Podcasting as a Contemporary Curation Practice: A Conversation with Projections’ Mary Wild and Sarah Cleaver.

Fox, Neil ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2959-2877 (2025) Podcasting as a Contemporary Curation Practice: A Conversation with Projections’ Mary Wild and Sarah Cleaver. In: Podcast Studies: practice in theory/theory into practice. NA, NA . Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Print Publication. ISBN 9781771126434

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Abstract / Summary

Podcasting as a space is malleable and open to a variety of readings, engagements and practices. Its ‘hybridity of thought, sound and text […] fosters a reinvigoration of the dialectic’ (Llinares et al.; 2018: 02) that creates a space for conversation to be cultivated and new, emerging voices to be heard and embraced. While this dialectic reinvigoration is evident in the work of audio creators whose background in traditional media (such as Radio) affords them the gatekeeping privilege of historical power, there is also cause for optimism that podcasting is emerging as a democratic space populated by a diverse range of voices. Many of those voices, ones traditionally marginalised within traditional media spaces if represented at all, have found a home in podcasting. Via a conversation with the hosts of the psychoanalytic film podcast Projections (2018- ), Mary Wild and Sarah Cleaver, this chapter explores the potentiality of podcasting for developing new, previously underserved audiences, and examines the capacities of audio curation as a mechanism for prompting audiences to discover or re-visit undervalued texts, voices and narratives.

As the medium of podcasting and its subsequent academic study grows it is vital to expand existing ideas around podcasting to incorporate different contexts. The role played by curation, how audiences and podcast producers think through and enact the cultural play and labour of not just listening, but collecting, sorting, sharing, and reflecting on their podcasting practice, is an under-theorisred strand of Podcast Studies. By situating podcasting as a curatorial practice, ‘collection-making’ (2015: 39) as curator Hans Ulrich Obrist writes, we can conceptualise how the dynamics of the medium engenders curation and archival assemblage that can be placed in the context of both commercial and nostalgic consumer needs. However, as a largely democratic medium, for the time being at least, podcasts can also use and create archives to address historical and cultural erasures and neglect. I would argue this can be achieved through what Maura Reilly terms ‘curatorial activism’ (2018: 22), discussed shortly. Podcasting can animate already existing archives, and create new ones, and by doing so address historical oversight in terms of the cultural spaces they are in dialogue with. This ‘narrative correction’, as Ashley Clark calls contemporary film curation practice (2019: 09: 05), creates the opportunity for previously unheard voices to engage with previously under-serviced audiences. In this vein, this chapter considers podcast curation a potentially political act. Podcasts often contain, consciously or not, an enunciation of ideological positioning or critique, through the content and form of their work. I begin by unpacking some of key insights regarding the aims and possibilities of curatorial activism within the broader context of curation, and its potential applications to the medium of podcasting. This is followed by the transcription of an interview with the hosts of Projections Podcast, in which the potential enactments of curatorial activism within their podcasting practice is explored.

Item Type: Book Section
ISBN: 9781771126434
ISSN: TBC
Subjects: Film & Television
Film & Television > Film
Department: School of Film & Television
Depositing User: Neil Fox
Date Deposited: 06 Oct 2022 10:06
Last Modified: 13 Aug 2025 11:35
URI: https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/4710
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