Welcome to the CoHearence Podcast

We proceed from the assumption that as John Livingston argued, “There is no technological solution to a moral problem,” or, as Aldus Huxley put it, “Nothing short of everything will really do.” Environmental concerns demand real cultural change, and our hope is to seek out that change by telling histories and stories that disrupt hegemonic narratives. By privileging ideas, experiments, and accounts that explore the state of the environmental movement, we hope to provide a piece of the change that we need.

CoHearence is an opportunity for listening and learning. We bring together voices from Toronto and the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University (FES) to explore the relationship between cultural practices and our environment. We hope to help connect people and academics inside and outside of NiCHE together through common interests. Our main goal is to create an opportunity for the public at large to gain an insight into some of the conversations that are happening in places like FES.

Our series will be released this January, and will be hosted on Sean Kheraj’s NiCHE podcast, Nature’s Past. The themes we explore in multi-part episodes include The Art of Melancholy and Mourning, Protest and Resistance, Food Justice, and Literature including a review of the Green Worlds/Green Words conference.

CoHearence represents a collaboration between graduate students and faculty at FES. Because York University includes a population of well over 40,000 commuting individuals, podcasts (free, downloadable radio-like broadcasts) offer a unique opportunity for networking and learning while in transit. People can access podcasts on the internet using a computer or mobile device. Many universities and institutions are offering publicly available podcasts these days, and in the fall of 2010, Andrew Mark and Amanda Di Battista combined their skills in audio production and script to propose this project with the support of their PhD supervisors, Catriona Sandilands and Peter Timmerman.

In addition to producing the series, we have collaborated with the FES Summer Institute and FES Lunchtime Arts and Environment Series to offer workshops on podcasting.