Podcasting as Liminal Praxis: Aural Mediation, Sound Writing and Identity

Abstract

Podcasting has been adopted by a host of academics, writers and artists in ways that both enhance, but also diversify from, their primary field of interest or mode of communication. In this chapter Dario Llinares, film academic and co-creator of The Cinematologists Podcast, reflects on his own experience of podcasting production, presentation and dissemination, and analyses interviews with a range of such podcast adopters, to conceptualise the ways in which the medium provokes a self-reflexive interrogation of one’s identity as a mediated and mediating subject. Through an exploration of podcasting praxis—the enactment and subsequent acquisition of knowledge through materialised audio practice—Llinares examines how a range of podcasters assess the effects of working in this audio format, particularly in terms of its potential challenge to the logocentric basis of information communication. Furthermore, Llinares argues that podcasting represents a regeneration of the dialectical possibilities of audio and, concomitantly, reopens debates as to how the form and process of mediation are fundamentally implicated in the formation of knowledge.