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Podcasting has thrived since its popularization in 2004 as a bastion for amateur media production. Over the past ten years, however, entrepreneurs and legacy media companies have rapidly expanded their interests in podcasting, bringing with them professional standards and the logics of capital. Breakout hits such as 2014’s Serial (with nearly 40 million downloads) and This American Life have demonstrated to both programmers and advertisers the potential for podcasting to emerge as a commercially viable media industry (O’Connell, 2015). According to a recent nationwide survey by Edison Research (2019), an estimated 90 million listeners reported having listened to a podcast in the previous month. Despite the medium’s homespun, DIY roots, this dramatic expansion of the podcast audience and interest from legacy media has begun to transform it “from a do-it-yourself, amateur niche medium into a commercial mass medium” (Bonini, 2015, p. 27). This proposed panel aims to explore the transitions currently underway in podcasting. Specifically, each of the papers on this panel address in some way the process of formalization, or the process by which “media systems become progressively more rationalized, consolidated and financially transparent” (Lobato &Thomas, 2015, p. 27). Formalization is not a monolithic process, but rather one that is responsive to existing institutional, regulatory, and cultural structures. It is also historically contingent. The first paper, entitled “Podcasting as a cultural form between old and new media” utilizes a historical lens to link the current trajectory of the medium’s development to the development and domestication of radio in the 1920s as well as the rise of online streaming services in the 21st Century. In particular, this paper situates podcasting in the context of these earlier technologies, arguing that the medium is best understood as a complex interplay between networks of market actors. This complex interplay of actors is explored in more detail by papers 2 and 3. In the second paper, entitled “Formalising the informal: BBC commissions and the shape of podcasts,” the author explores the powerful role of the BBC in providing an institutional and creative framework for podcasting production via its BBC Sounds online radio platform. Through the efforts of this venerable public service broadcaster to reach new audiences by developing podcast content specific to this platform, this paper argues that the medium’s amateur and informal ethos stands to be re-shaped. The third paper, entitled “Protecting public podcasting: Are U.S. news, public affairs, and learning podcasts at risk?”, takes a macro-level view of the formalization process, focusing on podcasts within the U.S. context. Nothing that the most popular podcasts in the U.S. are either learning or information-oriented, this paper argues that the podcast ecosystem fulfills an important public service function. The introduction of platform services like Spotify as power players in podcast distribution, coupled with the rise of advertising as a means of monetization, presents new risks for perpetuation of the medium as an aural public service resource. The fourth paper expands the arguments surrounding podcast formalization by exploring the introduction of market information regimes within the medium. Specifically, this paper explores the development of audience metrics for podcasting, beginning in the mid-2000’s. This paper makes clear that powerful industry players such as Apple and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are quickly standardizing the measurement of podcast audiences. These standards create a more transparent market for advertisers, but in so doing they also shift the focus away from the unique nature of podcast content and move it toward notions of audience size. This has the potential to move the medium further away from its amateur roots. Finally, the fifth paper on the panel attempts to reframe the formalization debate by pulling the discussion away from the confining binaries of utopian or dystopian narratives. Instead, this paper situates podcasting within a much broader context by leveraging Don Idhe’s phenomenological philosophy of technology to “speculate on a potential future of reified oral/aural meditation.” This paper considers the nature of the medium itself as a unique “techno-sonic experience”. Here, podcasting is not considered as a medium being shaped by the formalization efforts of institutions or legacy forms of media. Instead, podcasting emerges as a transformational technology that promises a new era of sound integration.

Knowing Sounds is an experimental podcast exploring the possibilities and outcomes of using the podcast medium as a creative practice underpinned by conceptual thought to produce and disseminate academic research. The podcast, which more specifically can be defined as an audio essay, is split into three sections. The first is an experimental collage of music, dialogue and sound effects from a selection of films interwoven with excerpts from audience members who attended The Cinematologists live screenings. It is designed to open up questions as to the potential for a sonic landscape to tap into the ‘cinematic imagination’ without the use of images. We thus play with aural engagement creating a space for the listener to actively negotiate the binary between the abstract emotions and intended rational meaning inferred through listening. The second section is a spoken analysis of the potential of podcasting as an academic form exploring how the mechanics sound production and dissemination in the digital age can challenge the powerful logocentric link between knowledge and writing. We also interrogate the structural formation that, paradoxically, has given rise to the ubiquity of podcasts in mainstream culture but has undermined its potential development. Furthermore, interweaving illustrative references, we analyse specific film podcasts and how they utilise a developing grammar of sonic writing to expand cultural discourse. The final section brings together other contributors to the journal of disrupted media practice commenting on their alternative methods of production and exhibition aimed at unsettling assumptions about the relationship between practice and theory.

Prison films are beset by a fundamental paradox. Because mainstream film is reliant on a combination of the pleasure of the visual and the dramatic structuring of narrative, institutionalised incarceration based on the loss of liberty, extended temporal control and physical spatial restriction would seem to be fundamentally at odds with ‘the cinematic’. Prison as depicted on-screen is therefore a space in which visibly enacted retribution is foregrounded in a mode much more akin to what Foucault calls the pre-modern ‘theatres of torture’. The routinised banality of day-to-day life behind bars is eschewed in favour of the spectacle of the masculine body punishing or being violently punished. British cinema is replete with films set in prison, however, as the first part of this article explores, and academic analyses of such films are formulated around three discursive strands: debates around the constitution of the prison film as a genre, discussions of the potential relationship between cinematic representations and the ‘real-world’ sociology of punishment, and assertions about how national identity is reflected. The second part of this article deploys a comparative analysis of Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson (2008) and Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008), examining what is often taken for granted in previous work, namely how the environment of incarceration is produced as an aesthetic, social and even ontological space that contextualises and materialises a link between masculinity, violence and spectacle. I argue that the microcosm of the prison, on the one hand, reasserts the male body as the root of physical ‘being-ness’, yet on the other, reveals masculinity as a constructed performance determined by the social context of incarceration and amplified through cinematic aesthetics.

In this introductory chapter, the editors set out the technological, industrial and cultural contexts which have facilitated the emergence of podcasting and podcasts as a ‘new aural culture’. Drawing on their own experiences as podcast producers, listeners and theorists they explore the unique circumstances through which podcasting has evolved into a discreet form, despite existing in a simultaneously symbiotic relationship with a host of mediums. The introduction also sets out the parameters of podcast studies and introduces the book’s chapters as developments of the previous nascent research, while furthering avenues of enquiry reflective of podcasting’s increasingly influential status in the digital media landscape.

This editorial contextualises and introduces a series of articles that tackle arguably the most pertinent political and social phenomenon of the last 5 years: austerity. Commissioned by Dr Graeme Harper (Oakland University), a former AHRC council member, the editorial fronts a special edition of the Journal of European Popular Culture and comments upon the prevailing discourse of austerity and its dissemination as a shaping narrative across the entire cultural spectrum. The development of this special edition emerged from an international conference organised by myself with Dr Fiona Philip and Dr Zoe Thompson at Leeds Metropolitan University. The conference keynote speakers were Professor Griselda Pollock and Dr Rebecca Bramall who both then published articles in the journal. The editorial synthesises discussion points that emerged from the conference, on both an academic and political basis, for an interrogation of austerity that sought to break new by moving on from a purely economic question, to one of culture. The piece sets out a highly relevant and necessary framework for contemporary theoretical analysis when one thinks of the effect that forms of austerity have and are having not only on higher education as a whole, but on arts and humanities disciplines specifically. Indeed the editorial explores the increasing need for ‘cultural vigilance’ and a new academic politics of resistance, which is further amplified within the journal via a variety of social, cultural and pedagogical arguments. So, while placing the concept of austerity in historical and theoretical context this article is prescient and important because it explores and critiques the prevailing cultural zeitgeist and forwards possible dynamics of response.

KEYWORDS Spectatorship, Cinema, Digital Culture, Film History, Dispositif

Dr Dario Llinares interviews Dr Sarah Atkinson about the core themes addressed in her recent monograph Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences (Bloomsbury, 2014). The conversation explores the context for new conceptualisations of cinema, which encompass and reflect the myriad ways film can be experienced beyond the auditorium in a digitally networked society. They also explore the historical antecedents for embodied cinema, discuss examples of expanded, extended and mobile film spectatorship, and postulate as to the effect of these transformations for film production, criticism and scholarship. KEYWORDS Expanded Cinema; Film Criticism; Film Theory; Digital Technology; Mobile Cinema; Spectatorship

Podcasting has been adopted by a host of academics, writers and artists in ways that both enhance, but also diversify from, their primary field of interest or mode of communication. In this chapter Dario Llinares, film academic and co-creator of The Cinematologists Podcast, reflects on his own experience of podcasting production, presentation and dissemination, and analyses interviews with a range of such podcast adopters, to conceptualise the ways in which the medium provokes a self-reflexive interrogation of one’s identity as a mediated and mediating subject. Through an exploration of podcasting praxis—the enactment and subsequent acquisition of knowledge through materialised audio practice—Llinares examines how a range of podcasters assess the effects of working in this audio format, particularly in terms of its potential challenge to the logocentric basis of information communication. Furthermore, Llinares argues that podcasting represents a regeneration of the dialectical possibilities of audio and, concomitantly, reopens debates as to how the form and process of mediation are fundamentally implicated in the formation of knowledge.