This practice-based thesis explores how podcast practice — often rooted in broadcast radio and journalism practice — can adapt to meet the needs of diverse storytellers. Static: A Party Girl’s Memoir (also known as Static) is a six-episode podcast series telling the true story of how 19-year-old Ashley King lost her eyesight when poisoned by methanol while travelling in Bali. This series, collaboratively produced with Inside Out Theatre and Chromatic Theatre in Calgary, Alberta (Canada) considers the intersectional nature of relationships, identity, and disability in its content as well as its modes of production. Through an iterative action research framework, supported by disability justice principles and Dokumacı’s theory of activist affordances (2023), Static’s team developed a process for adapting standard podcasting practices to better accommodate the team’s accessibility requirements — specifically, producer, playwright and actor Ashley King’s visual impairment. In collaboratively re-conceptualizing the podcast’s scripting, recording and revision processes, this practice-based work provides a practical demonstration of how affordances can be used to identify challenges to accessible and inclusive podcasting while also serving as a tool to theorize solutions to these challenges. This research theorizes an accessible podcasting landscape, from technological considerations to how embedding best accessibility practices into story content — the narrativization of essential story information — can create more accessible media outputs and open new and exciting opportunities for remediating digital stories across audio, video, and text. Informed through the lens of podcast studies, disability media studies, practice-based research and disability arts practice, this research contributes to the field of podcast studies and other fields by theorizing a new framework for how media makers can adapt their production processes to better serve accessibility and inclusion in their work. It also contributes to literature on practice-based research, podcast studies, radio studies, disability media studies, journalism practice, and disability arts practice. Further, this work contributes to the developing area of practice-based research by using podcasting and action research to consider practical and theoretical aspects of practice-based work, including a discussion of the challenges that research-practitioners may have in navigating institutional ethics processes, as well as potential solutions.
M. Wilcox (Thu,) studied this question.