Recordings from My Closet

Podcasts have become increasingly popular in academia, probably due to the increasing availability of technology across many Universities in the U.S. as well as abroad. For example, I’ve recently been listing to Invisibilia on NPR as well as a variety of podcasts produced by the Religious Studies Project. In my own graduate cohort we are currently in the process of creating our own episode of the department’s podcast Studying Religion. Under the guidance of Dr. Mike Altman, in one of our two foundations courses this Fall, we have begun learning the standard methods for creating a podcast, also benefiting from the advice of a digital expert at the University of Alabama.

Being the only one in our group to have produced podcasts in the past, I had a few pro tips for the others, such as how to save time (and, if you’re not affiliated with a university and lack resources, how to save money too!) in the production of a podcast. Most notably, I mentioned to my colleagues that a closet full of clothes, with the door closed, could function perfectly well as a recording studio, to which the expert at UA replied that while a closet could certainly fulfill that function the recording studio is ideal.

Naturally, the social theorist in me began to wonder what interests go into identifying something as a ‘recording studio’. Could it be the structure of the room itself? I think not, for both my closet and the ‘studio’ are ostensibly identical in structure in that they are rooms with four walls, no windows and a single door. So, could it be the content perhaps? Maybe, although beyond whatever high tech recording equipment it might have, the studio has noise-suppressing padding that is pretty much identical to my clothes, in that they are just objects that to fulfill the same purpose (i.e., suppressing sound). So instead of seeing them as all that different, I would like to suggest that the recording studio is only a recording studio, and my closet is only my closet, because we arbitrarily label them as such.

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