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Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory critically examines the emergent field of podcasting in academia, revealing its significant impact on scholarly communication and approaches to research and knowledge creation. This collection presents in-depth analyses from scholars who have integrated podcasting into their academic pursuits. The book systematically explores the medium's implications for teaching, its effectiveness in reaching broader audiences, and its role in reshaping the dissemination of academic work. Covering a spectrum of disciplines, the contributors detail their engagement with podcasting, providing insight into its use as both a research tool and an object of analysis, thereby illuminating the multifaceted ways in which podcasting intersects with and influences academic life.The volume provides substantive evidence of podcasting's transformative effect on academia, offering reflections on its potential to facilitate a more accessible and engaging form of scholarly output. By presenting case studies and empirical research, Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory underscores the originality of podcasting as an academic endeavor and its utility in expanding the reach and impact of scholarly work. It serves as a key resource for academics, researchers, and practitioners interested in the application and study of podcasting as a novel vector for knowledge creation and distribution.

Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary collection of academic research exploring the definition, status, practices and implications of podcasting through a Media and Cultural Studies lens. By bringing together research from experienced and early career academics alongside audio and creative practitioners, the chapters in this volume span a range of approaches in a timely reaction to podcasting's zeitgeist moment. In conceptualizing the podcast, the contributors examine its liminal status between the mechanics of ‘old'and ‘new'media and between differing production contexts, in addition to podcasting's reliance on mainstream industrial structures whilst retaining an alternative, even outsider, sensibility. In the present tumult of online media discourse, the contributors frame podcasting as indicative of a ‘new aural culture'emerging from an identifiable set of industrial, technological and cultural circumstances. The analyses in this collection offer a range of interpretations which begin to open avenues for further research into a distinct Podcast Studies.

The Astronaut: Cultural Mythology and Idealised Masculinity interrogates the historical and cultural dynamics of one of the most revered icons of the 20th century. Analysing a diverse range of cultural representations the book postulates the construction of an intertextual mythology through which the astronaut becomes an embodiment of American ideological values and heroic manhood. The discursive processes at work in the range of media texts examined serve to embed the astronaut into the cultural imaginary as a largely coherent and uncontested exemplar of idealised masculinity. Using a range of interdisciplinary analytical tools the book examines how the social construction of this masculine ideal iterates and naturalises gender hegemony. The book situates the astronaut within the context of a modern/postmodern theoretical framework linking shifts in gender perspectives to the contradictory narratives and characterisations that inform the mediation of the astronaut. In so doing, the book argues for a re-evaluation of the, often oversimplified, use of the term hegemonic masculinity as an anchoring point for the critique of masculinity. The strength of this work is its interdisciplinary diversity and its interconnection of a range of themes including gender, representation, history, ideology, the postmodern and the media. Drawing upon contemporary theoretical debates while redeploying seminal theoretical texts the book offers new cultural interrogations of a highly familiar historical subject.