Podcasting as a Tool of Global South Communication and Public Engagement


Please join the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies for an in-person talk by Jackson Allers, filmmaker, music journalist, radio broadcaster, archivist and storyteller.

April 7th, Thursday, 6pm PST
Location: Girvetz Hall 2320
Zoom: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/86856988762

This honorarium discussion will broadly outline how podcasting is used as a powerful form of bridging communication gaps between the “global south” and the “global north” – or the majority and minority worlds respectively. It is also a reexamining of the university’s narrative positionality in society as a place to set new storytelling norms within a framework of affordable, accessible, and highly connected media tools that can elevate otherwise insular academic intellectual output to new production and storytelling heights.

This talk will particularly be tailored to the audience of the Orfalea Center at UCSB looking to benefit from the idea of intellectual and cultural production through podcasting – with a centering around ethnographic methodologies, practical uses of field and studio equipment, and use of other technologies and production techniques. The aim in the end is also to de-center the US exceptionalism that has historically constrained the narrative possibilities of mainstream media and academia – boundaries not at play for the podcast universe.

“I see the podcast as glorified radio with software driven bells and whistles thrown into a soup of more accessible technical tools operating in an environment online where people willing to listen can figure out how to tell their own stories in the ways they want to tell them. We all want to listen to people’s stories. The ways of telling them these days are endless.”

About Jackson Allers

Filmmaker, music journalist, radio broadcaster, archivist, and storyteller, Jackson Allers has focused the majority of his work on the subcultures of his surroundings. He has documented the plight of farm workers in rural North Carolina with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles; advocated for the legal rights of the Roma population in Kosovo as the media adviser to the former international Ombudsman, Marek Antoni Nowicki; created digital-audio archives for a book on ancient Bedouin stories in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and spent the better part of 25-years writing about and documenting independent arts and culture movements.

For the last 13-years, Jackson has been based in the Arab world (Beirut, Lebanon) where he has been making documentaries, film portraits, and engaged in numerous multimedia productions about politics, and the independent musical/art trends in the Arab world for clients like VICE, BBC Culture, BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4, Red Bull Music Academy Magazine, Red Flag Magazine, Audio Kultur, The National, Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera English, Radical Media, National Public Radio, Free Speech Radio News, Art Dubai, Beirut Design Week, UNHCR, and ARTE.

Page Editor

CY Xu
CY Xu
Graduate Student Researcher at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies
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