bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Beyond the Horizon of the State: Listening to offshore detention’s longue durée
Authors: de Souza Poppy
Published: November 2024

From the ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric of Operation Sovereign Borders to #KidsoffNauru and #BringThemHere to the 2018 Migration Amendment Bill (or ‘Medevac’ bill)—legal, discursive and temporal logics of crisis are used to both defend Australia’s border regime in the name of state securitisation and appeal to humanist calls for empathy and compassion. Yet the logic of crisis both obscures the ‘long emergencies of slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) of the settler-colonial carceral state, and renders disposable those whose lives endure beyond its shelter or under its duress. Responding this Special Issue’s call to consider the acoustics of justice, this essay aims to listen beyond crisis in response to the artwork how are you today (Manus Recording Project Collective, 2018), a collaboration between six men then detained on Manus Island, PNG, and three men in Melbourne. Parcelled out in eighty-four, ten-minute vignettes, the resulting fourteen-hour sound archive confounds expectations of what life in offshore detention might sound like. Focusing on attention, duration, and slowness, I suggest how are you today presses us to develop more sustained and situated ethics of attention—one oriented not towards empathy or compassion, but towards the more difficult, durational and justice-oriented listening (Thill 2018) needed to unsettle Australia’s settler colonial border regimes. Taken together, or heard collectively, the work invites us to listen beyond the horizon of the state to hear to the enduring-ness of life on Manus—the solitude and suffering, but also the sociality and solidarity—as well as the limits of what settler-colonial carceral logic and law can hear.
Glitching justice: Audio visual links and the sonic world of technologised courts
Authors: McKay Carolyn
Published: November 2024

My earlier work on the prison endpoint of audio visual link technologies found that a ‘soundtrack of incarceration’ often infiltrates prison audio visual link studios and may be unintentionally transmitted to the remote courtroom (McKay 2016, 2017, 2018a,b). This article shifts attention to the courtroom endpoint of audio-visual links to examine the audio dimensions of this form of communication. Drawing on case law and transcripts from Australia, New Zealand and England, this article identifies a range of acoustic issues, or glitches, that are analysed through the lens of emergent criminological and socio-legal understandings of sound to grasp the sonic world of increasingly technologised courtrooms.
Acoustic Surveillance in Brazil: The Car Wash Operation Panacousticon
Authors: Cardoso Leonardo
Published: November 2024

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault famously described Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as the emblematic representation of a shift in power from public and centralised punishment to diffuse and individualised surveillance. Within surveillance studies, Foucault’s panopticon has become a dominant analytical framework. Although Foucault considers the panopticon as a matter of optics and visibility exclusively, Bentham was not oblivious to acoustics. For instance, in his panopticon plans, he considered including a network of “sound pipes.” Compared to its visual counterpart, such a ‘panacousticon’ presents two distinctive traits. One trait is the symmetry between the inspector and inspected, as information could flow in both directions – ‘toward the scene of discovery but also toward the listener’ (Szendy 2017: 23). The other trait refers to versatility: the inspector can use the sound pipe for eavesdropping, monitoring, and as a channel for public addresses. In this article, I examine acoustic surveillance in Brazil within the context of the Car Wash Operation (Operação Lava Jato), the country’s largest corruption investigation, launched in 2014. I argue that the Operation’s success is directly related to its use of ‘sound pipes’ such as wiretaps, plea deals, and leaks. I start examining Brazil’s legal mechanisms that prohibit (silence layers) or permit (auditory probes) state interference into people’s private acoustic spheres. The second part of the article describes the Car Wash Operation was able to build and deploy its panacousticon.
Law As … IV: Minor Jurisprudence in Historical Key. An Introduction
Authors: Tomlins Christopher
Published: November 2024

Is minor jurisprudence tallow or is it tar? Taking its cue from Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet’s ‘Damnation’s Cellar (1993), this introduction presents the idea of ‘minor jurisprudence’ as it was first proposed in the mid-1990s, and explores its current potential as discussed, developed, and applied in the essays in this issue of Law Text Culture. The introduction also presents the enterprise known as ‘Law As …’ – a biennial symposium under the umbrella of which this exploration of minor jurisprudence took place. One important question for the symposium was, ‘can “Law As …” be a form of minor jurisprudence’? Should it be? The authors answer by example, or explicitly, as they develop their own encounters with minor jurisprudence in this issue.
On the Magic of Law
Authors: de Sutter Laurent
Published: November 2024

This essay focuses on a forgotten and ill-reputed category, long used by anthropologists and historians to describe the origins of law: the category of “magic.” At the end of the 19th century, many scholars found in the idea of “magic” something that could explain why some sort of a necessity could be attached to certain actions, paroles or rituals from which concrete, practical effects were expected in “primitive” societies. “Magic” was a concept embodying a complete theory of performance, and of the necessity of the consequences produced by this performance, that seemed to some of those scholars capable of explaining why necessity and performance were also legal features. Yet, after World War II, the positivist school of legal historians chose to discard this explanation, and to forget all about the possible links between law and magic. By re-reading the work of Paul Huvelin, a forgotten French legal historian close to the circles of Emile Durkheim, I would like to claim that this gesture was rather a form of foreclosure – foreclosure of the fact that law might very well be the last form of magic in a world that refuses to admit its existence. Of course, the whole question is: Which magic? How magic? Why magic? These are the questions that the essay tries to answer.
How Strange the Change from Major to Minor
Authors: Goodrich Peter
Published: November 2024

The lines from a Noel Coward song provide the appropriately melancholic and suitably ambiguous title to an excavation of the ontology of the minor. Associated theologically with the abrogation of all law, the minor is the child, play, the modal chord that challenges, subverts and displaces the certainty of the major key and black letter law. A minor jurisprudence is argued here to be a lifestyle that challenges the extant legal form of office, the establishment as doctrine, the stasis and complacency of the institution.
A Minor Jurisprudence of Spectacular War: Law As Eye in the Sky
Authors: Rajah Jothie
Published: November 2024

The 2016 film, Eye in the Sky (Eye), features contestation among lawyers, politicians, and military personnel as to law’s values, meanings, and consequences. In other words, Eye is animated by jurisprudence. As jurisprudence, Eye represents contemporary drone warfare as a highly regulated legal system structured around an ethical valuing of civilian life. Given that drone warfare is known yet secret, by rendering drone warfare vivid and visible, what legal system does Eye construct, which jurisprudential questions are asked, and which are occluded? Drawing on scholarship relating to minor jurisprudence, and spectacular war, this essay argues that Eye dazzles us with technology, and an acute questioning of law, to distract us from first, concealments and erasures accompanying drone warfare, and second, a legitimation of the controversial international law principle, responsibility to protect. In the process, by rendering visible a particular set of actors, narratives, and questions, while concealing and erasing others, Eye legitimises drone warfare and valorises its actors, institutions, practices, and technologies.
Law As…Forest: Eco-logic, Stories and Spirits in Indigenous Jurisprudence
Authors: Anker Kirsten
Published: November 2024

Taking up the suggestion that minor jurisprudence may consist either in the perpetual critique of the outsider to major jurisprudence or in the initiation of new grounds for jurisprudence, this essay wonders whether some forms of Indigenous jurisprudence – with a focus on the articulations of North American scholars – might do both. Emerging out of embodied relations with sentient forests, mountains, rivers and other non-humans, practices of Indigenous jurisprudence are at once a living critique of the disenchanted character of modern law, as well as a literal grounding of jurisprudence in relationships to place. The essay takes Indigenous jurisprudence on its own terms, particularly through ecologies as teacher, place-based stories and a participatory consciousness that experiences the spirit of the land, while attempting to articulate this jurisprudence in the idiom of the author’s own intellectual tradition, such as through the scientific foundations of Earth jurisprudence, through metaphor in the analysis of myth, and through semiotics as a way of comprehending a sentient landscape.
‘Life Grasps Life’: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Minor Jurisprudence
Authors: Minkkinen Panu
Published: November 2024

In an article from 1994, I tried to read Franz Kafka’s short story ’In the Penal Colony’ as what I called ’minor jurisprudence’ by drawing on an analogy from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Whatever Kafka had to say about law should not, so I claimed, be understood as a form of theodicy as it usually is but, rather, as the possibility for a new ’politics of desire’. As ‘minor literature’, Kafka’s texts were inherently resistant to attempts to box them into conventional literary taxonomies. And it was this inherent resistance that created the opening for his ’minor jurisprudence’, as well. My aim will be to discuss the nature of this discordant force through the notion of vitalism. More specifically, I will discuss this vitalistic element through Wilhelm Dilthey’s 1883 treatise Introduction to the Human Sciences. But instead of focusing on the hermeneutical method which is the usual way in which Dilthey is introduced into the jurisprudential tradition, I will discuss his more general views on law as a cultural and political phenomenon and on jurisprudence as the ’human science’ that studies it, both significant themes in the 1883 Introduction but which scholarship has largely ignored.
Law Protecting Rights: Restoring the law of self-determination in the neo-colonial world
Authors: Maguire A.
Published: November 2024

In light of the continuing state dominance of international legal relations, it is questionable whether international law adequately protects the right of self-determination. Yet, as it is enshrined in international law, self-determination retains great emancipatory promise. It is therefore essential that the law of self-determination, and its means of implementation, further evolve in order to harness the right’s full potential in the wide range of twenty-first century claims to the right. In this paper I consider self-determination in relation to the contemporary rights claims of Irish nationalists and Indigenous peoples in Australia. This comparison allows for an analysis both of the impacts of colonialism in the present and of the various means by which self-determination may be asserted today. I am advancing two central arguments: firstly, that self-determination retains a mission of decolonisation in the twenty-first century; and secondly, that a ‘human rights approach’ to self-determination presents the best means of advancing the rights of contemporary claimants while protecting the rights of non-claimants.
Sovereignty: Some considerations
Authors: Duncanson I.
Published: November 2024

The purpose of this paper is to assert that sovereignty is not a useful doctrine when applied domestically in modern times in the form it often assumes, namely a locus of legal or political authority which has an existence beyond the political system governed by it and which may therefore have resort to extraordinary power in exceptional circumstances. The conviction that this must be so has gained the status of common sense in some circles: after all, must the state not have emergency powers to protect itself ? But what is ‘itself ’? — a question that arises whenever ‘state’ infrastructure is sold to largely wealthy purchasers. Is the state not the taxpayers’ agent? Why should they be asked to pay over again for assets they already own?
Identity crisis: Judgment and the hollow legal subject
Authors: Mohr Richard
Published: November 2024

In this article I will be suggesting that there is a problem with the modern legal subject. There is something missing, a gap in the middle of that subjectivity, which clouds our judgment. This split had its origin in the Enlightenment, its first effect being the separation of knowing from doing. Our experience of the world could only be mediated through self-conscious sense data and thought, without our being in direct contact with the satisfaction of our needs or the consequences of our actions. This new conception of subjectivity has become an impediment to judgment, since splitting the actor from the spectator, and the judge from the life of the community, results in a denial of the capacity to interpret facts in the light of experience.
Spirited away: Asylum law and the institutional violence of legal discourse
Authors: Parker J.
Published: November 2024

I can’t honestly say I remember, but the chances are it was cold: this was early March in Montreal after all and it usually is. I wandered south out of the Latin Quarter down through Chinatown and, as the buildings became gradually either taller or older — one or the other — through the business district. The Federal Court building was just on the corner there, after the road works and next-door to that ludicrously overpriced café with the pasta in the window. Through the revolving doors I found a man in a uniform and a dark blue hat with a badge sitting at a desk in the centre of a large room, only a metal detector for furniture and his security cameras for company. A few garbled words in French and I was pointed in the direction of the registrars’ office — juste là bas, through that door on the left. I asked to see a recent asylum file, any one at all as long as it was in English, and I remember that the lady on the other side of the counter only ducked away for a moment or two, presumably plucking the first one she could find from the nearest shelf, before reappearing case in hand. Confronting that first case in the little grey room they put me in was a thoroughly bemusing experience. For starters the file itself looked like nothing I had ever seen during the course of my law degrees. A great big blue folder (IMM: 2850-5) with a massive jumble of papers in it — six hundred pages probably, all told — bound together into various smaller bundles and arranged in no particular order that I could determine at the time at any rate. This was the law, ‘real’ law; I felt utterly unprepared for it. And so, naturally enough perhaps, my eye was drawn to the small brown folder that had been precariously attached to the larger one by a rubber band, but was now sitting there on the side, almost embarrassingly small by comparison to its big blue brother. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.
The Intersection of Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and Law: Some Themes and Policy Reflections
Authors: Mercer D.
Published: November 2024

The following article provides a brief sketch of some important themes that can be drawn from studies which have investigated law/science interactions from a Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) perspective and notes some of the policy ramifications of such studies. SSK studies can be characterised by their analytical concern with linking the content of scientific knowledge and the practices of scientists to the social contexts in which scientific knowledge claims are produced and evaluated and their rejection of the idea that science is something that can be defined by its unique method and social norms (Mulkay 1979, Collins & Pinch 1993, Lynch & Bogen 1997). Many SSK/law studies have focused on controversial areas of science and law such as toxic torts, forensic science and risk and environmental regulation. The brief overview provided below will identify some important, recurrent conceptual themes rather than provide an exhaustive bibliographic survey.
Law's Other Spaces
Authors: Hogg R.
Published: November 2024

Here a north coast man, Horrie Saunders, is talking to the late Kevin Gilbert, Indigenous poet and writer, for his 1978 book, Living Black (1978: 46). Horrie Saunders became a successful local businessman after he was expelled from the local Aboriginal reserve in the 1960s for criticising the management. In the interview he described the loss of freedom he suffered when he was removed from the reserve lands with which his people had traditional links. In addition to the loss of community he also lamented the sense in which loss of place affected traditional authority and made it difficult or impossible to transmit traditional knowledge and stories to the young. The comments suggest that space and place set definite limits to law, authority, obligation and knowledge in Indigenous society in ways fundamentally alien to the abstract conceptions of right and duty to be found in western thought and conceptions of law. We find the same tension highlighted in the reaction of some of the litigants in the Wik case (1996), who found it bizarre that a leaseholder could acquire an interest in 'their' land without ever having occupied or otherwise having physical contact with it, let alone that such an interest could extinguish their millennia old association with that same land. Others have pointed to the manner in which Indigenous law has in various ways adapted to the dispossession and dislocation described by Horrie Saunders, often by the improvisation of new spaces, albeit in the face of constant official attempts to circumscribe and police the boundaries of Indigenous community life and cultural practice according to European (more specifically Anglo) standards of civic propriety and public order (Langton 1988).
Sovereign Debts: Global Colonialism, Austerity and Neo-Liberal Assimilation
Authors: Giannacopoulos Maria
Published: November 2024

What does it mean for a sovereign nation to be in debt? What does it mean to be sovereign in the context of debt? Which debts must be paid and which debts can be disavowed? What is the role of law, in particular the High Court of Australia, in rendering Australian sovereign debt invisible? Why has the notion of ‘sovereign debt’ become synonymous with countries like Greece while other sovereign debts remain invisible? In this article I interconnect the seemingly unrelated debt crises of Greece and Australia. I take a critical legal approach to the effaced debt scenario of colonial Australia and the imperialising economic order in contemporary Greece in order to extend, in cultural and racial terms, the discussions possible on sovereign debt.
Brokeback’s Bareback: Queering Lex Populi
Authors: MacNeil William P.
Published: November 2024

One evening, almost a decade ago, at a smart dinner party held in Northcote, an inner suburb of Melbourne, the utterly fabulous and now, sadly, late Penny Pether turned to me after some discussion of the then recent American gay rights decision, the Supreme Court’s landmark Lawrence v Texas, and suggested, with her customary forthrightness that I should write about the case within the context of a film that both of us had only lately seen (her, on an aeroplane from America; me, at my local cinema in Brisbane), and which each of us, as we had discovered earlier in the conversation, had thoroughly enjoyed.1 The film was unique, having begun its cinematic life as a modest art house production made on what was, by Hollywood standards, a shoestring.2 By the time though that Penny and I spoke of the film, it had become a huge international blockbuster, winning a raft of prizes,3 garnering critical acclaim,4 and scoring staggering box office returns.5 That film was (and is), of course, Taiwanese Ang Lee’s masterful screen adaptation (2005; 2006)6 of Annie Proulx’s dazzling New Yorker short story, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (1997; 2005). Ostensibly a ‘Western’7 – but one with a ‘twist’, to indulge in a characterological pun; that is, punning on the literary and cinematic character, ‘Jack Twist’, played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the film, and his ‘twisted’, or at least bent sexuality.
Introduction, LTC volume 17
Authors: Cranny-Francis Anne , Kelly Elaine
Published: November 2024

This collection of articles was prompted by our concern with the ways in which the treatment of strangers is understood socially, culturally, politically and legally. The actions of successive Australian governments seem deliberately to avoid any engagement with a notion of hospitality as an obligation to assist those in need, to accommodate the visitor or the alien. The arrival of strangers is instead viewed as hostile – an infringement of national sovereignty, rather than an appeal for assistance. The common social response is a kind of panic that is not justified by the number of applicants, which is tiny by comparison with the demands on nation states elsewhere. This seems a deadly irony in a country that was founded as a nation-state by immigrants – and perhaps something of the hysteria aroused by the arrival of supplicants is a displaced recognition among non-Indigenous Australians that they are us; if we admit these strangers, perhaps they will ‘settle’ this country as violently as our forerunners did, but this time we will be the targets. Whether or not that is the case, it seemed that the time is ripe for an examination of the notion of hospitality.
Acts of hope. James Boyd White, Acts of hope: creating authority in literature, law, and politics
Authors: Pether P.
Published: November 2024

I approached writing this review with a measure of anxiety. James Boyd White is a friend whose encouragement and hospitality I have much reason to be grateful for. His is a generous and punctilious intellect, and as a scholar he models courteous and decent behaviour to his juniors as well as his peers. He is also without question the scholar who has thus far done most to advance interdisciplinary scholarship in law and humanities in the 'main stream' of the legal academy and the legal profession. That said, we work in different traditions: his the liberal humanist; mine the feminist poststructuralist. And so we judge and value differently. Which is to say that I disagree with many of his conclusions in this collection of essays, and almost all of the volume's assumptions and methodology. And thus that reviewing Acts of Hope in an ethical manner loomed as a knotty problem, for Boyd White's hope and my transformative politics are not two sides of the same coin, but insigne of radically different degrees of satisfaction with the present dispensation, and with those men - many of them, like Boyd White, decent, democratic, thoughtful men - who in the main speak and write the law.
Plessy v Ferguson and the literary imagination
Authors: Thomas B.
Published: November 2024

On 7 June 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for violating Section 2 of Act 111 passed by the Louisiana Legislature in 1890. The law called for 'equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races' on all passenger railways within the state. Plessy's arrest was part of a planned challenge to the law by New Orleans blacks, who fanned a committee of protest. In September 1891 the committee had contacted the white lawyer Albion Winegar Tourgee.
The compassionate decision-maker
Authors: Glass A.
Published: November 2024

At times we respond to the predicament of another person with compassion. We come to an understanding of their difficulties and feel for them and suffer with them. Feelings of compassion call for an 'imaginative dwelling' on the particular circumstances of another. We will not have this experience or it will be misdirected if we do not treat the other person as an identifiable individual; someone with a particular history; someone with particular needs and desires. Compassion, in short, calls for particularity. The administration of the law, in contrast, calls for abstraction, it encourages an approach which treats people in general terms. Law's emphasis is on generality and the sameness of people; for justice demands that rights and obligations be applied equally, often irrespective of particular circumstances. That judges settle disputes according to law (and not moral principles or feelings) and that bureaucrats administer without affection or illwill are regulative ideals of our legal and administrative structures.
The Peronist and the ghost in the state of Australia
Authors: Duncanson I.
Published: November 2024

The spirit in this article is that of liberal democracy, that precisely state of affairs in which there exists a separation of powers among the executive, legislature and judiciary, an independence of the judiciary and a substantive independence of the legislature from the executive. Additionally, in the 19th century there was added to this structure, in the United Kingdom and subsequently in the Australian colonies, a tenured civil service. Writers in mid to late Victorian Britain saw this addition as a necessary restraint on a Parliament elected by an ever-widening franchise comparable — if one listens to Maine’s gloomy assessment of popularly elected legislatures (Maine 1897, Essay II) — to the process of judicial review established in the United States. However undemocratic in origin, the civil service nevertheless operated by guaranteeing — in the eyes of the political ‘establishment’ — disinterested advice to secretaries of state and ministers, to help ensure that those selected to government were, so far as possible, given the information upon which to make choices, and therefore to carry responsibility to the legislature for those choices. Its very paternalism in restraining ‘irresponsible’ popular politics helped ensure the answerability of government to popular politics.
Editors’ introduction: challenging nation
Authors: Dauvergne C. , Wesley Pue W.
Published: November 2024

What I most like about the idea of ‘challenging nation’ is what it has brought us over the past two years. Initially we wanted an idea that would act as an umbrella for people interested in Australia here at the University of British Columbia, a concept that would make sense of the diversity of their scholarship across disciplines. ‘Challenging nation’ worked for that purpose, and that group of people developed and supported the Challenging Nation Lectures in 2003–04. But once we invited eight other people, somehow plausibly connected to Australia with something to say about nation, the challenge took off in different ways.
CALL OUT for CREATIVE AUDIO FEATURES for CRITIQUE And ANALYSIS in RadioDoc Review Issue 7, 2018
Authors: Romero Laura
Published: November 2024

Next issue of RadioDoc Review (Issue 7, 2018) will be guest edited by me, Laura Romero - and I am calling for nominations of audio works in languages OTHER THAN ENGLISH to be considered for in-depth review. See article for guidelines. Submit by 1 April 2018.
Mothers and Daughters in the Digital Private Era: Review of “A Life Sentence: Victims, Offenders, Justice And My Mother” by Samantha Broun and Jay Allison and “Mariya” by Mariya Karimjee, Kaitlin Prest, and Mitra Kaboli.
Authors: Hilmes, Michele
Published: November 2024

The conditions of contemporary soundwork have sparked an extraordinary flowering of intimate storytelling, much of it told by women. Freed from the bonds of technology, scale, and forms of support and distribution that keep traditional radio relentlessly mainstream, the new “digital privacy” of the last fifteen years has allowed new kinds of stories to be told: or rather, has allowed some of the oldest stories in the world to finally be spoken aloud. In both “Mariya” and “A Life Sentence” sexual violence against women is portrayed in all its complexity, tragedy, and terrible familiarity.
In “A Life Sentence,” Samantha Broun confronts the rape and brutalisation of her mother Jeremy that occurred two decades earlier, and the personal and public consequences that radiated out from it, partially through her own actions as a loving daughter. Broun’s and Allison’s skillful and compelling interweaving of the personal and political throughout this nearly hour-long piece makes for a hypnotically engaging experience. In “Mariya,” Mariya Karimjee relates the physical and emotional consequences of the genital mutilation inflicted on her by her loving mother, also a victim of the practice, and what that means for both of them. More meditation than documentary, this story is told with a dreamlike yet matter-of-fact intensity by its author, who reads from a previously published account. Both stories plunge us into the dark complexities of power and victimisation, innocence and complicity, love and pain. Mothers and daughters: in this era of the digital private, radio 3.0, now their stories can be told.
Sounding Out Stories: A Critical Analysis of The Prince, How To Become A Dictator, The King of Kowloon, Three Narrative Podcasts on Contemporary China
Authors: McHugh Siobhan
Published: November 2024

It’s unusual and welcome to see not one, but three, well-produced narrative podcasts made in the West about China. Hosted by female journalists with a Chinese background, all provide strong context on Chinese history and politics but focus essentially on an individual: The King of Kowloon (produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) memorialises an eccentric graffiti artist called Tsang Tsou-choi, his art seen in the context of Hong Kong’s shrinking democracy. Both The Prince (by The Economist) and How To Become A Dictator (by The Telegraph) zero in on Xi JinPing, President of the People’s Republic of China, their release coinciding with the fifth annual Communist Party Congress in October 2022.
There are many ways to ruin a narrative podcast. Unlike chatcasts, technical quality matters: intimacy, that cherished currency of podcasting, starts with a close mic. The deployment of voice, actuality, music and archival sound in the service of story makes a big difference to how engaged listeners will be. Underpinning all of this are the script and narrative structure. The host should be relatable, as a human being and in connection to the podcast theme. The script also has to link, foreshadow and clarify the various story elements, while the narrative arc works at both a micro level, providing a satisfying journey within each episode, and a macro, whereby thorny details and bum steers are explored, eliminated or developed, and by the end of the series, finally resolved—or at least exhausted.
This article is an in-depth critique of these three narrative podcasts, analysing aspects from production/structure and craft/sound design to editorial/research, hosting, script and storytelling.
Toward a Third Podcasting: Activist Podcasting in an Age of Social Justice Capitalism
Authors: Shane Jess
Published: November 2024

A manifesto that provocatively argues for the rise of "Third Podcasting" patterned after Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's concept of "Third Cinema."
Audio Activism: A Discussion of Mother Country Radicals
Authors: Dohrn Zayd
Published: November 2024

This article is a transcript of a speaking event at Northwestern University, USA, in which producer Sarah Geis interviewed writer Zayd Dohrn and podcast producer Misha Euceph about their recent podcast Mother Country Radicals, which concerns the history of the Weather Underground, as well as Black Liberation more broadly, from the perspective of Dohrn, who grew up as a child of radicals from that period. Dohrn and Euceph explain the process and thinking they brought to the project and explore a few key moments that shaped the podcast, reflecting on the complicated relationship between family and activism.
From Statement to Purpose: An Interview with Bill Siemering
Authors: Verma Neil
Published: November 2024

This article is an interview between RadioDoc Review Editor Neil Verma and Bill Siemering, founding Director of Programming at National Public Radio and lifelong proponent of public radio. Siemering and Verma discuss Siemering's role at the founding of NPR, his earlymcareer in Wisconsin, WHYY Philadelphia, WBFO and KCCM, as well as his enduring work in community radio development in Africa.
Intimacy, inc.
Authors: Boynton Robert S.
Published: November 2024

Routledge’s new Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies is a follow up to its Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, published in 2000--precisely the moment when podcasting began to undermine radio’s audio hegemony. What if the transition from radio to podcasting is a paradigm shift, the new medium posing challenges different from radio, and closer to those faced by journalism, literature, and film? Siobhan McHugh's The Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories Through Sound represents a podcast-first, back to basics approach which approaches podcasting as a process, not a technology.
Frente de Fogo (Firefront): analysis of an epic story of survival
Authors: De Beauvoir Charlotte
Published: November 2024

Frente de fogo invites us on a multiple journey through the story of a Portuguese fireman who unbelievably survived the forest fires that devastated his country in the summer of 2017. Isabel Meira’s production is based on a very strong story and backed with honest testimonies. It’s the tale of a survivor and the tale of a surviving family. Frente de fogo tackles such fundamental questions as: What does one do in the face of an exceptional situation and a danger of death? What is it like to live in hell for several hours? How do you survive this? How can your family survive this?
This review aims to analyse the narrative in Frente de fogo, pointing out its strong points and suggesting how to improve its weakest points. The analysis addresses mainly three issues: the categorisation of the documentary as a “production without a narrator” and the demanding nature of the genre; the reconstruction of a dialogue through editing between the two main characters; the creative treatment of sound and space in the piece, especially linked with the creation of an emotion and the rhythm of the production.
Some More Notes on Notes on a Scandal: Lessons From Producing Pakistan’s First True Crime Podcast
Authors: Masood Khan Tooba
Published: November 2024

If a country’s podcast scene could be described as a vibe, Pakistan’s would be “dude bro”; that is, politically and culturally right-leaning masculinist narrative. The format is simple: like The Joe Rogan Experience which has over 15 million subscribers and over three billion views in Pakistan, there’s a host and a guest. In addition to Rogan, other popular pods are The Pakistan Experience, Pakistonomy, Thought Behind Things, Talks that Matter, Mooroo, The Pivot, Junaid Akram’s Podcast. The conversations usually revolve around the guest’s life, their political views, the economy – whether Pakistan will default or not, will the IMF give another tranche for relief, will donor money bring in dollars and other burning subjects. There’s also How Does This Work, Misaal (a tech/start-up podcast), Policy Beats, Climate Mahaul (Pakistan’s first podcast on Climate Change), Dragon Road (exploring Pakistan’s relationship with China) and Mosiki which looks at music, freelancing, and other “fun” things. All this changed in December 2020 when the first episode of mine and Saba Imtiaz’s Notes on a Scandal – Pakistan’s first true-crime podcast – made its debut.
SKYWRITING – MAKING RADIO WAVES by Robyn Ravlich: book review
Authors: Ladd Mike
Published: November 2024

Robyn Ravlich’s Skywriting - making radio waves is partly an extended dissertation on feature-making and radio art, and partly an autobiography of this acclaimed Australian audio feature maker from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It is reviewed by Mike Ladd, poet, audio producer and an erstwhile ABC colleague.
Have You Heard George’s Podcast (it's a true original)
Authors: Levinson Hugh
Published: November 2024

The podcast, Have You Heard George’s Podcast, is a true original. Made by George Mpanga, who goes by the stage name of George the Poet, it won five awards at the 2018 British Podcast Awards – in fiction and non-fiction categories. The son of Ugandan immigrants, George went to an elite state school in north London before taking a degree at Cambridge.
The podcast takes on big themes - empowering George’s community, self-belief, crime, drugs, racism, inequality and international politics. Stylistically, the eight-part series is a mash-up: poetry, sketches, interviews, archive, music, performance and sometimes off-mike chat with his producer. It’s often difficult to know what’s real and what isn’t.
This article analyses how the series achieves its force.
Down But Not Out: Tara and George and the Boundaries of Subjectivity.
Authors: Sewell Hamish
Published: November 2024

Set on the streets of London, amidst the snarl of traffic and the clip of passers by, this work is a biographical sound portrait of two homeless people, Tara and George. It is a testament to the parlous state of homelessness in the UK today and is masterful in its execution.
To this work, producer and host Audrey Gillan brings a quality of frank disclosure and decency. Relationships between producers and their subjects are contentious, due to an inherent power differential. Gillan neither portrays Tara and George as archetypes nor as helpless and needy. She knows she is the one working for the BBC, delivering ‘their’ story to us in its very skin and bones. Over time, Gillan’s obvious affection for these two mendicants comes through; as does her desire to resolve an insoluble situation that goes back many years.
One of the principal strengths of the work is its framing of time. Over two years, we travel with Gillan and Tara and George, through freezing winters and searing summers, through illness and loss, disappearances, laughter and moments of great pain. Central to this is the relationship between George and Tara, “a love story—of sorts”. And just like many relationships that are further fuelled by substances and grief, the bond between George and Tara is complex and varied.
Nice White Parents and the Phantom Public School
Authors: Loviglio Jason
Published: November 2024

Serial Productions’ Nice White Parents tells the story of “an utterly ordinary, squat, three-story New York City public school building”, and the many schools it has housed over six decades; each one, it turns out, shaped in ironic and disastrous ways by white parents’ ambivalent desire for diversity. Like some earlier Serial efforts, this is a story on a theme: the failure of the American experiment in public, democratic institutions. Thanks to impressive archival research, candid interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, and a deftly delivered dose of Serial’s trademark reflexivity between the object of study and the reporter’s investment, what could have been a depressing dirge for democracy is instead a lively dialectic exploration of the difficulty and necessity of equitable public institutions.
Tools of Rescue: A Review of Silencio para rescatar: documental sonoro
Authors: Robles Sonia
Published: November 2024

In this audio documentary, Mexican cultural promoter and sound artist Abraham Chavelas recounts rescue activities in which he took part after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake rattled Mexico on 19 September 2017. Answering a call for help, Chavelas was assigned to a collapsed factory where an unknown number of undocumented Asian and Central American women working as seamstresses were trapped under the rubble. For two days, he aided rescue efforts by using a high-tech microphone to help determine whether or not there was life under piles of concrete, glass and debris. Chavelas used the audio he gathered before the Mexican Marines arrived and prevented untrained emergency workers like himself from helping. Subsequently he organised it to create a cathartic homage to the real heroes of the catastrophe: people, not government officials.
Narrative Justice: Somebody Delivers the Answers that Police Will Not
Authors: Price Neroli
Published: November 2024

By investigating Courtney Copeland’s 2016 murder, the podcast series Somebody (2020) does the work that should be done by police. Narrated by Courtney’s mom, Shapearl Wells, the series not only decentres the official police narrative, but also opens up alternative paths towards seeking justice. Situated within the Black Lives Matter movement, calls to defund the police and questions about the usefulness of “objectivity” in journalism, Somebody attempts to put systemic violence on trial and hold those in power to account. Challenging extractive forms of journalism, Somebody moves towards a model of shared authority between producers and their sources. This review focuses on the use of voice and perspective in the series and how that lays bare the many ways that systemic police violence disproportionately impacts Black people. It uses narrative structure and true-crime tropes to illustrate how Somebody both deploys storytelling techniques and breaks them. It offers an example of what podcast series might sound like if they centred the communities they cover rather than trying to shock and surprise their imagined audiences.
La Revolte des Prostituées/The Sex Workers Revolt: a dual analysis
Authors: Prpick Sean , Beaulieu Maud
Published: November 2024

This documentary chronicles how hundreds of French sex workers went on strike in 1975 and occupied five Catholic churches to protest against police abuse and government closure of their workplace. Forty years on, Australian producer, academic and sex worker rights researcher Eurydice Aroney revisits the Lyon cathedral occupied by the women with the full blessing of its cleric, Père Blanc, now ninety years old. Interviews with Blanc and some of the original sex worker protesters are interwoven with archival material to make a compelling audio story, selected as a finalist for the UK In The Dark award (2015).
This work has had several incarnations: the original 50-minute French documentary heard on Radio France Culture and Radio Belgium; the French documentary watched with English subtitles provided by the In the Dark organisation; and a shorter (27mins) remixed English version, heard on ABC RN’s Earshot. To address these complexities, RadioDoc Review asked former CBC broadcasters Sean Prpick and Maud Beaulieu to review the work from different perspectives: Prprick, as an English-speaking producer, listened to the subtitled French and the English versions; Beaulieu, who is bilingual, evaluated the original French version using guidelines devised by the RDR Editorial Board. Finally, RDR Editor interviews producer Eurydice Aroney about the complexities of making a crosscultural work on a politically delicate theme and its standing as an academic research publication, known as a Non-Traditional Research Output (NTRO).
Peculiarities of the course of gestation in women with a history of reproductive loss
Authors: Siusiuka V. H. , Soloviova N. M.
Published: November 2024

Aim. Тo assess the frequency of extragenital pathology, features of obstetric and gynecological history and the course of pregnancy in women with a history of reproductive loss.
Materials and methods. The study was conducted on the basis of the Municipal non-profit enterprise “Maternity house No. 9” of the Zaporizhzhia City Council with the involvement of 75 pregnant women with one reproductive loss in history. The control group consisted of 30 women without a history of reproductive loss. Women who had reproductive losses were divided into 2 groups. Group I (main group) includes 38 pregnant women who registered for pregnancy and began their participation in this study after the start of a full-scale war on the territory of Ukraine. II (comparison) group included 37 women who were registered for pregnancy before the start of the full-scale war. It should be noted that 17 pregnant women (44.7 %) had the status of an internally displaced person. The average age of women in group I was 30.10 ± 5.86 years, in group II – 28.80 ± 6.07 years, and 26.50 ± 4.95 years in the control group. The anamnesis data and features of the course of gestation were studied in all patients. Management of pregnancy and childbirth of women was carried out in accordance with the current Orders of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine. Variational and statistical processing of the results was carried out using the Statistica 13 program.
Results. According to the results of the study, it was established that the frequency of extragenital pathology in women with one reproductive loss was higher, compared to women who had no such experience. Diseases of the cardiovascular and urinary systems occupy a leading place in this category of women. According to obstetric and gynecological anamnesis, a significant predominance among women of I and II groups of diseases of the reproductive system, compared to women of the control group, was established. Also, in the corresponding groups, a high frequency of miscarriage was established both in the period up to 12 weeks (28.95 % in the I group, 43.2 % in the II group against 6.67 % in the control group), and in the period of 12–22 weeks (34.20 % in the I group, 29.73 % in the II group vs. 13.33 % in the control group).
Conclusions. Based on the conducted analysis, a high frequency of pregnancy complications was established for pregnant women who had a history of one reproductive loss. This contingent of women also has a high frequency of extragenital and gynecological concomitant pathology. Such results make it possible to assume a connection between the presence of one reproductive loss in women in the anamnesis and gestational complications of the next pregnancy.