This presentation is one of (counter) stories and (counter) storytelling: ones told to strangers, ones conversed between friends, ones repeated to ourselves, and this one, told to you. It falls more precisely at the intersection of podcasts and critical public pedagogies by focusing on one Canadian podcast called COMMONS which I position as a subaltern counterpublic (Fraser, 1990) that works against Canadian hegemony. I analyse, through a decolonial lense, the perspectives of creators and listeners of the podcast to demonstrate how COMMONS upholds Canadian hegemony through its narrative voice, but interrupts it through its working processes, how podcasts allows the subaltern to speak and hear alternative narratives through (re)archiving and how this also serves to create critical forms of public pedagogy. As this work in itself is a subaltern counterpublic, I finish with a reflection on the dual role of researcher-participant as I deal with my own positionality and power in spaces that seek counter-hegemony.
BIO
Olivia Siino is a recent graduate of the International Masters in Adult Education for Social Change (IMAESC) programme as an Erasmus Mundus scholarship holder, Olivia focuses on collective, informal and counter-hegemonic modes of education. She is also the co-creator (along with Esi Callender) of the theatre collective Sort of Productions where she has produced, written, acted and dramaturged various original works. Looking to bring together her academic and artistic practices, she is always looking for new intertwining, contradictory paths to set foot in.