I’m currently assembling a schedule of podcasts with a range of awesome guests. All this work is a two-fer: I publish it on Dark Matter Zine and it counts towards 45% of my grade for a subject at university.
The downside?
I have to justify my goals.
In theory that’s fine but in practice this means that I need evidence.
My draft project proposal includes aiming for gender parity (boys and girls) as well as gender diversity (LGBT representatives) for podcasts.
While I know there is some support out there on the interwebs, my ‘knowledge’ is really anecdotal with no evidence to back me up.
If you’d like some panels with gender parity and gender diversity and you want to tell Australian academic institutions that THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT please either comment on this blog, reply to a tweet or comment on my posts on facebook or googleplus.
GENDER DIVERSITY in podcasts: can I get LIKES for gender diversity? I need to justify a project proposal for uni. Please favourite & share.
— Dark Matter Zine (@DarkMatterzine) March 7, 2014
GENDER PARITY in podcasts: can I get LIKES for gender parity? I need to justify a project proposal for university. Please favourite & share
— Dark Matter Zine (@DarkMatterzine) March 7, 2014
@DarkMatterzine Absolutely all for diversity! Panels shouldn't dominated by one viewpoint.
— S G Larner, Climbrarian (@StaceyGLarner) March 8, 2014
I think its important to place diversity at the forward end of planning ie having panel/podcast organisers think – could a woman/ POC/ someone with a disability provide an important angle to a particular discussion. Which is not tokenism, its the organiser being thorough and asking themselves that question. If they can’t think of a person(s) then they might need to do a bit of legwork. If we leave panel parity to the end of the process I think there’s a temptation to quickly gather people together to do POC or Women in ….. panels to shore up overall parity. Really what we should be aiming for is integration of minorities into discussions that might not necessarily relate directly to the minority they represent ie A POC included in a discussion an character devlopment in fiction as opposed to be included in a discussion on POC in fiction, if you get the differentiation. ( and I have just realised that we are talking more about podcast panels than convention panels but I think the same holds)
These are convention-style podcast panels. I completely agree with everything you said 🙂
I agree that we need more visibility for diversity and this is a great way to start. I’d definitely be involved with something like this.