Echoes from the Shoals of Academe: Podcasting as Life raft, as Lighthouse, and as Anchor

Location: Small Rehearsal Studio, Dalhousie Arts Centre

Ashley Williamson & Timothy Youker

Echoes from the Shoals of Academe: Podcasting as Life Raft, as Lighthouse, and as Anchor

We will perform a live episode of “Let’s Unpack That”, our podcast about public history and heritage performance, nested within a meta-discussion about the podcast as a performance genre and academic genre. This presentation will build on previous discussions of podcasting in literary studies by Hannah McGregor and others while also addressing advantages and challenges specific to theatre and performance studies. The “Let’s Unpack That” episode addresses various topics, including cross-dressing War of 1812 re-enactors, fraudulent Viking relics, the dangers of corporate museum sponsorship, and what it means to have “a historical chocolate experience.” We focus instead on the wacky, horrible, inspiring, and sometimes sexy (okay, rarely sexy) facts behind how communities preserve and perform their histories. Our visits to historical sites and participation in living history re-enactments inform many of these discussions.

Podcasts evoke live conversation’s intimacy and occupy a fluid, conceptual space where research and teaching, liveness and mediation, and intimacy and commerce mingle. Podcasting has also become a refuge for precarious and unemployed scholars who lack access to more traditional means of public engagement. We’ll discuss all this and then open the floor to practical and conceptual questions.

Bio: Dr. Ashley Williamson is an expert on museums and living history performance, with a resumé including the University of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Stratford Festival.

Bio: Dr. Tim Youker has taught drama at NYU and Columbia University and is the author of a book on documentary arts.