We’re excited to launch Arts & Minds, a limited podcast series produced by SWWDTP students, exploring the arts and humanities through new voices, fresh perspectives, and creative storytelling.

Arts & Minds is the result of an SWWDTP training course in podcast production, designed to help researchers develop audio storytelling skills and experiment with podcasting as a form of research communication. Over the course of the training, students worked with expert trainers to develop, record, and edit their own podcast pilot. The result? Five compelling standalone episodes, each showcasing a unique area of research.

If you’ve ever considered podcasting as a way to share your work but weren’t sure where to start, this series is a great example of what’s possible.

Each episode is a pilot concept developed by an SWWDTP researcher, covering diverse and thought-provoking topics, including:

  • The powerful protest art born during Chile’s dictatorship
  • The revitalisation of the Cornish language and its cultural significance
  • Climate change and the hidden costs of fast fashion
  • Mindfulness, neuroscience, and the art of attention
  • The changing role of independent film exhibition in the UK

These episodes highlight the breadth of research happening across the SWWDTP community and explore how podcasting can be used to communicate complex ideas in a dynamic and accessible way.

The Arts & Minds series came out of an SWWDTP podcast training programme, where students gained hands-on experience in audio production, interviewing, scripting, and editing. It provided a space to experiment with new ways of communicating research beyond traditional academic formats.

Here’s what Katy Humberstone, one of our student podcasters, had to say about the experience:

“Podcast creation was a not an entirely new medium to me; I had undertaken some podcasting as part of my MA course, but the SWWDTP initiative was the first time that I had the possibility to engage with a professional production studio to understand the fundamentals of podcast production and translate this new knowledge into practice.

 

The initiative gave me the unique opportunity to plan and execute a podcast episode – from the initial planning stages, up to final execution, in a way that was accessible, engaging, and above all, fun! FoSho did an excellent job in training us, and assisting us to edit and polish our podcasts, and I am thrilled with the final outputs. Through this process, I have really gained an appreciation of how powerful the podcasting medium can be to translate my research into a format which is engaging and open to all. Now that I am familiar with how to plan and design a podcast series, I am very motivated to continue my podcast and develop further episodes on other topics!”

If you’re thinking about new ways to communicate your research, Arts & Minds is a great source of inspiration.

Listen to all episodes of Arts & Minds now, available on YouTube, Spotify and Podbean.

 

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