Search

Intimacy is an important and growing concept in both media studies and podcast studies. But research regarding intimacies in both disciplines has yet to fully account for the connection between sound and normativity, which is essential to podcasting and important to mediated intimacies more broadly. In this article, we mobilise scholarship from these two fields to analyse the award-winning music podcast Song Exploder. Our study highlights that attending to intimacies in podcasting involves both analysing how the story structure aligns with social norms and listening critically to the ways the sound design and audio editing complements and complicates these intimate stories. We contend that identifying the intersection of sound and normativity in this podcast contributes to understanding the cultural work of podcasting and underscores the key role of sound in mediated intimacies.

The coronavirus pandemic has inundated the globe with discussions of time. Incubation periods, contagion intervals, exponential growth curves, hospitalization timelines, belated government response...

In Indigenous/settler relations, temporal rhetoric functions as an essential tool for both subjugation and resistance. Much scholarship on these temporalities focuses on Turtle Island and is thus implicitly shaped by a seminal historical event: the arrival of European colonizers. We extend this research by turning to Sweden, where the Indigenous Sami and the Scandinavians, who would later become their colonizers, have a long history of continuous interaction. We analyze a pamphlet written by Elsa Laula, the leader of the Sami civil rights movement in early twentieth-century Sweden, as well as Swedish policies and press documents from the time. While the settler Swedes employ similar techniques of temporal othering and erasure as colonizers on Turtle Island, Laula’s rhetoric differs subtly. Her rhetoric enacts resistance by highlighting how Sami temporalities are braided with Swedish temporalities, a rhetorical move that echoes their intertwined histories.

While usability testing can help instructors improve the design of online writing instruction (OWI), its emphasis on student-users sometimes overlooks the networked rhetorical ecologies in which those student-users operate, tilting online composition pedagogy toward neoliberal models of higher education that cater to the student-as-consumer. In response, I propose augmenting usability testing in online writing education with the theories of digital rhetoric. In the context of OWI, usability theory and digital rhetoric share a similar emphasis on the student as a user or audience, but they also have at least two key differences. First, unlike digital rhetoric, usability testing typically elides the political and ideological implications of student-users’ experiences. Second, the usability theories of Jakob Nielsen, for example, tend to view online interfaces as static objects manipulated by users. Digital rhetoric, on the other hand, sees interfaces as dynamic, real-time interactions. Although both paradigms have their advantages, I argue that integrating usability testing with the theories of digital rhetoric can add complexity to researchers’ understanding of OWI by revealing not only how students use online writing environments but also how they use them rhetorically.