Call for Papers: Special issue "Podcasting Age"
Call for Papers: Podcasting Age
Guest editor: Sally Chivers, Trent University
This special issue of Age, Culture, Humanities responds to the increased cultural, political, and pedagogical power of podcasting. Podcasts play a significant role in disseminating information, creating culture, and offering entertainment. For this special issue, we invite contributions that examine or illustrate how audio podcasting and related sound work represent and produce age.
It makes sense that podcasting should be rife with older voices and solidly anti-ageist. Feminist podcast studies have theorized podcasting as relational, care-oriented and politically situated, foregrounding marginalized voices, embodied knowledge, and alternative modes of scholarly communication. Despite recent attention from for-profit producers, podcasting remains a form of participatory media with enormous potential to amplify older voices and age studies research. And indeed, Julia Louis Dreyfuss’s Wiser than Me was named Apple’s podcast of the year in 2023 and subsequently won Webby and Amby awards. Prominent age studies scholars and activists appear on mainstream and niche podcasts to share their findings and spread the anti-ageist word. Age Culture Humanities readers are likely familiar with scholarly podcast examples such as Kristi Allain’s radio documentary Fire on the Ice, Kathrin Cortes-Miller’s Disrupting Death, Sally Chivers’s Wrinkle Radio, Roya Liu’s Witnessing Aging, and the Penn Memory Center’s The Age of Aging.
Despite these promising examples, podcasting remains a notably youthful medium, rife with explicit and implicit gendered ageism. Older women’s absence from mainstream media, documented by the Geena Davis Institute, continues into the podcast space. Women who Podcast Magazine describes how “ageism … finds a way to sneak into the sound booth.” The dominance of “tech-savvy, younger (mostly male)” voices pushes older women into stereotyped genres of podcast, if they pick up the mic at all. As a consequence, podcast audiences largely miss out on the significant lived experience and knowledge older women have to offer.
This special issue considers podcasting not simply as content, but as a sound medium that values collaboration, accessibility, affect, slow scholarship, and public-facing knowledge production. We welcome considerations of how these aspects of audio podcasting and related sound work resonate with age studies commitments to challenge ageism, amplify older voices, and reshape whose knowledge counts, including how it circulates.
We welcome submissions (written, audio, and hybrid) that treat podcasts and related sound work as an object of analysis, a site of cultural production, and / or a methodological approach that enhances how aging is researched, narrated, and heard.
Potential Topics and approaches include:
- Listening as a critical practice
- Podcasting as a form of care work and community-making
- The age politics of noise and silence
- Representations of aging, later life, midlife, or the life course in podcasts
- Older adults as podcasters, producers, guests, and audiences
- Podcasting as method in age studies
- Sonic ethnography
- Deep listening as intergenerational practice
- Intergenerational storytelling through sound
- Platform cultures and ageism in podcasting spheres
- Podcasting as age-aware information activism
- Podcasting as pedagogical tool in age studies
Submission guidelines:
We welcome audio submissions as well as submissions that include audio supplements: podcast excerpts, original sonic reflections, subject to the journal’s technical requirements. The audio must convey or enhance the critical and cultural analysis.
Abstracts: 250-300 words
Deadline for Abstracts: September 15, 2026 (early submissions welcome)
Full Manuscripts due: January 15, 2027
Submit your abstract to sallychivers@trentu.ca
