Sounds like 'home': The synchrony and dissonance of podcasting as boundary object. (1st April 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Cory, Erin; Boothby, Hugo
• Is Part Of: Radio journal. Volume 19:Number 1(2021)
• Page Start: 117
• Page End: 136
• Publication Date: 2021-04-01
• Subjects: Radio -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Radio audiences -- Periodicals; Radio stations -- Sociological aspects -- Periodicals; Sound recordings -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; 384.54
• DOI: 10.1386/rjao_00037_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1476-4504

Abstract

Working at the intersection of migration studies and radio studies, we interrogate podcasting's potential as a practice-based activist research method. This article documents podcasting's role in an ethnographic project conducted together with Konstkupan (The Art Hive), a migrant-focused community arts space in Malmö, Sweden. We argue that the value of podcasting as a practice-based research method exists in its potential to function as a boundary object. Boundary objects are technologies and processes bridging social worlds and providing sites of communication and translation between groups. Challenging narratives that detect a decline in podcasting's radical potential, we argue that as a boundary object, podcasting's political significance continues in how it convenes small, diverse, but attentive 'listening publics'. A boundary object does not demand consensus on the meanings or representations it produces, affording space for both the synchrony and dissonance of narratives produced by migrants.