Jason Loviglio presents "Empathy Machines: Podcasting and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling"
Part of the Spring 2025 Humanities Forum
Location
Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn : Gallery
Date & Time
April 23, 2025, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Description
For our Spring 2025 Humanities Forum, the Dresher Center for the Humanities presents
Empathy Machines: Podcasting and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling
Podcasts are the latest in a long list of media formats hailed as "empathy machines," technologies that will, by dint of their reach and affective force, compel us to care about one another. Radio, films, novels, and telegrams have all been previously designated as such. In the United States, public radio has, over the last 60 years, staked out a special claim for its capacity for empathy. At the center of this promise lies public radio's historical relationship to liberalism, understood less as a specific political philosophy and more as a bundle of affects-- a structure of feeling. This talk will explore the migration of the public radio structure of feeling as it migrated into narrative podcasting over the last two decades. This process has something to tell us about the affective power of audio media and about the state of liberalism in this illiberal moment in our history.
Jason Loviglio is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He is the founding chair of the Department of Media and Communication Studies at UMBC, and he is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion of Radio and Podcast Studies (2022) and Radio Journal: Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media (2017 - present).
Co-sponsored by the Department of Media and Communication Studies and the Department of American Studies.
Photo by Marlayna Demond, '11.
Image description: Jason Loviglio is wearing glasses and a blue shirt.
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