Best Documentary Podcast, Signal Awards (US), Best True Crime Podcast, Australian Podcast Awards, Best Creativity Award, Australian Podcast Awards, Best Audio Documentary Finals Nominee, Webbys Online International Award 2023, Silver, Europe Rose D’Or 2022, Ambies Finalist US 2023.

SIOBHÁN MCHUGH , Honorary Associate Professor, Dept of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature,  Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.