The SpokenWeb Podcast - ShortCuts Live! A Magical Audio Tour with Jennifer Waits

ShortCuts Live! A Magical Audio Tour with Jennifer Waits

11/20/23 • 18 min

This ShortCuts presents the first of many conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us? Join us for this ShortCuts Live in which a conversation with Jennifer Waits that takes us on a magical audio tour into the sounds of campus radio stations.

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at [email protected] with your pitch.

Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod

Supervising Producer: Maia Harris

Sound Design: James Healey

Transcription: Zoe Mix

ARCHIVAL AUDIO

Archival audio excerpted from this episode of Radio Survivor:

https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/11/podcast-22-were-all-moving-to-the-fm-dial-now/

Blog post with photographs from Jennifer Waits’s tour of Radio K:

https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/10/my-grand-tour-of-college-radio-station-radio-k/

A past Radio Survivor episode featuring SpokenWeb:

https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2021/02/podcast-284-spokenweb-and-literary-sound/

SPECIAL GUESTS

Jennifer Waits (interviewee) is the co-founder of Radio Survivor and Radio Survivor’s College Radio and Culture Editor and Social Media Director. Jennifer is also the Founder and Editor of SpinningIndie, a website devoted to the culture of college radio. She’s worked in college radio at 4 different stations (off and on) since 1986 and is currently a DJ at KFJC 89.7FM in Los Altos Hills, California. Jennifer has a Master’s degree in Popular Culture Studies and has written about radio, music, youth culture, and pop culture for a number of publications and websites, including Radio World, PopMatters, the scholarly Radio Journal, youth culture blog Ypulse, beloved teen mag Sassy, and music site Uplister.

Kate Moffatt (interviewer) is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include British Romanticism, women’s authorship, walking and pedestrianism, and print culture. She is the former supervising producer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, and she is the current co-host of The WPHP Monthly Mercury podcast.

Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod

Supervising Producer: Maia Harris

Sound Design: James Healey

Transcription: Zoe Mix

ARCHIVAL AUDIO

Archival audio excerpted from this episode of Radio Survivor:

https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/11/podcast-22-were-all-moving-to-the-fm-dial-now/

Blog post with photographs from Jennifer Waits’s tour of Radio K:

https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/10/my-grand-tour-of-college-radio-station-radio-k/

A past Radio Survivor episode featuring SpokenWeb:

https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2021/02/podcast-284-spokenweb-and-literary-sound/

SPECIAL GUESTS

Previous Episode

Listening in Uncertainty

This episode navigates this question using an associative method which links stories and sounds, forming a non-linear audio collage. Listeners are invited to tune in to their affective and embodied responses to end time stories including Lulu Miller’s podcast and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror film, and stories of endurance, with Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem and Tanya Tagaq’s audiobook.

Nadège Paquette (she/they) is a white settler living in Tiotià:ke/Montréal, on the lands and waters of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, where they are completing a master’s degree in English Literature at Concordia University. Their research interests aggregate around the relationship between human and nonhuman forms of life and nonlife. They are drawn to narratives of the future extrapolating present troubles and delving into already-existing Indigenous, decolonial, queer, and non-anthropocentric alternatives to a colonial and capitalist world. For them, some of those alternative worlds take the form of collective gardens where they love to work with plants, soil, water, animal, and human neighbors.

Show Notes

Music:

Tom Bonheur https://www.instagram.com/dj.g3ntil/

Kovd, Kvelden, Tell What You Know, Ivory Pillow, and Fever Creep by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/

Podcast:

“The Wordless Place” Lulu Miller https://radiolab.org/podcast/wordless-place

“Why Podcast?” Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html

Short Film:

Anointed, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Dan Lin https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/videos-featuring-kathy/

Film:

Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Additional sounds from:

“Interview with Tanya Tagaq,” Alicia Atout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FupatQbcTeM

“Open Dialogues: Daniel Heath Justice,” Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrBN8_IGuuw

“Monster 怪物,” United for Peace Film Festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8OJulGi1Rg

Works Cited

Bouich, Abdenour. 2021. “Coeval Worlds, Alter/Native Words.” Transmotion 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.980.

Butler, Judith. 2003. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4 (1): 9–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240650409349213.

Chion, Michel. 2017. L’audio-Vision : Son et Image Au Cinéma. 4th Edition. Armand Colin.

Copeland, Stacey, and Hannah McGregor. 2022. Why Podcast?: Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count. Vol. 27, no. 1. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html.

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. 2019. “Introduction: The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?” In The Race of Sound, 1–38. Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11hpntq.4.

Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Technologies of lived abstraction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=018751433&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina, United States: Duke University Press.

Hudson, Seán. 2018. “A Queer Aesthetic: Identity in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Horror Films.” Film-Philosophy 22 (3): 448–64. https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2018.0089.

JLiat. 1954. Bravo. Found Sounds. Bikini Atoll. http://jliat.com/.

Justice, Daniel Heath. 2018. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, dir. 2001. Pulse. Toho Co., Ltd.

Lamb, David Michael. 2015. “Clyde River, Nunavut, Takes on Oil Indsutry over Seismic Testing.” CBC. March 30, 2015. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/clyde-river-nunavut-takes-on-oil-industry-over-seismic-testing-1.3014742.

Lin, Dan, and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, dirs. 2018. Anointed. Pacific Storytellers Cooperative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEVpExaY2Fs.

Madwar, Samia. 2016. “Breaking The Silence.” Text/html. Up Here Publishing. uphere. Https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence. 2016. https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence.

Miller, Lulu. 2022. “The Wordless Place.”...

Next Episode

Getting Lit with Linda Presents: The Languages & Sounds That Are Home: Kaie Kellough's Magnetic Equator

In this crossover episode (Episode 7, Season 2), Linda begins with the sound of her father's old espresso machine, to explain how she sees -- or hears -- sound working in Magnetic Equator (published by McClelland & Stewart) by international poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough. You can hear a sample of his sound poetry here. This episode includes a small excerpt read by Kellough himself (with permission by Kellough). In the "take-away" section, Linda talks about a biography she recently read by Sherrill Grace, about Canadian author Timothy Findley (published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press). If you'd like to know more about sound poetry, and about Kaie Kellough as a sound poet, check out Adam Sol's blog post about Kellough on "How a Poem Moves."

Get this episode and more by following Getting Lit with Linda - The Canadian Literature Podcast on all major podcast platforms.

Linda Morra is Professor of Canadian and Indigenous literatures, a former Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies (2016-2017) at UCD, and the Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar (2021-2022) at Simon Fraser University. Her book, Moving Archives, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English (2020) and her podcast, Getting Lit With Linda, won in the category of Outstanding Education Series in the 2022 Canadian Podcast awards. Getting Lit With Linda is entering its 5th season.