Audio storytelling as methodology: proper distance in scholarly communication

This article provides a lyrical reflection on the production of a feature radio documentary — #City#Life for Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio National — and through this reflection, it aims to solidify the foundations for audio storytelling to be heard and understood as a dynamic methodology for academic scholarship. There is now a substantial body of research illustrating podcasting’s ability to inform, challenge, care, entertain, and thrive in an attention economy that has seen other modes of long-form journalism decline in popularity and influence (Lindgren & Loviglio 2022; McHugh 2022;, Zokaei 2024); likewise, much thought and energy has been given to the acceptance of journalism as research (Bacon 2006; Jorgensen & Lindgren 2022; Lindgren & Phillips 2011; Nash 2013; Niblock 2012). This article explores how the inherent strengths of podcasting and audio production can be applied to academic scholarship more broadly, providing not just non-traditional research outputs, but also a methodology for qualitative research based on two interrelated concepts: multi-modal storytelling and aesthetics. These twin dimensions of audio as methodology are explained and analysed through three complimentary frameworks. The first of these is Mark Deuze’s media life, which argues that media have become environmental, and that the inherent logic of communications media have subsequently become invisible to us in the same way that water is invisible to fish (Deuze 2012); the second is Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of habitus and field, which allows for a critical understanding of relationships between and within modes of cultural production (Bourdieu 2005); and the third is what Roger Silverstone describes as ‘proper distance’ vis-à-vis mediated strangers, strangeness, and the multiple calamities of our mediated world (Silverstone 2007). This article suggests that research methodologies that work between and across fields of cultural production are most able to recognise the inherent biases of any given field; that the production of knowledge across multiple media, including but not limited to traditional academic outputs, allows for qualitative research to evolve in surprising, reflective, and generative ways; and that this multi-modal approach can go some way towards approximating ‘proper distance’ in scholarly communication.